Wednesday November 4, 2009, 10:23 pm
"Oh no, not this Kilimanjaro ice rubbish again!

Gore started this. Note to journalists everywhere: IT’S THE EVAPOTRANSPIRATION STUPID!

See this article to understand why linking Kilimanjaro glacier retreat to small changes in global temperature is just flat wrong. The plains around Kilimanjaro have gone through years of deforestation. Less trees > less evapotranspiration > less snow.

Don’t believe me? Here’s news of a recent study from Portsmouth University Of Mt. Kilimanjaro ice waving us good-bye due to deforestation. Here’s another peer reviewed study from UAH saying the same thing.
========
There wasn’t organized farming near Kilimanjaro until the last century. Farming preparation clears trees, trees evapotranspirate mositure. Less trees, less moisture.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/02/oh-no-not-this-kilimanjaro-rubbish-again/#more-12394

Thursday November 5, 2009, 2:21 am
Deforestation a huge problem. What about sustainable farming?

Thursday November 5, 2009, 7:42 am
Glaciers at the equator have been an anomally all along.

Thursday November 5, 2009, 1:17 pm
Too many people.

Thursday November 5, 2009, 1:51 pm
It is a lack of precipitation not warmer temperatures. Actually at those altitudes and that latitude as measured by NASA satellite shows cooling in this region since 1979 not warming.
There is always glacial melting and sublimation even in higher latitudes. What glaciers require besides temperature is abundant snowfall. The deforestation issues that Judy has correctly pointed out have caused a lack of moisture flowing up and across the mountain and therefore much reduced snowfall.

Thursday November 5, 2009, 2:15 pm
Have you denialists done an experiment to support these claims, Judy and Mark? Does ice disappear just because no more water is added to it? No, it disappears because it gets WARMER! Note that Kilimanjaro is near the equator, so seasonal temperature changes would not be an issue. Any warming would be year round and constant.

You do realize that deforestation contributes to global warming/climate change, don't you? So the two issues are not mutually exclusive. Anthony Watts strikes out again!

Thursday November 5, 2009, 2:22 pm
Gee, I wonder if next the denialists will claim the disappearing ice on Kilimanjaro is due to it becoming volcanically active again. They blame volcanos for the shrinking of the Arctic ice cap, too.

Thursday November 5, 2009, 2:48 pm
Well, I see that Miss Judy (lovely toes by the way) and a couple other deniers are still at it in denying established truths concerning global watrming. She does incessantly give a separate reason for all the world's glacial and ice disappearances that have glimmers of accountibilities to the demises, but can't seem to figure or fathom out that man's contribution to global warming is also not only a culprit, but the main one.

How they can deny that 90 million tons of man generated greenhouse CO2 emissions per day is not a factor and has no bearing is beyond any reasonably minded person.

If there were money to be had in insisting on a flat world, they would be coming up with attacks and dismissals on that as well, for if one cannot see the myriad effects of Earth's surface and atmospheric warming trends, along with the resultant displaced CO2 acidifying the oceans, they're not much going to stand to reason much on any realistic account with their narrowmindedly focused belief systems, now will they...

Carry on as you were with your blindsided troops Miss Judy, we all love ya anyway...

Thursday November 5, 2009, 2:52 pm
judy: if deforestation is a major contributor in this event, surely you're not saying that that's a good thing??? you're still saying that human actions are at fault, and i'm sure that you're correct in pointing out one of several factors at work.

Thursday November 5, 2009, 5:27 pm
I note that the deniers are defying all science sense yet again. The problem with their flat earth way of thought is that this research was done twice...in 1982 and again in 2006. The test core samples were taken from under the ice of the glaciers...which showed that the ice was melting uniformly at ALL levels. In fact over these years when they claim the world was cooling the difference in thickness was over five meters...that is fifteen foot. This blows a hole fifteen foot thick in their rather pathetic efforts to deny what the rest of the world has taken as fact...Hey Judy the moon is made of Green cheese and the cow jumped clean over it...I know this as I read it in a book.

Thursday November 5, 2009, 5:29 pm
Oh goodness Brad THAT was too funny...nice toes for ms. foot....LOL

Big gorilly Hgs

Thursday November 5, 2009, 5:50 pm
Thank you Judy and Mark for all that you do!

Thursday November 5, 2009, 6:33 pm
thanks all.

Friday November 6, 2009, 3:26 am
Note to you, Judy Cross: TO HAVE THE EVAPOTRANSPIRATION, YOU NEED HOT!

I don’t call you stupid...

Friday November 6, 2009, 5:39 am
Judy Cross,

Do you know the American Electrical Enterprise Green Mountain Energy, that’s operates in California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut and Texas?

Are they, also stupid?...

Friday November 6, 2009, 5:42 am
Antonio she would probably say yes....If your not on her side everyone is dumb.

Big Gorilly hugs

Friday November 6, 2009, 5:59 am
There are two reasons for to these phenomena, not only one reason:

1. It´s true that when we have less trees, we have less humidity, less rain and snow.

2. If we have the greenhouse gas effect (mostly CO2), we have warming and so, also we have glacial and snow melting.

Friday November 6, 2009, 6:17 am
On the other hand, if we have warming, we have also less rain and so we have less trees. It’s not simple as that.

Friday November 6, 2009, 6:36 am
Julie, deforestation has three causes:

1. The trees abate.
2. The fire that burns the forests.
3. The climate changes, caused by the Global Warming.

Friday November 6, 2009, 6:58 am
Judy Cross,

Have you read the site you referred? Here it is:

Friday November 6, 2009, 7:02 am
"The ice sheet that capped Kilimanjaro in 1912 was 85 per cent smaller by 2007, and since 2000 the existing ice sheet has shrunk by 26 per cent, the paleoclimatologists said.

The findings point to the rise in global temperatures as the most likely cause of the ice loss.

Changes in cloudiness and precipitation may have also played a smaller, less important role, especially in recent decades, they added.

“This is the first time researchers have calculated the volume of ice lost from the mountain’s ice fields,” study co-author Lonnie Thompson said.

Mr Thompson is the professor of Earth Sciences at Ohio State University.

“If you look at the percentage of volume lost since 2000 versus the percentage of area lost as the ice fields shrink, the numbers are very close,” he said in the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

While the yearly loss of the mountain glaciers was most apparent from the retreat of their margins, Mr Thompson said an equally troubling effect was the thinning of the ice fields from the surface.

The summits of both the Northern and Southern Ice Fields atop Kilimanjaro have thinned by 1.9m) and 5.1m respectively.

The smaller Furtwangler Glacier, which was melting and water-saturated in 2000 when it was drilled, has thinned as much as 50 per cent between 2000 and 2009.

“It has lost half of its thickness,” Mr Thompson said. “In the future, there will be a year when Furtwangler is present and by the next year, it will have disappeared.

“The whole thing will be gone.”

The scientists said they found no evidence of sustained melting anywhere else in the ice core samples they extracted, which date back 11,700 years.**

They said their findings show that current climate conditions over Mt Kilimanjaro were unique over the last 11 millennia."

Friday November 6, 2009, 7:07 am
Judy, above you has the transcription of site in your comment…

Friday November 6, 2009, 8:59 am
Is that a case of shooting oneself in the foot?

Friday November 6, 2009, 9:32 am
Yes, if you read the transcription of her comment's site...

Friday November 6, 2009, 10:08 am
The mythology about Mt. Kili is like a zombie. It doesn't matter how many times it is shot down, it rises up again.


Satellites and weather balloons show no warming in mid to high levels in the tropics. Only in the tinkertoy climate models does that happen but to alarmists that is reality. See John Christy plot of tropical temperatures in mid to high atmosphere from satellite below and enlarged here.).
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/Tropics_Christy.jpg
"Changes in cloudiness and snowfall may also be involved, though they appear less important, according to the study. (Once again wrong. Thompson sees what he wants to see in the data. But temperatures below and enlarged here have declined at Kilimanjaro not risen
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/KILITEMPS.jpg

and precipitation below and enlarged here has declined due to deforestation and Atlantic Multidecadal changes. Also dust from drier ground is said to be darkening the ice and enhancing the melt.)
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/KILIPREC.jpg

Even if warming was a factor...we didn't do it.

Friday November 6, 2009, 11:27 am
"Satellites and weather balloons show no warming in mid to high levels in the tropics. Only in the tinkertoy climate models does that happen but to alarmists that is reality."

Why? Because CO2 and most other greenhouse gases are heavier than the nitrogen and oxygen that make up most of the atmosphere, they will tend to be lower, thus trapping heat closer to the surface. The exception is water vapor, a greenhouse gas that is LIGHTER than nitrogen and oxygen molecules. But higher in the atmosphere, where it is cooler anyway, water vapor forms clouds that cool the earth, providing a counterbalance to the effects of the other greenhouse gases. Finally, heat flows naturally from warmer to cooler areas, so it is the poles, not the tropics, that should be warming the most. That's simple physics!

So the actual effects of global warming should be:

1. The lower atmosphere WARMING
2. The upper atmosphere COOLING
3. The poles warming MOST and the tropics warming slightly. But even that slight warming would be enough to melt ice on mountaintops where the temperatures have risen above the melting point of water. Like at Kilimanjaro.

My earlier statement about Kilimanjaro still stands, because it too is based on simple physics, which trumps the phony data made by ICECAP:

"Does ice disappear just because no more water is added to it? No, it disappears because it gets WARMER! Note that Kilimanjaro is near the equator, so seasonal temperature changes would not be an issue. Any warming would be year round and constant."

It is really loopy to claim that deforestation causes less rain to fall. How do clouds know when forests have been destroyed and then start avoiding the area that was cleared of trees? Sounds like magic to me, not science!

Friday November 6, 2009, 11:30 am
Weve helped it along though and that is what matters....

Big Gorilly Hugs

Friday November 6, 2009, 11:37 am
Mixing apples and oranges again, our resident genius, who never bothers to support his looney tunes science with anything more substantial than his own meanderings, tries to pretend that the removal of trees, which give off water vapor as a byproduct of photosynthesis, would have no effect on rainfall...which turns to snowfall at higher elevations.

The only thing this has to do with CO2 is that plants use CO2 during photosysnthesis....a bigger supply of CO2 would mean more water vapor given off. Higher levels of CO2 also enable plants to survive drought better.
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V11/N39/C1.php

Friday November 6, 2009, 12:28 pm
The CO2 and other gases are as the glass of a greenhouse:

The hot radiation of electromagnetic waves, that are light of the sun, pass throw the CO2 (and other gases with the same effect) into the Earth, but the soil reflect that electromagnetic wave in a lower frequency that is reflected by the CO2 back to the soil and only a few hot radiation goes to out Space. The greenhouse works the same way. That's why they are called greenhouse effect gases.

That's simple physics too!

Friday November 6, 2009, 1:05 pm
The greenhouse gas effect, as I show in my post above, causes the Global Warming of the Earth. This warming melt the ice of the poles and past some few decades, the land coats will be submerged by the rise of the water's oceans level.

It doesn't meter to you?!

Friday November 6, 2009, 1:14 pm
The greenhouse gas effect, as I show in my post above, causes the Global Warming of the Earth. This warming melt the ice of the poles and past some few decades, the land coasts will be submerged by the rise of the water's oceans level.

It doesn't meter to you?!

EDITED

Friday November 6, 2009, 1:18 pm
The CO2 and other gases are as the glass of a greenhouse:

The hot radiation of electromagnetic waves, that are light of the sun, pass through the CO2 (and other gases with the same effect) into the Earth, but the soil reflect that electromagnetic wave in a lower frequency that is reflected by the CO2 back to the soil and only a few hot radiation goes to out to Space. The greenhouse works the same way. That's why they are called greenhouse effect gases.

That's simple physics too!

EDITED

Friday November 6, 2009, 1:21 pm
The greenhouse gas effect, as I show in my post above, causes the Global Warming of the Earth. This warming melt the ice of the poles and past some few decades, the land coasts will be submerged by the rise of the water's oceans level.

It doesn't matter to you?!

EDITED twice

Friday November 6, 2009, 2:03 pm
"Mixing apples and oranges again, our resident genius, who never bothers to support his looney tunes science with anything more substantial than his own meanderings, tries to pretend that the removal of trees, which give off water vapor as a byproduct of photosynthesis, would have no effect on rainfall...which turns to snowfall at higher elevations."

Uh, most water vapor comes from the oceans and it will keep coming whether there are trees or not. The trees themselves store carbon and emit water vapor, which raises humidity. But do you really think there is much more water in forests than in the oceans, Judy? LOL! Nope! Try planting millions of trees in the Sahara Deserts and most of them will be dead in a year or two. Trees by themselves do not attract water. The water must already be there. Removing the trees means there is less surface area in an environment for water vapor to be emitted, but it can still come from oceans, rivers and lakes. of which there are plenty in and around central Africa. That's it. BTW, the main reason for deforestation is to replace the forest areas with farms. There are lots of plants in them too.

You still haven't explained why merely reducing the rainfall or snowfall would make the Kilimanjaro ice shrink. It would only stop growing, since the only way to shrink it, aside from occational avalances, is to INCREASE THE TEMPERATURE! And avalances would only happen otherwise if more snow and ice was constantly being added to the slopes, which is not the case.

"The only thing this has to do with CO2 is that plants use CO2 during photosysnthesis....a bigger supply of CO2 would mean more water vapor given off. Higher levels of CO2 also enable plants to survive drought better."

What an outright contradiction! If plants give off more water vapor as a result of increased CO2, then they would be LESS able to survive droughts!

Friday November 6, 2009, 3:22 pm
In adding to that, the Global Warming, increasing the temperature dry the soils and cases the desertification of the Earth, and then Judy, that's the end of your aimed plants!...

Friday November 6, 2009, 3:23 pm
In adding to that, the Global Warming, increasing the temperature dry the soils and causes the desertification of the Earth, and then Judy, that's the end of your aimed plants!...

Friday November 6, 2009, 3:49 pm
Judy, as I said above, the deforestation has three causes:

1. The trees abate.
2. The fire that burns the forests.
3. The climate changes, caused by the Global Warming.

If we want to preserve our Planet, we must reduce the trees abate, prevent and combat the fire and reduce the CO2 emissions to stop the Global Warming. There are the option of the Renewable Energy's, such as the energy of the sun, the hydraulic power, the energy of the wind, the wave energy, the geothermal energy, etc..

Saturday November 7, 2009, 6:08 am
Noted. TY Katie.