In Al Gore’s propagandamentary An Inconvenient Truth he uses the receding snow coverage of Africa’s Mount Kilimanjaro as a sign that man-made global warming is real, and no scientist can deny it.
Now it looks like real science has determined that Kilimanjaro’s snows are not some barometer of global warming:
Kilimanjaro’s icy top, which provided the title for an iconic short story by Ernest Hemingway, has been waning for more than a century, according to Philip Mote of the University of Washington in the United States and Georg Kaser of the University of Innsbruck in Austria.
Most of the retreat occurred before 1953, nearly two decades before any conclusive evidence of atmospheric warming was available, they wrote.
“It is certainly possible that the icecap has come and gone many times over hundreds of thousands of years,” Mote, a climatologist, said in a statement.
The fact of the matter remains that climatology is not a predictive science — we just don’t know enough about the complex and unpredictable nature of an entire planetary atmosphere to say with any certainty what forces have exactly what effects. Computer modeling is based on our assumptions about the Earth’s climate, which may or may not be accurate.
Is there evidence of anthropogenic global warming? Certainly there is evidence, but evidence isn’t enough to make a conclusive case. We’re in a period of increased solar warming which can have effects on global temperatures. We don’t fully understand how the planet’s magnetic field effects temperature. There are a whole host of unanswered questions which defy the easy answers given to us by global warming advocates. Reducing our output of carbon dioxide is a good thing in itself, but justifying it through fear-mongering and alarmism only cheapens the efforts of real scientists.
Gore was wrong about Kilimanjaro, and he is wrong about many other things in his film — and yet we’re being told over and over that Mr. Gore is some sage truth-teller who is warning us about a crisis that will destroy our entire civilization — and if you believe that, I’ve got a snowy peak in Africa to sell you…
Nice post! Thank you.
I’m always amazed how much faith and magic laymen place in computer modeling. Ford physically crashes cars despite the computer modeling used to design a car with a 4 star rating. Boeing actually flight tests their planes despite sophisticated models that predict the several ton plane will fly. From the outside, science looks exact, perfect and clean cut. In the real world, this is simply not true.