Who could have predicted that Ernest Hemingway’s novel, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” would be a victim of “Global Warming” decades after its publication? Al Gore, searching the planet for visual examples which would best warn the public about the deteriorations provoked by rising global temperatures, found one in the apparently shrinking ice cap of Mt. Kilimanjaro. How ironic, the snows of Kilimanjaro are melting from global warming, something that surely would render Hemingway’s book …well, sort of a relic of cooler days gone by.  But Al Gore and the “Global Warming” proponents are banking on the general public not knowing a thing about Kilimanjaro the actual mountain, or anything about the novel apart from the catchy title. Yet, fiction is not what we want to discuss, but fact. And the “fact” of anything “melting” at the top of Kilimanjaro is a “fact” that is totally dependent on an un-informed public not challenging it.

Mt. Kilimanjaro, a volcano rising just over 19,000 feet from sea level, located in the East African nation of Tanzania, is somewhat unique – a mountain on the equator with a glacier at its summit, rising above the hot savannah, a grassland game park with lions, elephants, zebras, and wildebeest, nibbling about under acacia and crimson-blossomed flame tree shade – with red-wrapped and colorful bead-adorned traditional Masai warriors strolling about, visiting, tending their cattle, minding the homesteads and families amidst the flora and fauna. There are glaciers on mountains near the tropical equator elsewhere in the world, so it’s not truly unique. What does make it more uniquely interesting is information that Al Gore didn’t offer when he claimed that “global warming” was melting the ice on Kilimanjaro. That would be an inconvenient fact – Kilimanjaro’s sister peak, Mt. Kenya.

Mt. Kenya, situated in the East African nation of Kenya, next door to Tanzania, is a volcano like Kilimanjaro, also just over 19,000 feet and is close by on the other side of the equator; the mountains are the two most distant points on the earth which can be seen from each other. And, what are the odds? … Mt. Kenya also has a glacier at its summit. But unlike Mt. Kilimanjaro, and despite the nearly identical circumstances, Mt. Kenya’s glacier doesn’t lend itself so well to photographic “evidence” of any sort of …“melting,” so it’s never mentioned. Logically, if “global warming” is melting the glacier on Mt. Kilimanjaro, then it must be melting the glacier on Mt. Kenya at a very similar rate.
Because the two mountains sit at the equator, their summit temperatures remain in a relatively constant range; days at the equator do not shift the way they do as in latitudes approaching the poles. Instead, they have a steady twelve hours of daylight, twelve hours of night with very little variation, 365 days a year. Literally, there can be more than a 100 degree decline in temperature as one ascends from the sultry bases to the frigid summits of both mountains. Mt. Kilimanjaro’s glacier doesn’t look like a flowing sort of glacier found in seasonally-affected mountains, it’s a big block of ice sitting at the rim, and temperatures there at 19,000 feet lurk at negative 3 degrees F and lower. That would be 35 degrees below freezing point. There is very little atmosphere at 19,000 feet, the air is very thin and has a very low capacity to hold any sort of heat or water vapor, so it’s extremely dry and cold, much too cold to “melt” anything.

But Al Gore showed photos of a once bigger ice cap than today. There are at least two factors. One, the snowfall has been measurably less as the region has been in a drought for over decade. There just hasn’t been any significant rainfall, and so, little snowpack added up top. But nearby Mt. Kenya has had closer to average rainfall, and its glacier isn’t showing much change in size, so the drought is a localized problem. Rains in that region resemble very much Arizonan rain patterns – produced by cells rather than comprehensive cloud cover. Two, at the summit, a different process is at work. In extremely cold, dry conditions, the ice/solid to water/liquid to water vapor/gas transformation skips a step. Under the right conditions, ice can “sublimate” or evaporate into the air without any melting. In the bitter cold and extremely dry environment of the summit at over 19,000 feet, it is simply too cold for melting. “Sublimation” is not a function of “warming” but of chilling.

 The snows of Kilimanjaro have not been “melting” from “global warming.” At 19,000 feet, the thin atmosphere will never be dense enough at that altitude to hold heat even with any potential rise in global temperatures at lower altitudes. The “fact” of the “melting” is not a fact, but a fraud or in today’s debate, a “trick” to hide the truth. 32 degrees F has a meaning and a significance that too many people today do not apply to real life.

Time to refresh ourselves of that old adage: “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”

An excellent article regarding extensive background and research into the conditions for sublimation, solar radiation and recorded temperatures is found in The American Scientist, Vol. 95, 2007 Sigma Xi, “The Shrinking Glaciers of Kilimanjaro.” Authors: Philip W. Mote and Georg Kaser http://uwnews.washington.edu/ni/relatedcontent/2007/June/rc_parentID34106_thisID34110.pdf