University of Washington climate scientist Philip W. Mote, co-author with Georg Kaser of an article in the July/August issue of American Scientist magazine, said most scientists who study Kilimanjaro’s glaciers have long been uneasy with the volcano’s poster-childĀ status.
Pictures of the peak, which has lost 90% of its snow and ice, were featured in Al Gore’s āAn Inconvenient Truth.ā Greenpeace activists once held a satellite news conference on the summit during an international climateĀ conference.
Kilimanjaro has seen its glaciers decline steadily for well over a century, Mote said, due to lack of snowfall and sublimation, the same process that causes freezer burn by sucking moisture out ofĀ leftovers.
āKilimanjaro is a grossly overused mis-example of the effects of climate change,ā said Mote, who doesnāt want skeptics to use his and Kaserās article to debunk broader climate-changeĀ trends.
He emphasized that global warming is, indeed, responsible for the melting away of nearly every other glacier around the globe. āKilimanjaro just happens to be the worst possible caseĀ study.ā
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