The Truth about Kilimanjaro....

The snows have been receding for quite awhile...

In their desperation to keep the panic going before next month's Copenhagen climate conference, the media warmist groupies last week wheeled out, yet again, one of their favourite but long-discredited scare stories, the one about the melting snows of Kilimanjaro. Their excuse was a new study by Al Gore's friend Dr Lonnie Thompson, claiming to show that the ice on Africa's highest mountain is vanishing due to soaring temperatures.

Indeed Kilimanjaro's snow and ice is receding, as I saw for myself when I climbed it a few years back. But, as a small army of international experts have shown, this has nothing to do with global warming (temperatures on the summit, at 19,346ft, never rise above freezing). It has been going on since 1880, due to the decline in precipitation caused by widespread clearance of forests around the volcano's base.

The rate of the ice shrinkage (as I note in my new book on the climate change scare, The Real Global Warming Disaster) was in fact at its greatest in the years before 1950, long before those rising 20th-century temperatures set off the panic over global warming. Ironically, no one puts this more forcefully than Dr Philip Mote, a US expert who is a firm believer in man-made warming. He complains that citing Kilimanjaro in this way can only discredit the cause because it is so demonstrably at odds with the facts. This hasn't prevented the likes of Al Gore and Hillary Clinton claiming that their fairy story "cannot be refuted by any scientist". But actually it can – by every scientist who has studied Kilimanjaro (apart from Mr Gore's friend Dr Thompson).

Unsurprisingly, the media groupies were far too busy with Kilimanjaro to report the latest figures from the US National Climate Data Center showing that last month the USA enjoyed its third coldest October since 1880, four degrees Fahrenheit colder than the 20th-century average (for details see the Watts Up With That blog).

But hard facts of this kind may help to explain why Yvo de Boer, the chief organiser of next month's UN conference, was last week bemoaning that hopes of any meaningful agreement in Copenhagen seem doomed.