Kilimanjaro’s ice set to linger

Recent concerns that climate warming would rob Mount Kilimanjaro of all its glaciers within 20 years are overly pessimistic, say Austrian scientists.

Their weather station data and modelling work indicate the tropical ice should last well beyond 2040.

Precipitation and not temperature is the key to the white peak’s future, the University of Innsbruck-led team says.

I cannot recall. Was Kilimanjaro one of Al Gore’s icons?

The I would assume, based on comments below, that the red curve was derived from other data, and that the composite curve is the combination of two separate graphs, hence Figure 2.

Peer review?

Brooks, you hit the nail on the head.

Come on… it’s just as plausible to match the wiggles a little differently and assume that both cores are about the same age. I’m not sure how one can show that one wiggle-match is better than another wiggle-match, but 1,2 and especially 3 above convince me that you need to find it. But even if you do wiggle-match, you can’t just go and splice them.

1. Just looking at FIG1, it seems that there is a sort of sawtooth pattern going on with period of every 4-5 meters (but with a fair amount of deviation/noise on top of the sawtooth signal). Are there any tests to run to see if the pattern is significant versus random noise?
2. If there is such a sawtooth and it’s significant, what could have caused it?
3. Trying to think why there could be such a difference in thickness/age and all I can come up with is that the one that has more ice/year was on a flat and the other was on a slope.
4. I assume that there are some mechanisms for transport of organics…but if so, it casts the whole core into question, no? What would an expert like our swiss friend say on this issue?
5. I agree that it seems like wiggles near 40 and near 30 can be matched well with each other with a shift of about 2 meters vice the 10 meter shift. How can one address the two choices mathematically?
6. Just being nitty, but there’s a misprint of 5 twice on T’s figure 2.
7. When I look at T’s figure 2 and follow the wiggles and look at the events, it sure seems to make good sense how he matched the wiggles. Nothing sticks out as wrong.
8. Wonder what the impact of the 10 year averaging is, how many points go into it, etc. Still may be a great way to process data actually to enable the wiggle matches.
9. “coeval?” Come on! Use a regular word. The more silly the social science, the more they wordy up their language.
10. Perhaps the ion measurements need more sample? Still wonder why we have 50m for ions and 10 for O18. and implication of that re stats caveats.
11. The wiggle match is not a simple 4 for 3 rate thing is it? Varying in rate instead?
12. What is the rationale for the prescence of ions at all in the ice? What makes one have more or less of an ion?
13. Sometimes with analyses, it’s more the peaks that are important than the peak height (not sure how to express this). And don’t know if this is the case with ions in ice. Need more cores to see that. But real hard for me to judge if wiggles of ions match or not. NH4+ looks good, but Na+ doesn’t.
14. Any chance, you can capture the implied data from the curves and then deconvolue back out the offset? Then you could visually see if unoffset works better. Or I guess, you could come up with your own offset. But that figure 2 wiggle match sure looks good…