I notice that by coincidence there was a near-simultaneous article regarding Mt. Kenya that took a completely different approach.

Interestingly, some of my students felt that one point was lost in the reporting on this paper: It’s possible that both Mote and Thompson are each partially right. Global climate change could be changing regional climate in such a way as to reduce cloud cover.

Other students felt that there was an opportunity here to pursue a less shopworn angle than the attribution question, especially since in the big scheme of things it matters not one whit what’s causing the ice loss on Kilimanjaro. The folks who depend on summer runoff are just as screwed whether the cause is local or global. These students felt that the impact of melting glaciers and ice caps on water resources was a potentially more important, compelling and productive angle, with Kilimanjaro serving as a way to explore the larger phenomenon.

They made me smile.

Tom, I hope your students are (or become) clear on the difference between formal and informal attribution in climate science, the former requiring modeling and setting a very high threshold for drawing firm conclusions, and the latter being a somewhat arbitrary sliding scale of opinion that will vary depending on who you’re talkiing to (and is what we saw in this instance). Bhanoo seems to have been unclear on this distinction.

One of NYT reporter’s primary sources was climatologist Philip Mote of Oregon State University, who himself apparently didn’t read the PNAS report very carefully. Mote’s sole basis for arguing that warming can’t be leading to glacial melting is that the air is always below freezing. Therefore, the glaciers must be evaporating. Yet, the evidence provided by the core samples clearly show recent ice melt and that this has never happened before, even during past droughts lasting 300 years.

Which raises another question the NYT reporter raised by failed to answer – is the PNAS ice data legit or not? Glaciologist George Kaser says Thompson’s data is meaningless because it represents only a few hundred years of history (and not 11,700) and that even that ice had come and gone several times over and thus should be suspect. This seems an important issue to get to the bottom of since the whole story depends on it and by all measures, an event that hasn’t occurred in over 11,700 years is a significant. Rather than doing the reporting for us the reader is left to go sift through six pages of dense PNIS data himself to figure this out. I think this is what Boykoff would call false balance and the result is we’re left wondering about the accuracy of the data rather than considering the more compelling issue or listening to a more relevant source than Kaser.

Clearly the Ohio State University article took the most liberties of all the articles, sounding the alarm that global warming is causing the snows of Kilimanjaro to melt. The author concludes that cloudiness and precipitation are secondary, less important factors, and describes dramatic physical evidence of global warming. The liberties taken in this piece were shocking, especially if you read this article last as I did. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised, however, given that it was written by a university communications/PR department.

A couple of issues these articles seem to tell us is that a.) climate and weather patterns are complicated and often interwoven; B.) global warming’s impacts to weather are equally complex and mysterious to scientists at this point: Are Kilimanjaro’s glaciers melting from drier air or warmer air? What does that say about global warming impacts? Can’t drier air be related to climate change as warmer air is? (Often lost in discussions of climate change, and I believe relevant here, is that the two terms, global warming and climate change are not interchangeable. Roughly, climate change represents all the changes happening to our climate as a result of warming, such as temperature, humidity, rainfall, wind, severe weather events, while global warming refers only to warming.); C.) For the above reasons, it is very dangerous to draw early, obvious and anecdotal conclusions about the impacts of global warming. This is especially true if you’re name is Al Gore, or you’re doing advocacy. Climate change skeptics and detractors are waiting in the wings to take up any scrap of falsehood or stretched truth to discredit global warming or at least sew a few seeds of doubt. They understand all too well that once there exists even the smallest doubt among the public about a single piece of evidence, there is no need to take action. In short, there exists too much concrete evidence on global warming’s impacts to our planet to use the mixed bag of Kilimanjaro’s glacial melt as evidence of global warming or climate change.

http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/feature/the-shrinking-glaciers-of-kilimanjaro-can-global-warming-be-blamed/1RecentarticleinAmericanScientist.

and add the question:

How well do you think either story represented the full breadth of scientific opinion?