As Kilimanjaro’s ice cap disappears, journalists grapple with the story differently. What’s your take on the coverage?
The pictures at left reveal in visual form what a new study led by Ohio State University scientist Lonnie Thompson has documented scientifically:
More than a quarter of Mount Kilimanjaro’s famed ice cap has disappeared since the year 2000.
Published Nov. 2 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study also confirms that a total of 85 percent of the ice cap vanished between 1912 and 2002. The researchers predict the ice will be gone completely in 30 years if it continues to shrink at this rate.
What’s causing the ice to vanish? To help answer that question, Thompson and his colleagues drilled cores deep into the ice fields on the summit to obtain records of past climate change on the mountain. The researchers say these ice cores show that rapid melting during the past few decades is unprecedented in 11,700 years. The ice fields even managed to survive a widespread drought 4,200 years ago that lasted 300 years.
Thompson and his colleagues concluded that “the climatological conditions currently driving the loss of Kilimanjaro’s ice fields are clearly unique within an 11,700-year perspective.” And from this and other evidence documented in the paper, they argue that warming is playing an “important role.”
Kilimanjaro became something a poster child for human-caused global warming when Al Gore featured it in his movie an Inconvenient Truth. But scientists have been engaged in what Michael Lemonick describes in Time magazine as something of an “intellectual war for years over what’s really causing the ice loss atop Kilimanjaro.”
Lemonick puts it this way in his article:
“The simplest explanation would be that warming temperatures are making the ice melt — and indeed, Thompson believes this is a big part of what’s going on.
Lemonick goes on to describe the evidence Thompson and his colleague provide to support the contention that melting caused by warming atop the mountain is playing a major role in the disappearance of the ice cap. But then he also gives the scientific opposition a chance to make its case:
. . . other scientists insist that melting, if it’s occurring at all, has a relatively minor effect. “The fact that you have melting may mean air temperatures have increased, but it doesn’t necessarily,” says Philip Mote, who heads the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute at Oregon State University. “And in fact, the temperature on the summit of Kilimanjaro is essentially always below freezing, which makes it hard to accept warming as the reason [for glacier loss].”
According to Mote, other processes are probably at work, including reduced cloud cover causing increased sublimation — ice turning directly into water vapor without melting.
In contrast to Lemonick’s story, a piece by Sindya Bhanoo of the New York Times handles the attribution question — and the paper in PNAS — differently. Here’s what she writes in the “nutgraf” of the story, the second paragraph, where the significance of the study is described:
Yet the authors of the study, to be published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reached no consensus on whether the melting could be attributed mainly to humanity’s role in warming the global climate.
As an assignment to students in my graduate-level Science Writing course here at the University of Colorado, I’m asking them to read and analyze the original PNAS paper, then the New York Times story, and lastly the Time article. (I’m also having them take a look at the press release from Ohio State.) Among the questions I will ask them — and you, if you care to leave a response here — are these:
- Is Bhanoo’s description of the significance of the PNAS paper accurate?
- Did Lemonick balance the competing scientific claims fairly and appropriately?
- How well did both authors describe the science detailed in the PNAS paper?
- Based on your reading of the PNAS paper, what significance, if any, do you think it holds for the scientific case for human-caused global warming?
- Overall, what worked, and what needed improvement in the different stories?
- What conclusions, if any, can we draw from these stories about covering climate change?
I hope you’ll participate in this little experiment and share some of your thoughts on one or more of these questions. It could be quite interesting to compare what the readers of CEJournal and the students come up with.
This thing has 12 Comments
HI
I was already convinced of the impact of AGW before reading your piece. So am a biased observer. I had also read the chapters covering Dr Thompson’s efforts to get the ice cores from Mt K as described in Dr. Mark Bowen’s book “Thin Ice”.
The Bhanoo interpretation is not one that can be drawn based on the PNAS paper. There is virtually no mention of “humanity’s role” etc. She is slanting the conclusions based on some other agenda.
When do they have to submit by?
Our class meets on Monday at noon, Mountain time.
FYI Tom, if one forgets to fill in name and email before posting a comment here, the helpful software gives one a message to that effect and kindly deletes the text.
Thanks - in that case I suggest you add the work of Mote and Kaser to the reading list (8 pages):
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?
I think it’s interesting that neither Bhanoo nor Lemonick emphasize Thompson’s finding that the glacier mass loss, shrinkage, and retreat is occurring elsewhere in the world where there has not been a loss in precipitation, such as the Quelccaya ice cap in Peru. This suggests that glacier retreat is not due to regional changes, but the overall observed increase of global temperatures. This suggests that global warming trumps regional changes as the reason for ice shrinkage.
I thought the Time magazine article was the best-written and reported of the Kilimanjaro stories and was actually surprised by how bad the New York Times piece was.
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.
Please, give President Barack Obama a reason for going to Copenhagen next month so that he has a chance to make the difference that makes a difference. Action is needed now. Support the objectives of the Copenhagen Climate Conference before it is too late for even these great, leading-edge human beings with feet of clay to guide the children away from the patently unsustainable lifestyles of the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe among us and toward sustainable ways of living in the planetary home God has blessed us to inhabit as stewards, I suppose.
A late note on this:
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.
Great point Steve. I need to pay closer attention to the distinction myself. As for Bhanoo, I think she was simply in over her head. I’m not even sure she would know what “attribution” means in the context of climate research. And I don’t think she really read the paper, or if she did, it doesn’t appear that she understood it. Her approach was to interview dueling experts and leave it at that.
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.
That’s good to hear.
I notice that by coincidence there was a near-simultaneous article regarding Mt. Kenya that took a completely different approach.
Excellent link Steve. I am going to forward it to my students. Thanks for sharing it.