Kilimanjaro

This is actually something that I posted as a comment on another blog, but I thought it was worthwhile to post again:

My personal opinion is that we’re not going to destroy the world with what we do, but we should probably try not to (by curtailing ourselves from being overly destructive, etc.).

There is supposedly a paper that explains Kilimanjaro’s loss of glaciers as a result of deforestation. The loss of humid air rising up from the wooded slopes causes less condensation and deposition of ice on the cap of the mountain.

A paper in Nature is often (from what I’ve seen in my searches today) cited as the one that explains all this, but the Nature paper is actually a news summary of the work of Bill Ruddiman. I can’t pull up the references right now because UND doesn’t electronically subscribe to the journals in question.

I think this is probably a good answer to the question of Kilimanjaro, not because I’m skeptical of climate change but because the deforestation theory describes a discrete mechanism by which the ice cap would get smaller. It’s a lot easier to figure out whether a specific theory is correct or incorrect than to argue for or against such ill-defined terms as “climate change” that do not in themselves describe a mechanism.

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