Snowy peak of Kilimanjaro defies Al Gore’s gloomy forecast

Predictions that there would be no more snow on Africa’s highest peak long before we entered this decade spurred a rush of visitors.

Al Gore speaking at a lunch in Brisbane last year. Picture: Glenn Hunt

Predictions that there would be no more snow on Africa’s highest peak long before we entered this decade spurred a rush of visitors to see the white cap of Mount Kilimanjaro before it vanished forever.

Yet climbers have been wading through snowdrifts on its upper reaches this month, confounding prophecies most notably featured in An Inconvenient Truth, the 2006 documentary on climate change written and fronted by former US vice-president Al Gore.

“The snow has certainly got my clients talking,” Methley Swai, owner of the Just-Kilimanjaro trekking company, said. “Many people have made Kilimanjaro a bucket list priority ­because of the Al Gore deadline but when they get here they are pleasantly surprised to find lots of snow.”

There were also abnormally high snowfalls in 2018, which led to the highest recorded growth for the total snow depth on Tanzania’s inactive volcano, an ­aggregated increase of 1.2m.

Mr Swai, 50, who has been to the summit of Kilimanjaro 115 times over the past two decades, also reported his clients’ surprise at seeing “huge glaciers, a couple of storeys high” at its higher camps. The mountain, which looms over the plains of Tanzania, has a habit of defying predictions. Some climate scientists had forecast that all Kilimanjaro’s icefields and glaciers would have completely melted by now. Yet data suggests a number are stubbornly clinging on, albeit shrunken.

Doug Hardy, a climate ­researcher from the University of Massachusetts who has scaled and monitored the mountain for 20 years, returns this week to carry out the latest assessment. “The timing on all those predictions was obviously off,” he said before leaving America. “But most importantly, all glaciers on the mountain continue to decrease in thickness and in area.”

Ever since records began, snow has come and gone each year on Kilimanjaro, falling in the four months of the wet season and melting during the rest of the year. The far more important ­indicator of changing weather is the health of the icefields at its summit. In 1912 the ice covered 11.4sq km but that was down to 2.95sq km by 2000 when a team, including Dr Hardy, went to ­measure the area and thickness of the ice.

They drilled in three locations, finding ice depths of 50m in the icefield to the north of the summit’s volcanic crater, 9.5m in the glacier inside the crater and 20m in the icefield to the south. Two decades on, the sites where they drilled inside the crater and to the south have no ice while the northern thickness is down to 45m.

Dr Hardy said the Furtwangler glacier within the summit’s volcanic crater had reduced so much that only 10 per cent of its volume remained in 2017 compared with 2000. While the ice decline is evident, unlike the snowfall disappearance promised by Mr Gore, the exact cause of the changes remains in contention. The science of tropical glacier behaviour is still a work in progress.

The simplistic prediction made by Mr Gore “was not helpful”, Dr Hardy said.

“Quite possibly, the black-and-white nature of his statements may have benefited those wishing to confuse the issue and cast doubt on climate change, and I’ve always felt that hyperbole should be avoided.”

The Times