Mt. Kili snow will not disappear - researcher

A local researcher has said snow on Africa`s highest peak, Mt. Kilimanjaro, will not disappear around 2017, as suggestively pronounced by foreign scientists. The pollster, Prof Ernest Njau from the University of Dar es Salaam`s Physics Department, sounded yet another theory on Mt. Kilimanjaro during an interview yesterday at the Hill in Dar es Salaam. The don said most scientists still held reports provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which he faulted, saying that they contained prediction errors due to imperfections in the climate models used. According to the don, recent scientific reports had taken sunspot-climate relationship into account and came up with a prediction that a 430-year-long global cooling trend was due to start at about year 2060, and the Ice on the Kilimanjaro would resume to its original state. ``This is contradictory to the predictions by the IPCC that had been holding that temperature will always be increasing over and over, because the IPCC does not use sunspot-climate relationship in its predictions,`` he said. He said the averaging processes used to make the models were unable to simulate any sunspot-related climate variations. As a result, he said, all the climate predictions issued by the IPCC so far did not take into account the recently proved relationship between terrestrial climate variations and solar cycles. The don said climate predictions made in the past using similar methodology had proved true, as predicted in 1998 using similar methodology that globally averaged temperature would halt its post-1970`s increase trend for about 30 years from 1998. He said it was true that average global temperature had not increased since 1998, despite the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide by 4 per cent over the same period. Prof Njau insisted: ``It is on the basis of the prediction above that the snow on Mount Kilimanjaro will not disappear in 2017.`` The don, an active pollster over the last 23 years, said climatic variations that had taken place so far had natural and not man-made frequencies, and had taken place at frequencies related to those of solar cycles or sunspots. He further explained that sunspot-related global climate variations had not been detected or simulated by computer models upon which IPCC rely on. Just last week, another scientific theory linked the loss of snow on the Kilimanjaro to deforestation and dismissed suggestions that the dwindling of the glaciers was due to global warming. The ``deforestation theory`` is highlighted in a recent study report compiled by two researchers from Britain`s Portsmouth University, Nicholas Pepin and Martin Schaefer, who surveyed the mountain`s glaciers for 11 days. Last year, another study on the dwindling ice on the mountain`s cap suggested that global warming had nothing to do with the alarming loss of its beautiful snows. The scientists who conducted the study, US-based Philip Mote and Georg Kaser, assertively linked the problem to a process known as sublimation-that occurs at below-freezing temperatures and converts ice directly to water vapour with the liquid phase skipped. Kibo volcano is widely acknowledged as located at the highest point on Mount Kilimanjaro at about 5,895 metres (19,340 feet) above sea level. According to a rough 1889 survey Kibo`s icecap occupied about 12.5 square miles but this had dwindled to about 7.5 square miles by 1912, to about 4.3 square miles by 1953, and just over 1.5 square miles by 2003.