Posted by
BLOGASSAULT on Saturday, December 05, 2009 11:00:16 AM
It is beginning to look like the mortar is falling out of the brick wall that used to be global warming. Now the famed Kilimanjaro Ice cap that has become Al Gore's poster pic for global warming has just
been assaulted; by a real scientist.
...Professor Jaap Sinninghe Damste — a leading molecular paleontologist at Utrecht University and winner of the prestigious Spinoza Prize — about the melting icecap of the Kilimanjaro, the African mountain that became a symbol of anthropogenic global warming.
Professor Sinninghe Damste’s research, as discussed on the site of the Dutch Organization of Scientific Research (DOSR) — a governmental body — shows that the icecap of Kilimanjaro was not the result of cold air but of large amounts of precipitation which fell at the beginning of the Holocene period, about 11,000 years ago.
The melting and freezing of moisture on top of Kilimanjaro appears to be part of “a natural process of dry and wet periods.” The present melting is not the result of “environmental damage caused by man.”
Professor Damste studied organic biomarker molecules in the sediment record of Lake Challa, near Mount Kilimanjaro, and reconstructed the changes and intensity of precipitation in this part of Africa over the last 25,000 years. They observed an 11,500 year cycle of intense monsoon precipitation.
In the dry period between 12,800 and 11,500 years ago, Kilimanjaro was ice-free.
What? Kilimanjaro was ice free at one point? Shock! Maybe the Neaderthals discovered coal and used it to cook food and stay warm in the area around Kilimanjaro, because we all know that
burning coal is terrible.
Obviously, his work will have to be proved out as well, because it is a theory based in real science. But if he had to submit his work to peer-review in climate journals, well, we would not be reading his study right now.