Monday, March 21, 2011

I Told You So

Four years ago... FOUR years ago I wrote the following about the snows of Kilimanjaro:

Please remember that last year was (so we were told) the "warmest year ever" and the glacier at Kilimanjaro grew larger. Also notice that this research confirms the hypothesis that glacier retreat has nothing to do with "warming" but with moisture patterns AND that these patterns starting changing in the 19th century. (Must have been caused by those "Sport Utility Horse and Buggies.")

Today one can read:

Standing as the highest mountain in Africa, Mount Kilimanjaro is slowly regaining its snow after several years of drought in East Africa and the effects of climate change in African continent.

The snow is slowly mounting on the top point of the mountain, giving new hopes to Mount Kilimanjaro environmental watchdogs and tourists that the mountain may not lose its beautiful ice cap as scientists predicted.

Covered in mist most of the day, Mount Kilimanjaro is the most tourist attractive site in Tanzania, pulling in tens of thousands of tourists each year. The snow, which once disappeared in some parts of the mountain is mounting slowly, giving a beautiful view of the Kibo peak.

A visit by our Tanzania eTurboNews reporter to Mount Kilimanjaro's slopes proved that there were changes on the mountain snow, which has been covering some parts of the mountain where once the ice had melted.

Lo! and behold, some "scientists" have egg on their faces:

“Unfortunately, we made the prediction. I wish we hadn’t,” says Douglas R. Hardy, a UMass geoscientist who was among 11 co-authors of the paper in the journal Science that sparked the pessimistic Kilimanjaro forecast. “None of us had much history working on that mountain, and we didn’t understand a lot of the complicated processes on the peak like we do now.”

Look, I am not a geoscientist, but I got this right and the so-called "experts" got it wrong. Am I lucky? No. I simply do not believe reality is beholden to some ideological preconception I may hold. And, let's get real here geoscientists, the problem was not that the complicated mountain tricked you, the problem was you wanted reality to conform to your will. Until you stop doing that you will continue to get things wrong, and look stupid doing it.

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