Failed Predictions in Climate Science, Part 2: Mountain Ice
In my last post I covered one failed prediction having to do with Arctic sea ice. Here I'll cover two essentially failed prediction covering mountain glaciers Mt. Kilimanjaro in 2017 Mt. Kilimanjaro Thompson et al 2002, a paper published in the prestigious journal Science [1], predicted that we should expect the remaining ice fields on Mt. Kilimanjaro to disappear sometime between 2015 and 2020. Over the 20th century, the areal extent of Kilimanjaro's ice fields has decreased ∼80%, and if current climatological conditions persist, the remaining ice fields are likely to disappear between 2015 and 2020. This prediction was featured in an Inconvenient Truth , so it gained a bit of attention, but by 2011, Mass Live reported that it was becoming clear that trends were not persisting as the study expected. By 2022, Politifact was writing factchecks about it, admitting this to be a failed prediction, but also (correctly) pointing out that this does not mean that clim...