The Shrinking Glaciers of Kilimanjaro: Can Global Warming Be Blamed?

The shrinking glacier is an iconic image of global climate change. Rising temperatures may reshape vegetation, but such changes are visually subtle on the landscape; by contrast, a vast glacier retreated to a fraction of its former grandeur presents stunning evidence of how climate shapes the face of the planet. Viewers of the film An Inconvenient Truth are startled by paired before-and-after photos of vanishing glaciers around the world. If those were not enough, the scars left behind by the retreat of these mountain grinding giants testify to their impotence in the face of something as insubstantial as warmer air.