CoGW caught lying about Kilimanjaro's disappearing icecap

One of the reasons the AGW hysteria has advanced as far as it has is the fact that CoGW adherents are very skilled at promoting false interpretations of verifiable facts.

For example, Al Gore (in An Inconvenient Truth) and others have frequently pointed to the disappearing icecap of Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro as proof positive of AGW.

While the icecap is indeed disappearing, this fact has nothing to do with global warming, anthropogenic or otherwise, as reported in this June 12 Reuters article:

The snows of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania have been diminishing for more than a century but probably not due to global warming, researchers report.

While the retreat of glaciers and mountaintop ice in the mid-latitudes -- where much of the world's human population lives -- is definitely linked to global climate change, the same cannot be said of Kilimanjaro, the researchers wrote in the July-August edition of American Scientist magazine.

Kilimanjaro's icy top, which provided the title for an iconic short story by Ernest Hemingway, has been waning for more than a century, according to Philip Mote of the University of Washington in the United States and Georg Kaser of the University of Innsbruck in Austria.

Most of the retreat occurred before 1953, nearly two decades before any conclusive evidence of atmospheric warming was available, they wrote.

"It is certainly possible that the icecap has come and gone many times over hundreds of thousands of years," Mote, a climatologist, said in a statement.

The temperature atop Kilimanjaro never rises above freezing, so there is no chance for the icecap to melt. Instead, the snow is sublimating -- evaporating without first melting. This is due to increased solar irradiance (combined, I presume, with lower humidity).

Reuters is careful to throw in a YeahBut to hold on to the faithful:

"But for temperate glaciers, there is ample evidence that they are shrinking, in part because of warming from greenhouse gases."

Somehow, the credibility of Al Gore and the other saints of the CoGW never suffers when one after another of their claims proves to be false. Either they're lying, or they have no idea what they're talking about -- in either case a sane world would pay no attention to them.