Climate Gallery

The ice cap in Africas highest mountain, Mt. Kilimanjaro gleams on December 13, 2009

The ice cap in Africa's highest mountain, Mt. Kilimanjaro gleams on December 13, 2009. According to a recent study by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS) the ice sheet that capped Kilimanjaro in 2007 was 85 percent smaller than the one that covered its plateau in 1912. The mountain's ice cover shrank about 1 percent a year from 1912 to 1953, a rate that has accelerated in recent years. From 1989 to 2007, that rate jumped to 2.5 percent a year. Since 2000, the plateau's three remaining ice fields have shrunk by 26 percent, scientists found. If current conditions persist, climate change experts say, Kilimanjaro's world-renowned glaciers, which have covered Africa's highest peak for centuries, will be gone within the next two decades. World leaders struggled to nail down a climate pact Friday in Copenhagen, amid dismay and alarm among nations most at risk from global warming. A draft of a pact contained a call to prevent a rise in global temperatures of more than 2.0 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with pre-industrial times, the figure fell way short of the demands of threatened island nations. AFP PHOTO/ROBERTO SCHMIDT / AFP PHOTO / ROBERTO SCHMIDT

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