| Details1: | Background
Kilimanjaro, the highest free-standing mountain in the world, was long renowned for its summit glaciers, immortalized by Ernest Hemingway in his famous short story "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." Over the first few years of the current century, its disappearing summit ice fields were once again made famous, this time by political luminaries such as Al Gore, Hillary Clinton and John McCain, who cited them as unmistakable evidence of the deleterious consequences of human-induced global warming. With the appearance of the research reports of Molg et al. (2003), Kaser et al. (2004), Molg and Hardy (2004), Cullen et al. (2006) and Mote and Kaser (2007), however, it has become clear to all but the most blind, that rising temperatures have had little to do with Kilimanjaro's disappearing ice, as the findings of Duane et al. (2008) also suggest.
What was done
Between September 2004 and January 2006, Duane et al. (2008) collected temperature and relative humidity readings 1.5 meters above ground level at 11,600 hourly intervals at seven locations over an elevation range of 3,910 meters on the southwestern side of Kilimanjaro, after which they determined the implications of their data for the shrinking ice fields atop the mountain.
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