The ice cap on Africa’s Mount Kilimanjaro will be gone in 15 years, says Lonnie G. Thompson, a researcher at Ohio State University. Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science this weekend, Thompson said that 82 percent of the ice cap that existed on the mountain in 1912 has already melted. Although the retreat started a century ago, Thompson said the pace of the melting now exceeds anything in recent centuries, providing one of the loudest signals yet that human-induced climate change is upon us. In other climate news, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report today that concludes that the poorest regions of the world will be the hardest hit by global warming.
