Mr Gore said the disappearance of snow on Mt Kilimanjaro was expressly attributable to human-induced climate change. The judge said the consensus was that that could not be established

TRANSCRIPT

When I went to the Congress in the middle 1970's I helped organize the first hearings on global warming, I asked my professor to be the lead off witness. I thought that would have such a big impact we'd be well on the way to solving this problem, but it didn't work out that way. I kept having hearings, and in 1984 I went to the Senate and really dug deeply into this issue with science round tables and the like. I wrote a book about it. I ran for president in 1988 partly try to gain some visibility for this issue. In 1992 went to the Whitehouse. We passed a version carbon tax and some other measures to try to address this. I went to Kyoto in 1997 to help get a treaty that is so controversial, in the US at least. In 2000 my opponent pledged to regulate the CO2 and that was not a pledge that was kept. The point of this is all this time you can see what I have seen all these years. It just keeps going up. It is relentless.

• And now we're beginning to see the impact in the real world. This is Mount Kilimanjaro more than 30 years ago, and more recently. And a friend of mine just came back from Kilimanjaro with a picture he took a couple of months ago.

  Another friend of mine Lonnie Thompson studies glaciers. Here's Lonnie with a sliver of a once mighty glacier. Within the decade there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro.

• This is happening in Glacier National Park. I climbed to the top of this in 1998 with one of my daughters. Within 15 years this will be the park formerly known as Glacier.
• Here is what has been happening year by year to the Columbia Glacier. It just retreats more and more every year. And it is a shame because these glaciers are so beautiful. People who go up to see them, here is what they are seeing every day now.
• In the Himalayas there is a particular problem because more than 40% of all the people in the world get their drinking water from rivers and spring systems that are fed more than half by the melt water coming off the glaciers. Within this next half century those 40% of the people on earth are going to face a very serious shortage because of this melting.
• Italy, the Italian Alps same site today. An old postcard from the Switzerland: throughout the Alps we are seeing the same story.
• It's also true in South America. This is Peru 15 years ago and the same glacier today.
• This is Argentina 20 years ago, the same glacier today.
• 75 years ago in Patagonia on the tip of South America, this vast expanse of ice is now gone.

RULING

5. The snows of Kilimanjaro.

Mr Gore asserts in scene 7 that the disappearance of snow on Mt Kilimanjaro is expressly attributable to global warming. It is noteworthy that this is a point that specifically impressed Mr Milliband (see the press release quoted at paragraph 6 above). However, it is common ground that, the scientific consensus is that it cannot be established that the recession of snows on Mt Kilimanjaro is mainly attributable to human-induced climate change.

William:

K seems to be a complex case; plough through the RC take if you like. I think the bottom line is that whether snowless K is from GW or not is unclear, but that its certainly not a good example to use for attribution. K isn't good evidence *for* GW. But the retreat of glaciers worldwide is. So we're back to sexing it up: Gore's basic point is fine; the icon he uses isn't. As the guidance notes says.

mt: but Kilimanjaro was, in fact, just one of a set of before/after pictures illustrating worldwide glacier retreat!