Word: summiter
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...that the big reform treaty is in place? Fredrik Reinfeldt, the Prime Minister of Sweden, which currently holds the rotating E.U. presidency, has already begun a round of telephone calls to draw up a shortlist of candidates for the new E.U. president and foreign policy chief positions. An emergency summit could be held as early as next week to decide. (See ten things to do in Sweden...
...most of the ice loss, he suggests, is due to sublimation - that is, ice turning directly into water vapor with no intermediate step. That tends to happen when temperatures are cold and the air is extremely dry, which is the case at Kilimanjaro's higher-than-19,000-ft. summit (it's the same reason ice cubes slowly wilt away in a frost-free freezer). That happens all the time, but if there's less precipitation to build the glaciers back up, which may be the case here, the result is a net loss of ice. (See TIME's photo...
...that bit of fact-checking is looking a lot less convincing with the publication of a study on Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Lead author Lonnie Thompson, a glaciologist at Ohio State University who has been to the summit of Africa's tallest mountain repeatedly over more than a decade, says that while the glaciers did start melting a century ago, their retreat has sped up dramatically in recent years. "We've lost 26% of the ice since 2000 alone. And that, unfortunately, is just what we predicted would happen." Within a few decades...
...occurring at all, has a relatively minor effect. "The fact that you have melting may mean air temperatures have increased, but it doesn't necessarily," says Philip Mote, who heads the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute at Oregon State University. "And in fact, the temperature on the summit of Kilimanjaro is essentially always below freezing, which makes it hard to accept warming as the reason [for glacier loss...
...Thompson agrees that this is a factor. "But the idea that at the end of the day, they're sitting in the mid-troposphere sublimating away is false. There are lakes on the surface of the glaciers," he says, noting that summit temperatures aren't so cold as to preclude the existence of water, "and when you drill down, the ice is saturated with water...