East Africa's Shrinking Icecaps - a Harbinger of Climate Change to Come
When Ernest Hemingway wrote the short story 'Snows on Kilimanjaro' in 1936 was the world as we know it today still largely intact.
When in 1952 the story was turned into a film, starring such greats as Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Susan Hayward, had the troubles of the Second World War passed and the Cold War was only in its infancy.
In East Africa, little had changed during those 16 years apart from the allies throwing Mussolini out of Eritrea and Ethiopia as part of their war effort beyond the battlefields of North Africa.
Today it is a different picture though. While around the world, the US Congress Republicans amongst the most notorious climate change deniers, politicians still try to call into doubt climate change per se and the fallout already seen, have the ice and snow caps of East Africa's mountains and mountain ranges seen a dramatic decline of snow and ice coverage. The changes accelerated over the past 50 years and have reached proportions where the effect of higher temperatures can no longer be ignored.
Diana Robinson