Sure, it could just be a coincidence that Mt. Kilimanjahro has 85 percent less ice than it did in 1912

Today's NYT had this story about the rapidly melting ice cap on Mt. Kilimanjahro:

The ice atop Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania has continued to retreat rapidly, declining 26 percent since 2000, scientists say in a new report.

Yet the authors of the study, to be published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reached no consensus on whether the melting could be attributed mainly to humanity’s role in warming the global climate.

We're no experts, but, uh... the hockey stick is pretty damning.

The lead author of the study, Lonnie G. Thompson, a glaciologist at Ohio State University, has concluded that the melting of recent years is unique.

In 2000 he extracted deep cylinders of ice from Kilimanjaro’s glaciers and found that the higher layers were full of elongated bubbles — signs that melting and refreezing had occurred in recent years.

There was no presence of the bubbles in the deeper layers of the cores, Dr. Thompson said.

If his dating of the ice core layers is accurate, surface melting like that seen in recent years has not occurred over the last 11,700 years.

That is, not since the Pleistocene. So, whether human caused or not, this kind of shift is something we should be preparing for. (Unless you expect to be Raptured.)