Climber posts pic of snow atop Kinabalu

Kota Kinabalu: The unusually cold weather due to a cold winds blowing this way from Siberia currently has resulted in reports of snow falling in areas like northern Vietnam.

Daily Express on Thursday featured a picture of a climber holding a slate of ice near the rock pool at the Kinabalu summit at 13,000ft.

But no latest picture has yet emerged of snow on top.

However, a picture on the Internet apparently taken on Aug. 18, last year, seem to suggest that some snow was recorded on the summit then.

When asked for his view, Tengku Datuk Dr Zinal Adlin, Chairman of Sabah Parks and a Mount Kinabalu expert, said snow "is not unusual but rare" and that he has seen "a lot of pictures of thick snow" photographed on the summit.

The foreign climber's picture of Aug. 18 showed descending climbers clad in red raincoats walking past some white blotches, with this caption: "The white blotches on the ground in this photo are pockets of snow, just below the summit of Kinabalu (Low's Peak). It seems snow rarely falls on Kinabalu. There is evidence of a little on this site."

In response, one Mascre replied: "Yes, it has. But officially means very little, since there is no weather station there. Anyway, there are rare snowfalls and they only stick to the ground briefly."

Tengku Adlin called the Daily Express a second time Friday and vouched that it snows on the mountain from time to time and stuck to his comment in our Thursday report entitled "Ice Found On The Summit of Mt Kinabalu"

He would not rule out the possibility that mountain guides reported snowfall even in Laban Rata which is only 10,700ft above sea level.

After all, summit temperature plunged to sub-zero minus 3 degrees Celsius on 17 January, preceded by two days of sub-zero temperatures on 15-16 January.

Most scientists believe climate change is a fact while the basis of the skeptics to argue otherwise have basically been discredited recently by a group of Mexican scientists who analysed what the atmospheric heat trappers (C02, methane, nitrous oxide, CFCs) emitted by human activities had done to the climate since the Industrial Revolution that began in Britain 1750.

The so-called slowdown on global warming over the last decade was actually the accidental outcome of the banning of CFCs by the 1987 Montreal Protocol.

Dr Francisco Estrada, the lead scientist, found out that CFCs is a 10,000 to 20,000 times more efficient or potent heat trapper than C02, per molecule basis and hence the ban on CFCs for industrial use accidentally created a favourable but temporary human impact on global warming. - Daily Express