FALSE: Glaciers are fluctuating because of human-made global warming
A claim that glacier fluctuations do not support global warming is FALSE.
A group which challenges accepted climate science has claimed that glacier decline does not support "the idea" of global warming.
Glaciers can be either mountain glaciers or ice sheets, as found in Antarctica and Greenland. They form when snow is compacted into ice, which moves slowly because of its weight. On mountains, glaciers flow downward while ice sheets move in multiple directions.
There are three glaciers in Africa: Mount Kenya, Kilimanjaro, and Rwenzori. The glaciers have shown “substantial and virtually continuous wastage of the glacier ice for more than 100 years”.
Glaciers in East Africa are exhibiting a rapid retreat rate surpassing the global average. If this trend continues, East Africa’s glaciers are projected to vanish completely by the 2040s. Mount Kenya’s glaciers, in particular, are the most vulnerable and are expected to be the first to disappear.
Glaciers have unequivocally been shrinking. A study in Nature found that glaciers worldwide have lost 273 gigatonnes of ice every year over the last two decades. The loss has sped up, leading to a mammoth amount of lost ice: "Glacier mass loss is about 18 per cent larger than the loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet and more than twice that from the Antarctic Ice Sheet".
The study's findings below indicate that the global mass loss (top) is also seen in every region of the world (bottom) which has glaciers.
Another study reached a similar conclusion; they found that between 2010 and 2020, glaciers lost a total of 272 gigatonnes of ice per year. This amounted to a loss of 2 per cent of their overall volume over just one decade.
Yet another Nature paper found a nearly identical amount of ice loss. Between 2000–2019, glaciers lost a mass of 267 gigatonnes per year. The loss had an acceleration of 50 gigatonnes per year per decade.
Photos of glaciers compared to the past show a clear, dramatic decrease.
It is also unequivocal that global temperatures are continuing to increase. In 2025, large parts of the world experienced their warmest or one of the warmest years on record. In Africa, this was pronounced in the western, central, and southern areas of the continent.
PesaCheck has shown on multiple occasions that humans, principally through greenhouse gas emissions, are the cause of global warming and climate change (here, here, and here).
All the evidence indicates that human-caused global warming is the cause of glacier mass change.
According to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), "human influence is very likely the main driver of the global retreat of glaciers since the 1990s" in addition to decreased Northern Hemisphere spring snow cover and surface melting of the Greenland ice sheet.
PesaCheck has previously shown how ice sheets in East Antarctica and Greenland are rapidly melting because of climate change. The same is true about sea ice.
This study found a clear and accelerating warming trend in glaciers and permafrost over the past three decades.
"The warming of glaciers and permafrost has exerted great impact on their stability, displayed as intensified melting, increased glacier surging, enlargement of supraglacial lakes, and increased permafrost degradation," they said.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said melting Africa’s iconic glaciers “highlights Africa’s disproportionate vulnerability” to climate change. The WMO adds that Mount Kenya will be “one of the first entire mountain ranges to lose glaciers due to human-induced climate change”.
These studies also conclusively show that anthropogenic global warming is the cause of melting glaciers.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says that the retreat of glaciers is among the “most dramatic evidence that Earth’s climate is warming”.
This view is shared by many global research organisations such as: the Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC), the United Kingdom's Natural History Museum, the International Water Management Institute, the African Union, the European Union, UNESCO, World Wildlife Fund, universities and international researchers.
PesaCheck has examined a claim that glacier fluctuation does not support global warming and finds it to be FALSE.
This post is part of an ongoing series of PesaCheck fact-checks examining content marked as potential misinformation on Facebook and other social media platforms.
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This fact-check was written by PesaCheck climate change fact-checker Christiaan van der Merwe and edited by PesaCheck chief copy editor Stephen Ndegwa.
The article was approved for publication by PesaCheck’s managing editor Doreen Wainainah.
PesaCheck is East Africa’s first public finance fact-checking initiative. It was co-founded by Catherine Gicheru and Justin Arenstein, and is being incubated by the continent's largest civic technology and data journalism accelerator: Code for Africa. It seeks to help the public separate fact from fiction in public pronouncements about the numbers that shape our world, with a special emphasis on pronouncements about public finances that shape government’s delivery of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) public services, such as healthcare, rural development and access to water / sanitation. PesaCheck also tests the accuracy of media reportage. To find out more about the project, visit pesacheck.org.
PesaCheck is an initiative of Code for Africa, through its innovateAFRICA fund, with support from Deutsche Welle Akademie, in partnership with a coalition of local African media and other civic watchdog organisations.