It’s no secret if you live in the upper midwest, but a recent study confirms what we already knew.
Great Lakes ice cover is down dramatically in recent decades.
Great Lakes ice coverage declined an average of 71 percent over the past 40 years, according to a report from the American Meteorological Society.
The amount of decline varies year to year and lake to lake, according to the report’s lead researcher, Jia Wang, an ice research climatologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor, Mich.
Wang’s report said that based on Coast Guard scanning, satellite photos and other research from 1973 to 2010, ice coverage dropped most on Lake Ontario, 88 percent; the second-largest loss was on Lake Superior, at 79 percent.
In recent years, continued warming year round has threatened the Great Lakes in ways not seen since the bad old days of burning rivers in the late 60s. Warmer temperatures, milder winters, and invasive species of toxic algae native to warmer water are changing the lakes in fundamental ways.
One question I have…since the IPCC doesn’t expect anything dramatic for another two decades aren’t these dramatic reports a way of undermining its work?
PS 1973 is not a great year to start trends from
Translation: the 1960s and 1970s were cold. But we knew that.
A more interesting question is whether Great Lakes ice cover is up or down compared with 80 years ago.
Dave Burton,
1934 was a really big freeze up for the Great Lakes. To keep Toronto Harbor open they had to run tugs across.
Yup, that was an exceptional year
there are a number of communities in the upper lakes that have been traditionally bound together in the winter time by roads on the ice –
Mackinaw City/Island for one, and also the Apostle Islands in Lake Superior.
In recent years they’ve had problems.
example
http://www.rittenhouseinn.com/blog/2011/03/bayfields-ice-road-to-madeline-island/
“2011 will go down as another year when the “ice road” between Bayfield and Madeline Island was only open about a week. A long time resident of the Island has kept a calendar for the past fifty years on how many days he could drive across the famous “Ice Road.” It started with over 90 days of an open road, and steadily dropped until that infamous year not long ago when the ice road was never opened.”
Those of us who grew up spending a lot of time on the water, and talking to old timers, know what’s up. this recent study is just confirmation.
Dave Burton only cares about his narrative, facts really are not relevant. He knows why the study covers the period it does (satellite data), and that the changes have been going on much longer than that. If the study included the earlier evidence he would dismiss it as anecdotal and not full detail.
I was just amused that he used 80 years, when that gets in the really frozen year of 1934.
I grew up in Michigan in the 1960s and 1970s. It was, indeed, cold. I played ice hockey & sailed an ice boat, and even drove my car on a frozen lake. I went dingy sailing (intercollegiate racing) on (unfrozen) Lake Michigan during a snowstorm, and the wet lines froze in the bottom of the boats (we used rock salt to melt ’em).
But in those days everyone knew it was getting colder. The winters were getting harsher and the summers were getting shorter, and scientists told us why it was happening: air pollution was reducing the amount of sunlight that was reaching the Earth’s surface. (Until then, air pollution had always been considered to be just an urban health problem, and the standard solution was to build very tall chimneys to keep smoke away from people.)
One problem with today’s Climate Movement alarmists is that they have such short memories.
70s ice age, yadda yadda