Great Lakes ice down 71%

A published study says the amount of ice covering the Great Lakes has declined about 71 percent over the past 40 years, a drop that the lead author partly attributes to climate change.

The report, published last month by the American Meteorological Society, said only about 5 percent of the Great Lakes surface froze over this year.

“There was a significant downward trend in ice coverage from 1973 to the present for all of the lakes,” according to the study, which appeared in the society’s Journal of Climate.

Researchers determined ice coverage by scanning U.S. Coast Guard reports and satellite images taken from 1973 to 2010, the Duluth News Tribune reported. They found that ice coverage was down 88 percent on Lake Ontario and fell 79 percent on Lake Superior. However, the ice in Lake St. Clair, which is between Lakes Erie and Huron, diminished just 37 percent.

Great Lakes ice down 71% since 1973, study finds | Detroit Free Press | freep.com

 

What's the percentage they are down from 10,000 years ago?

 

It wasn't my fault, I swear it even though I drive a gas guzzling 8 cyl truck. Leave it to the left to turn good news into bad news for political purposes.

 

God damn those cavemen. All those open camp fires started global warming.

 

I suppose the jet stream shift was not a factor....

 

Yeah, longer shipping seasons thanks to less ice is SUCH a bad thing! LOL.

BTW, the lack of ice on the lakes is mostly irrelevant, as it proves little. Canada and the US have been pursuing the goals of "Project Taconite" since the 1950's for year round shipping.

Oh, and if you want to try and equate that to anything 'catastrophic', here are graphs of the lake levels measured over the last 150 years or so.

Water levels on the Great Lakes

Some lower years, some higher, and none of them trending with any hip new 'global warming' theory although if it's true it SHOULD. You know, greater evaporation, less precipitation and snow pack. That should show then a steady decline in their levels like the canary in the coal mine of the climate of the hemisphere.

Oh look! It's not getting worse!

Yet more irrelevancy from Pissy Chrissy.

 

Oh yeah, well it snowed in New England this year so this global warming is bullshit.

 

The usual morons posting idiocy. Yes, the lack of ice on the lakes on our northern border is an indictation of a warming. Will a warming climate lower the water levels in the Great Lakes? Maybe, maybe not. Very difficult to predict what will happen in any one spot. The warmer winters would tend to lower the water levels, however, an increase in precipitation could well balance that out.

 

I dunno. Do you?
Get a measuring device and go back in your Wayback machine and find out.