Lake Water Levels Down

[GordMay]

Great Lakes Water Levels Down
All of the Great Lakes were well above long-term averages between 1965 and 1997; when they fell sharply. By 2000, Lakes Michigan and Huron (hydrologically a single body of water) had dropped by 4.3 feet, and Lake Erie by about 4.15 feet.
Although Lakes Erie & Ontario have recovered to long-term average levels, the other Lakes still well below average. By mid-summer 2006, Lakes Huron & Michigan were down 18", while Superior and St. Clair were down 7 and 8 inches, respectively.
Lake levels rise and fall depending upon rain & snow falls, and evapouration. Whether global warming is lowering precipitation, and increasing evapouration (ice cover reduces evapouration) is a matter of conjecture.

Change from July, 2005
Superior -4' ~ Huron/Michigan -2' ~ St Claire 0 ~ Erie +3' ~ Ontario +3'
Change from Long-Term Average (July)
Superior -8' ~ Huron/Michigan -18' ~ St Claire -7 ~ Erie -1' ~ Ontario +1'

[ssullivan]

Is that why it was so shallow up there? In all seriousness, the increased temps on the planet are certainly having an effect, especially in extreme northern (or southern) regions. Hopefully, everything will turn out ok.

[Joli]

The Great Lakes water level seems to be cyclical, it was very low in the 30's and 60's. High and low levels occur every 30 to 40 years or so. The lakes have trended down ever since we bought a boat that draws 8.5'.

Good site http://www.great-lakes.net/envt/water/levels/hydro.html
or the Corp of Engineers site is also very good.

[ssullivan]

As does the Earth's temperature (but over a greater time frame). 8.5' is TOUGH up there. Wow.

[delmarrey]

The PNW has already surpassed it's Nov. rain fall record (11.62") and Nov. still has another two weeks to go. And, here comes another storm down from Alaska.

Vancouver is having city water contamination due to flooding. I would call this global wetting

But yet people are still moving to Seattle, rain or not. A good place to have a boat

[delmarrey]

Originally Posted by ssullivan

Hopefully, everything will turn out ok.

What is ok (normal)? Is it an average over a period of time. Or is it someone who decides what is normal?

If it's an average then we're adding to the caluclations. If it's someone, who is that some one?

Without all the weather extreams we would not have all the beauty of the different landscapes. e.g. Grand Canyon, Rocky Mountains, Jasper, SWern Deserts, Puget Sound/Alaska/Norwegian glaciers and on and on through out the whole world.

People always seem to adapt or take their chances ......................._/)

[shellback]

Being a sailor on the Bay of Green Bay and Lake Michigan, yes the water levels are lower over the last couple years.

3 years ago, it was VERY low, so low, that charts were best used when near shipping lanes or shorelines, however with sand bars and such showed up much more during that time frame.

Last year, water levels were a tad higher than the previous year, so we'll see what it brings in 2007. My Oday 27 has a 4' draft.

Mark R.

[ssullivan]

Originally Posted by delmarrey

What is ok (normal)? Is it an average over a period of time. Or is it someone who decides what is normal?

If it's an average then we're adding to the caluclations. If it's someone, who is that some one?

Without all the weather extreams we would not have all the beauty of the different landscapes. e.g. Grand Canyon, Rocky Mountains, Jasper, SWern Deserts, Puget Sound/Alaska/Norwegian glaciers and on and on through out the whole world.

People always seem to adapt or take their chances ......................._/)

Guess by "ok", I meant I hope everything turns out to be nothing catastrophic. I hope all of the farmlands will support the growing populations, even with the climate changes. Thank kind of thing. No doubt that there have been much hotter times and much cooler times in the Earth's past, but I haven't lived in them, so I have no clue.

When you hear reports of "warmest year on record" the record doesn't go very far back in time. The records have only been kept a few hundred years and the earth is a few BILLION years old.
Second, the place where the official records are recorded haven't moved in a hundred years. A hundred years ago these places were in the countryside. Urban sprawl has surrounded these official recording sites with pavement, asphalt and other heat generating structures. Isn't hard to bump the temp a degree in these locations. Just watch the weather report in your city and note the difference between the city and the surrounding countryside. Faulty science and misleading claims.

[shellback]

It's all a circle of life kinda thing. LOL it'll warm up...............it'll cool down.......

it's all good! but rum will always be around! *happy laugh*

[GordMay]

Global climate and temperature cycles are the result of a complex interplay between a variety of causes; including (but not limited to): natural forcings, such as cyclical eccentricities in Earth's rotation and orbit, variations in the sun's energy output, geological activities (volcanoes etc) - as well as human-induced climate change (anthropogenic forcings such as increased greenhouse gases).

* Human generated climate variability (enhanced warming) is commonly referred to as “anthropogenic global warming” (AGW).
The latest global warming trend began about 18,000 years ago as the earth started warming its way out of the Pleistocene Ice Age. Small-scale cycles of about 40 years exist within larger-scale cycles of 400 years, which in turn exist inside still larger scale cycles of 20,000 years, and so on.

The prevailing scientific* & popular opinion on climate change is that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.
Analyses of most major peer-reviewed proxy climate reconstructions (from trees, corals, ice cores and historical records) show that the 1990s is the warmest decade of the millennium and the 20th century the warmest century.
The warmest year of the millennium was likely 1998, and the coldest was probably (but with much greater uncertainty) 1601. A linear regression model, applied to the global annual anomalies, indicates a warming trend of about 0.69̊C since the record began in the mid-nineteenth century.

Underrating Climate Disruption ~ by Dr. John P. Holdren
On Monday, October 6th, 1997, the President Clinton and Vice President Gore hosted the "White House Conference on Climate Change: The Challenge of Global Warming" at Georgetown University. Among those speaking at the conference was Dr. John P. Holdren, Visiting Distinguished Scientist at The Woods Hole Research Center.
Underrating Climate Change - an address to the White House Conference on Climate Change: The Challenge of Global Warming, 1997

"The prevailing scientific* & popular opinion on climate change"...in the 1960's was that absolutely we were facing global COOLING. I distinctly remember a plan being discussed where tanker planes would fly over Greenland and dump black soot to absorb heat and offset the coming global disaster of global cooling. The 1960's. 40 years ago.
There have been hysterical headlines splashed across the NY Times and Newsweek over the last century heralding global warming and then global cooling and now again global warming.
I've read accounts of young scientists who wanted to do some studies to verify some of the more wild claims and they were shut off. They describe it as a McCarthy type which hunt. 60 prominent Canadian scientists aproched the Canadian gov't to try to diswade the gov't from signing on to Kyoto as it would do little or no good and yet cost Canada a lot.
Dr. William Grey of CSU, developed the computer models that are now used to forcast hurricanes. He was turned down 7 times by Gore/Clinton to study whether the claims of man made global warming are true. He was considered (now retired) one of the leading climatologists in the world. Another leading climatologist at Yale says GW is not man made as well as Russia's leading climatologist. When you read about this supposed consensus you don't read that many of them are not career climatologists but johnny come lately's looking for grant money. And Algore is happy to arrange it for them. This is a Chicken Little sky is falling scenario.
The head of the UN, Kofi and Jack Chiraq, PM of France have stated that the Kyoto accords are meant specifically to slow down the US economy.
Dr. William Grey took some of the computer models that algore heralds in his slide show and back-tested them. If the models were accurate, we'd be 3 degrees warmer right now than we are. Much of the hysteria is based on cloud science computer modeling which is highly innacurate for long term forcasting.

The sky is falling, the sky is falling.

[chad.lawie]

I've heard weather has only been tracked for the last 150 years. I supposed it wouldnt be hard to find out. I am interested to see what the lake levels are like this year because our winter has been so warm in michigan. no snow.

Chicago factories suck up millions of gallons from lake michigan every day. instead of putting that water back into lake michigan, they send it down the chicago river. There is also a big fuss in michigan right now about nestle wanting to suck millions of gallon of ground water up each day.

[chad.lawie]

I am a college student. I just finished a class about global warming. here it is in a nutshell:

Gasses (carbon dioxide, CFCs, Methane, Nitrouse oxide) absorb heat from the sun, slowly releasing it into space. As the concentration of these gasses increase, the temperature rises.

1700: the start of the industrial revolution. we started buring a lot of fossil fuels (which emits carbon dioxide when it burns) and cutting down trees. Trees abosrb carbon dioxide.

Carbon dioxide levels have increased by 33% since 1700. still on the rise, america's carbon dioxide emission rose 11% from 1990 to 2000. what happens to carbon dioxide emission now with china booming?

Methane: methane in the atmosphere before 1700 was .7ppm. it is now 1.8ppm. a significant scource of methane ceoms from bacteria inside the digestive tracts of termites... I can see the news headlines for this: Termite farts cause global warming!
there is the same concern with cow farts too. clinton invested some research into the cows.

Nitrouse oxide is up 17% since 1750. this comes from fertilizer. so use fertilizer with low nitrouse oxide i guess.

Then there are CFCs. these guys have some amazing qualities concerning heat, but I don't know what they are.
These properties made them popular as propellants in aerosol spray cans and as refrigerants. CFCs are inert, so they do not break down in water or biological processes.

Once CFC get into the stratosphere ultraviolet rays split them, releasing Chlorine atoms. A single chlorine atom is able to decompose 100,000 ozone molecules. a CFC will stay in the atmosphere for 40 to 100 years. 24 million tons of CFCs were sold worldwide. even if only half of these were released in to the atmosphere you can imagine the effects. trouble is people don't buy products not to use them, so more than half probably made it.

CFCs are pretty much banned worldwide now. Even CFC manufacturers admit there is a serious problem. all CFC production is supposed to stop by 2010. scientists think the atmospheric CFC level will be back to normal by the end of the century.

I am not a crazy GW person. I think we will survive either way. But I do believe the science. I understand the concern and I do not think it is just a bunch of paranoid doomsdayers.
It is probably something we should pay attention to.

During the iceage the average worldwide tempurature was only 4 degrees lower than what it is today. that is pretty crazy.

I don't think the fear is so much that the temperature is going to increase, but that humans caused it. human and termites that is.

But hey, if global warming means 40 degrees all winter in michigan, than I am all for it!

One class on global warming and that's it all in a nutshell. Wasn't long ago that the highest halls of learning felt that black africans should be classified as another species.

The 'conveyor belt' theory was just posited in the 1990's. This scientific theory was the basis for the movie "The Day After'. The science said that the global currents (conveyor belts) would come to a sudden halt because of global warming and cause a sudden cooling. This was a highly regarded theory until this year when it was proven wrong. Ooops, never mind. Forget we ever mentioned that one. Kind of silly actually but don't stop believing all our other stuff.
The hole in the ozone over Antartica was a huge deal in the late 1990's. It somehow miraculously has closed up. Divine intervention? Oh wait, we can't teach that, there's no proof. So we'll just pretend it didn't happen.

The sky is falling, the sky is falling.