“Most of the water in the Great Lakes hasn’t frozen this year — largely because of a warmer-than-usual winter — and a new study shows the lakes have been losing ice cover for 40 years.

Lake Superior is the coldest of the Great Lakes. Yet only a thin layer of ice surrounds a cargo ship in the Thunder Bay, Ont., harbour. Past the break wall, there’s no ice at all.

Thunder Bay Port Authority CEO Tim Heney, a 20 year-veteran in his industry, said the lack of ice is remarkable.

“It’s the first time I ever remember the water being open right into Thunder Bay,” Heney said. “I’ve never seen this before.”

According to a new study published in the Journal of Climate, the Great Lakes have lost more than two-thirds of their ice cover over the last four decades. Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair lost the least (50 per cent), while Lake Ontario has lost the most ice (88 per cent). That’s more than even the study’s lead author, ice climatologist Jia Wang, expected.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/03/13/great-lakes-ice-loss_n_1341394.html

When you’ve lived around the Great Lakes for 40, 50 , 60 years and see the ice of your past years no longer form it’s likely to convince you that the climate is already changing. It’s not something that might or might not happen in the future. It’s happening right now to you, and then you’re likely to start worrying about what that means for your children and grandchildren….

Arctic sea ice has had a very strange winter, very little freezing on the Atlantic side and already the Central Basin seems to be loosing ice. We’re having a very intense early tornado season. Winter essentially didn’t show up for much of the northern hemisphere. Spring is arriving very early and parts of the US upper Midwest are 40 degrees higher than normal. Midwestern farmers are fearing major water problems due to lack of snow replenishing ground water supplies. The conditions which caused the extreme Texas drought last year seem to be reforming. Gulf of Mexico water temperatures are very high which can mean major amplification of any hurricane system that makes it into that area. Spain is suffering major drought problems. And it goes on….

The world is starting to relax their fears of an economic meltdown, we aren’t totally safe yet but the bear does seem to be growling a lot less. That means that people will stop concentrating on a major near-future fear and get back to paying attention to longer term dangers.

If weather continues this year like it has started and if we get the same sorts of events that we’ve been experiencing over the last few years, look for increasing calls to cut greenhouse gases. Even if we have to invest more money up front to speed up the transition away from fossil fuels.

Give us some more killer heat waves, massive crop losses to heat and drought, “100, 500, 1,000 year floods” happening over and over, raging forest fires caused by beetle death and lack of moisture and we could see installation rates soar.

In the long run their electricity bills will be lower. Their air will be cleaner. And they won’t have to worry about turning their countryside or cities radioactive.

Investing in a better future….