[MCN] Burn fossil fuel, turn Flathead Lake into shrinking scum pond

[Lance Olsen]

Yale 360: 19 NOV 2015: REPORT
On Thin Ice: Big Northern Lakes Are Being Rapidly Transformed
As temperatures rise, the world's iconic northern lakes are 
undergoing major changes that include swiftly warming waters, 
diminished ice cover, and outbreaks of harmful algae. Now, a global 
consortium of scientists is trying to assess the toll.
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/on_thin_ice_big_northern_lakes_are_being_rapidly_transformed/2933/


Excerpt:

More than three in four large lakes above the 40th parallel north, 
roughly the latitude of New York City and Madrid, have undergone 
summer surface temperature increases of 2.7 F or higher from 1985 to 
2009, a new international research collaboration finds. Some lake 
temperatures rose more than twice that amount. Nearly all have 
experienced retreating winter ice, a loss that can interfere with 
internal circulation, reduce oxygen, and help create fertile breeding 
grounds for harmful algae. These changes, which appear to be 
accelerating, have potentially profound consequences for water 
supply, food, and aquatic life.

"Lakes are very clearly telling us that there's rapid warming 
worldwide," said Stephanie Hampton, an aquatic ecologist at 
Washington State University in Pullman and a member of the Global 
Lake Temperature Collaboration, a grassroots scientific effort that's 
compiling an international database of lake observations. "Whatever 
is happening to them is not only a sentinel for larger environmental 
change," said Hampton, "but it also directly makes a difference to 
us."

Until recently, scientists had scant knowledge of how atmospheric 
heating and increasing weather extremes were affecting lakes 
throughout the world. Limnology - the study of inland bodies of water 
- typically centered on a specific lake, with little information 
exchange across regions. But the far-flung global lake collaboration 
- which is compiling data ranging from Alpine lake temperature 
observations by an Austrian naturalist in the mid-1800s, to 
century-old Baikal ice measurements that survived wars and 
revolutions, to the latest satellite imaging and probes - is 
beginning to reveal the planetary toll.

End excerpt:
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/on_thin_ice_big_northern_lakes_are_being_rapidly_transformed/2933/

-- 
"Climate change will alter ecosystem services, perceptions of value, 
and decisions regarding land uses. Outcomes for people will be 
determined by the interaction between changes in biophysical 
environments (e.g., climate, disturbance, and invasive species) and 
human responses to those changes (management and policy)."

United States Department of Agriculture
Forest Service
Pacific Northwest Research Station
General Technical Report PNW-GTR-870
December 2012
http://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/pubs/pnw_gtr870/pnw_gtr870.pdf
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://bigskynet.org/pipermail/missoula-community-news_bigskynet.org/attachments/20151124/dbf50b00/attachment-0002.html>