The stated purpose of the U.S. National Assessment's Climate Change Impacts on the United States; The Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change (USNA) is to "assess the risks and opportunities for the United States...associated with increased climate change." But the USNA has turned out to be one of the most misleading publicly funded reports on climate change this nation has ever produced. The two climate models on which it is primarily based—one developed by the Canadian Climate Centre and the other by the Hadley Centre in the United Kingdom—cannot correctly reproduce observed climate. What's more, the two models often produce markedly different forecasts of future climate. • In addition to large-scale inaccuracies, the models' spatial resolution is too coarse to include most small-scale processes—the type of processes responsible for local weather patterns. Yet the USNA breaks the country into eight regions and within each region depicts local ecosystem changes as a result of their predicted climate trends during the next 100 years. In this continuing series, we examine in detail each of those regions, comparing the observations of the past century with the USNA's climate model prognostications for the next.

Great Lakes Fauna

An email just came to us announcing:

Case study on the impacts of climate change on the Great Lakes (http://www.epa.gov/globalwarming/impacts/water/cs_glum1.html). A joint project of U.S. EPA, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service, this report outlines the potential effects of climate change on wildlife and wildlands in the Great Lakes and Upper Midwest.

Still wary after seeing how the USNA handled potential climate change impacts on the Great Lakes region, we immediately took a look at this report, written more than a year later and under the auspices of a different administration (one less eager to buy into the notion that all anthropogenic environmental impact should be avoided)—hopeful that it carried a more balanced treatment.

Although the new report contained a few hints and suggestions that all impacts may not be bad, nevertheless, the majority of the report was basically a parrot of the USNA.

Most of the negative impacts, it seems, will be caused by model-projected decreases in water availability across the region that will progressively worsen as the century drags on and humankind continues to rely on fossil fuels as our primary power source. Those impacts include significantly lower water levels in the Great Lakes (affecting wetlands, water quality, recreation, shipping, and hydroelectric power generation), loss of breeding habitat for waterfowl in the prairie pothole region, alterations in the forest makeup, and some more nebulous notion that has something to do with change in the region's general character.

That latter notion, which pervades the report, must be for the benefit of those folks who aren't affected by any of the particulars but might respond to a gentle, nostalgic tug on their heartstrings.

Despite the report's grandstanding, there is absolutely no indication, that despite decades of anthropogenic fossil fuels emissions, the Great Lakes region is becoming drier. In fact, it seems like just the opposite is occurring—there is a long-term trend toward more annual precipitation (Figure 1), greater soil moisture (Figure 2), and increased stream flow (Figure 3).

Figure 1. Great Lakes regional annual precipitation, 1895–2001.

Figure 2. Moisture levels for the Great Lakes region, 1895–2001, as measured by the Palmer Drought Severity Index.

Figure 3. National streamflow trends. Upward pointing triangles indicate increases. Notice the plethora of streamflow increases in the Great Lakes Region (source: Lins and Slack, 1999).

For all those negative impacts to manifest themselves, current trends would not only have to stop, but to completely reverse! That is just not how the climate models work. The same climate models that project drier conditions also indicate that that the drying should be taking place now—a continuation of a decreasing trend that started several decades ago! They have been totally wrong.

If you want to believe the future conditions that the EPA, FWS, NPS, and the USGCRP are pushing, then you must have faith that Nature will all of a sudden start acting the way global climate models insist she will, rather than the way she actually has. Our advice to those individuals who are so inclined—start working on your lung capacity, because you'll be holding your breath for quite some time.

Reference:

Lins, H.F. and J.R. Slack, 1999:  Streamflow trends in the United States.  Geophysical Research Letters, 26, 227–230.