Every fall, I take my environmental studies class camping at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore on Lake Michigan. Some years the beach extends more than three meters to the water. This year, in many spots, there was no beach at all.
The story is the same throughout the Great Lakes. During my summer research trip to Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River, I lost track of the number of submerged docks and buildings; swimming near the shore of Lake Huron was a bad idea because of the high risk of electrocution from inundated boathouses that still had the juice flowing.
Water levels in the Great Lakes have always fluctuated. But climate change is throwing past patterns out of whack. Almost every Great Lake reached record levels in 2019. And the latest studies predict that levels might reach even higher in 2020.
But instead of engineered solutions, we should be concentrating on getting out of the way.
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There are some good points in the article; chiefly that we need to adapt to changing water levels rather than try to regulate the lake levels. We can have some effect, but ultimately we’ll fail and we need to have infrastructure that can adapt. OK … that’s reasonable, to a point. If you really want a waterfront house, you’d better be prepared to have the shoreline either far away or in your living room. Changing waterfront infrastructure in cities; however, its a bit more difficult. And shipping (and recreational boating) will always find it difficult when water levels fluctuate.
But even as they acknowledge that …”very high water occurred in the early 1950s, early 1970s, mid-1980s and mid-1990s.”, they simply cannot resist raising the spectre of Climate Change to describe the recent changes and chaotic and unnatural. Rrriiigghhhtttt …. even though they clearly show an erratic decadal and bi-decadal pattern historically. So the best solution is to abandon the shoreline and leave it to Gaia.
Not. How is it possible that the cult of Climate Change(TM) has grown even stronger in the face of a climate that will not follow its most basic predictions? Oh, the answer is to have no predictions at all (hot, cold, wet, dry … all change) , but keep people scared of the weather. Cargo-cultism and superstitions for a modern age.