John Myers: Lakes Warming Up

Duluth News Tribune:

“Lakes across the globe are warming faster than oceans and air temperatures in a sign that climate change may be affecting freshwater environments more than anyone had previously understood.

That’s the finding of a report published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters and announced Wednesday at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The study found lakes worldwide warmed an average of 0.61 degrees Fahrenheit per decade between 1985 and 2009.

In northern climates, that increase averaged 1.3 degrees per decade. “The world’s deepest ice-covered lakes warmed twice as fast as the overlying air temperatures,” the report notes.

Temperature is among the most basic factors in lake ecosystems, the study’s authors noted, and when “the temperature swings quickly and widely from the norm, life-forms in a lake can change dramatically and even disappear.””

How long will some people keep their head in the sand? Justice would be served if only those descendants of today's global warming deniers paid the costs of inaction.