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Global Warming Is Ruining The Minnesota Winter [Greg Laden's Blog]
I suspect that the complexity of global climate change is under-appreciated. If you live in a cold climate and I tell you that things will get warmer, you may see this as good news and look forward to a future where you no longer have to get your antifreeze checked and replace your old battery in September in preparation for the bitter cold of winter. But global warming is not the only kind of change happening because of the release of huge amounts of carbon in the atmosphere, and even with respect to the warming itself, things are much more complex than “it gets warm.” One example of this complexity is to be found in the Minnesota lakes, and in the closely related activity of fishing those lakes.
Minnesota normally gets quite cold, so ice forms on the lakes early, gets thick fast, survives any mid-winter warm spells, and stays solid late in the season. Minnesota normally gets relatively little snow and tends to be windy, so those ice-covered lakes, especially the larger ones, often have large areas where the ice is not covered by very much of the white fluffy stuff. Also, the waters at the time of freezing tend to be cooler than they strictly need to be to form ice; Deep water in the lakes stays cool all summer, so when winter comes the average temperature of the water in many lakes is lower than necessary to see ice formation at the surface.
Combined, these factors support two things:
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