Askov Finlayson Article: Researching Climate Change and Lake Superior
Climate change is real. It has effects globally but also locally. It can be difficult to communicate this, because the natural, year-to-year variability tends to be large compared to the climate change signal. How do you convince somebody that the fact that it's going to be a couple degrees warmer by mid-century is important when it’s 10°F warmer today than yesterday, or after the harsh winter of 2014? My answer would be that Superior, for instance, is extremely sensitive to these long-term changes, and we are heading, within our lifetimes, towards an era where ice on the lake will be considered unusual.