Study: Declining Great Lakes Levels Entirely Natural

Study: Declining Great Lakes Levels Entirely Natural. By Henry Payne

Detroit, Mich. — Like polar bears, hurricanes, and arctic ice caps, recent drops in Great Lake water levels have been a poster child for green activists’ claims that the global warming crisis is upon us. A sampling:

April, 2003, Detroit News: “A group of scientists predicted that global warming will wreak havoc on the Great Lakes region . . . the largest single concentration of fresh water in the world.”
October, 2003, Detroit Free Press: “The idea that warming has benefits may be a particularly tough sell to Michiganders already disturbed by what happens when the Great Lakes drop near historic lows.”

April, 2007, Detroit News: “Data from a new United Nations report on climate change . . . strengthens scientific opinion that Michigan will see other dramatic effects in the coming decades: lower Great Lakes water levels, a dramatically receding Lake St. Clair. . . . ”

May, 2008, Detroit News: “A report released by an environmental group warns that unless Congress acts to curb global warming, Great Lakes water levels will drop up to 3 feet; beaches will close more often, and fish and animal populations will decline.”

Never mind.

In a comprehensive, two-year study of Great Lakes water levels, Canadian and American researchers working for the International Joint Commission this week found Mother Nature was to blame. “It’s not ongoing. It has definitely stabilized,” said Ted Yuzyk, the Canadian co-chair of the study, who added the changes have reversed in the last two years anyway. “And it’s not human driven. This is more natural.”

“Record high levels were seen in the early 1950s, in 1973, and again in 1985-1986,” reads The International Upper Great Lakes Study. “In the late 1990s, a nearly 30-year period of above-average water level conditions in the upper Great Lakes ended. Since then, Lake Michigan-Huron and Lake Superior have experienced lower than average lake level conditions.”

Among the natural factors that explain the lakes cyclical rise and fall, reported the Detroit News, “were changing climate patterns, including greater rain and snow” and “shifts in the ’s crust, called glacial isostatic adjustment, that are the result of the planet's rebound from the melting of glaciers 10,000 years ago.”

Green groups were not amused. Facts are such inconvenient things.