Corals vs. Climate: Slideshow from the Kiribati research

A short article and slideshow telling the story of my recent Kiribati coral reef field trip is now up on the Scientific American website. Check it out!

In the May Scifund campaign, we raised $1800 from 32 different donations to support the local coral reef monitoring expenses like fuel and stipends for the local researchers.

Thanks to all the generous donors!

I'm hoping to raise enough money for the local team to conduct regular monitoring of the reef sites. If you're interested in contributing to this effort, please get in touch. I'll be setting up a system where small, tax-deductible donations to UBC will be routed to Kiribati to support the monitoring and hopefully some training sessions.

(Image: A large Porites or boulder coral off the coast of Bikati Island in Butaritari Atoll)

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The north, melting

Arctic sea ice may be on pace for a record low this summer:

And, according to new analysis by Jason Box, Greenland's becoming increasingly less reflective because of all the melting ice:

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New paper on water use in the Amazon features a video abstract

This new paper spearheaded by recent UBC graduate Michael Lathulliere looks at how "green" water - the stuff evaporated from the soil or transpired by plants - flows are changing in Mato Grosso, a Brazilian state experiencing serious agricultural expansion. But rather than read the abstract, you can watch it. The journal Environmental Research Letters has recently begun asking authors to make short videos describing their new manuscript. Here is Mike's short video lecture on the project:

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How Canada has changed since the 1992 Rio summit

To really understand how much Canada - and the world - has changed, its worth comparing the Canadian government summary of the original 1992 Earth Summit to its submission to the 20th anniversary summit held in Rio last week. I looked through these a few days ago while preparing some thoughts for CBC Radio's BC Almanac discussion of Canada and Rio+20.

The broad history is well known. In 1992, Canada was seen as a leader, arguably the leader, on environmental issues at the international level, particularly issues related to the atmosphere. Canada had come off a decade during which it hosted the famous Montreal summit that led to a ban on CFCs (Montreal Protocol), hosted a groundbreaking climate change summit in which the government urged international efforts to control greenhouse gas emissions, and pushed the US extremely hard to deal with the sulphur dioxide emissions which were causing acid rain. Much of this happened under a Conservative government that was reviled at the time by people on the political left at the time as the most right wing in Canadian history. Canadian Maurice Strong was even selected to be the Secretary General of the Rio Earth Summit.

The five point agenda laid out by then PM Brian Mulroney, seen above with Jacques Cousteau at Rio in 1992, was forward-looking, environmentally-minded, and beyond anything, internationalist. The goals were to help developing nations formulate plans, to ratify international conventions, to take action on international aid and related debt, to integrate sustainability into the goals of all existing international institutions, and to pursue an Earth Charter.

Fast-forward twenty years and you find a changed Canada, but also a changed world. Canadians negotiators went into the Rio+20 summit arguing for only voluntary initiatives in the final document, "green" growth indicators which were intensity-based, no new international organizations or institutions be created (arguably defensible given the overhead), and less focus on providing financial and technical aid to the developing world. The Canadian government hoped to shift the focus instead two two issues: energy and the oceans. Energy is obviously in the Canadian interest. Oceans did get more attention at Rio+20, but Canada actually voted against the proposed plan to create a system for protecting the open ocean from exploitation.

People like to blame all this solely on our current government. Certainly, the Conservative majority government is responsible for tilting Canada inward and avoiding any concrete policy action on issues like climate change. The times have also changed.

We have to be careful waxing nostalgic about the original Earth Summit. The bar was much lower in 1992. The world was just beginning to grasp the global issues like climate change and declining biodiversity. Creating the organization and setting goals was an accomplishment.

Now, that's not enough. People expect action. Agreeing to binding targets is a lot more difficult, politically, than agreeing to create an organization that will talk about binding targets. The final document from Rio+20 contained only vague platitudes and commitments. Much of this stems from the reluctance of major players, certainly including Canada, to accept any responsibility for things like atmospheric pollution. But some stems from what the leaders of those countries have learned in the past twenty years. Many peopel in power, including I'll guess PM Stephen Harper, have watched the supposed big accomplishment of the 1992 summit fail to achieve any environmental progess. They might not care about the lack of environmental progress; regardless they have seen the flaws in using international policy to address environmental concerns.

For example, the journal Nature just gave failing grades to the three signature UN conventions that came out of Rio: the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention to Combat Desertification and the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). To illustate just how poorly these conventions have fared, I'd actually give the UNFCCC, the origin of the Kyoto Protocol and much worldwide hand-wringing about rapidly rising greenhouse gas emissions, the highest grade of the three. At least the UNFCCC has been reasonably successful in developing a GHG emissions reporting system, no small feat, and might succeed in securing substantial financing for climate change projects in the developing world (incidentally, the developing world was still referred to as the "Third World" in the 1992 Earth Summit; like I said, times have really changed).

The lack of international progress on climate change, biodiversity and other issues since Rio does provide a reasonable argument for Canada and other nations to shy away from further international commitments: no new institutions, no new targets, and all initiatives tied to national economic growth.

That's why it might be a mistake to characterise that attitude of the Canadian government as simply anti-environment. It is more than that: it is anti-international. Twenty years ago, Canada was pursing issues that were in the international good as well as the Canadian good. We have since turned inward. At Rio+20, Canada's focused entirely on Canada's own good. Hence the lack of progress on climate policy. Our current government has determined that resource exploitation is more important - for Canada - than addressing climate change.

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Note: I'll be back with more on Kiribati soon.

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Video of wrecked WWII plane in Butaritari, Kiribati

The northern Kiribati atoll of Butaritari, which we visited a few weeks ago and whose Aedes Aegypti mosquitoes are to blame for all my sore joints and muscles (it's the dengue, not age), was the captured by Japan during WWII as part of a Pacific defense strategy. During U.S. attacks in 1942 and 1943, at least a couple Japanese planes were downed. The remains of one can't be missed by a visitor: it sits right on the shore next to the government station. The other is out in the lagoon.

On our last day, I asked a local man to guide us to the plane so we could take a look. Here's a short video, I'll guess the only video in existence (?), of the plane:



I can upload more footage if there is interest.

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Last chance to support science through Scifund!

The Scifund Challenge ends in about 12 hours. This is the last chance to support this alternative way of funding science and to fuel the great projects proposed by students, post-docs and university faculty.

So far, SciFund had raised over $90,000 for research. But a number of really facsinating projects - a webcam to track penguins in Antarctica, looking for fracking contaminants in birds, studying the DNA of a long-lost race of people - are still short of their fundraising goals. Take a look at their videos.

Thanks to all the contributors to Scifund so far, including the fuellers of my Kiribati research project. The funds for our project will go directly to pay all the i-Kiribati co-workers and to pay ships costs. I'm actually just going through bills this week. We're still well short of the goal and appreciate any final day contributions.

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A really good excuse for not posting more about Kiribati

As a PhD student, I learned a lot about this tropical virus called dengue fever. A fellow student had developed a pretty impressive model that simulated the effect of climate, basically heat and rainfall, on the spread of Aedes Aegypti, the mosquito that transmits dengue. I consumed so many practice presentations and read so many draft papers that the symptoms of dengue became pretty much permanently stored in my brain, along with some atmospheric physics, coral ecology, useless sports trivia, the names of Canadians in Hollywood, etc.

So when the dangerously high fever, nausea, roller-coaster level dizziness, and random back and knee pain suddenly struck on Abaiang Atoll two weeks ago, I may have barely known who I was or where I was, but I certainly know what I had. The worst is now over, thanks to the numerous people, especially my caring i-Kiribati colleagues and the doctors in Tarawa. Safe to say, I have first-hand evidence why people at home might want to fear the northward spread of dengue as the planet warms.

Once the headaches and residual fatigue pass, I'll write a bit more about the research we did in Kiribati. In the mean time, I appreciate any more donations to the field research via Scifund. Only three days left!!

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Dispatch from Kiribati II: The slow boat to Butaritari

Tarawa, Kiribati - For new readers, this is an update on our field research in Kiribati. This month, you can contribute through Scifund to help us do another round of monitoring next year. All the funds will be spent here in Kiribati. Spread the word if you can.

We returned a couple days ago from boat trip to Butaritari, at the northern end of the Gilbert Islands chain here in Kiribati. That's it on the left. Try squinting. Atolls are hard to see from a distance, but more on that later.

Butaritari is an atoll apart. Though only 200 km N of the Kiribati capital of Tarawa, it has a very different climate. The plentiful rainfall - two to three times what you get close to the equator - allows more crops to grow (bananas, squash, pawpaw), or at least grow well. It also does not experience the same amount of El Nino driven variability.

That's why this awkward to access atoll is so critical to our scientific work. Butaritari allows us to compare the effect of different levels of past temperature variability on individual corals and coral communities. We already have strong evidence that higher temperature variability can make corals more resistant to bleaching - that's the subject of our recent paper, and the discussion on Quirks and Quarks. I'm now looking at how the temperature experience influence what corals survive on the reef, and how that changes over time.

This year, getting there with the dive gear required bunking on the government "research" vessel, actually an old fishing ship that even the captain says has seen some better days (er, decades). The Kiribati tourism slogan is "for travellers, not tourists". Travel here can be fun, provided you dispense with all, I mean ALL, "western" expectations. We left Tarawa with several large drums of fuel, stacks and stacks of cargo (unloading a ship was like unloading a clown car), two fish aggregating devices, a whole load of extra passengers such that there was little floor space, a few motorbikes, dive gear, a dive compressor (it's BYO everything if you are diving in Kiribati) and a one massive tub of seaweed.

En route, in a triangular sense, we stopped in Marakei, a neighbouring atoll, to drop off some cargo, a fish aggregating device, and a number of passengers. As a first time visitor, I did the traditional tour of the key sites around the island, which is this case, was literally around the island. Marakei is a complete oval, the world as a Mobius strip. As is tradition, I left offerings to the four ancestral spirits (that's one of the statues). I guess the ancestors protected us from the wildly rolling seas on the overnights to and from Butaritari (it's a bad sign when the locals laugh and say, "phew, that was rough"). Shame I didn't get my GPS, which conked out for reasons unknown, blessed as well.

In Butaritari, after a day of negotiations for fuel, a boat and a drive, we headed out to conduct coral and fish surveys, using underwater transects and a lot of photography, at a variety of sites along the western rim. I owe a great thanks to my fish expert Toaea for coming on every exhuasting long day in the boat, and to Timon and Tonana for chipping most days.

I also learned the key lesson to never draft a group of guys to help carry a large, heavy fiberglass boat into the water, at low tide no less, without first checking whether the proprietor is willing to also rent the engine. Never assume anything when doing a field project. We got our workout, and a good laugh, that day.

Being a scientist, I'm naturally reluctant to comment much on what we found until the numbers have been crunched. I'll say that, in general, we saw what looked to be rapid recovery from the 2009-10 El Nino, which caused severe heat stress in the region.  There were still many large dead coral colonies, like this table, topped with a few young colonies. Elsewhere, there appeared to have been some impressive coral growth, like in the photo taken by Toaea, albeit often restricted to certain species.

On the final day, with a bit of air left in our tanks, Tonana and I had the chance to dive around a Japanese plane from WWII sunk in the lagoon. This relic of the war is probably only known to the people of Butaritari. I'll upload the video to my Youtube channel when I get home.

We returned nine days later with a whole different set of passengers, an large empty tub, lots of reef data including many GB of coral photos and video, a broken GPS, a wonky CTD (oh, pH data, we'll miss you), enough bananas to challenge the global cartel, bags and bags of root crops, four pigs, the unloading of which is an image that will unfortunately be emblazoned on my brain for many years, and one seriously exhausted i-Matang from Canada.

After a rough night on the open passage from Butaritari, where the winds have 1000s of kms to stir up a good swell, there was much excitement when Tarawa first appeared on the horizon.

That's it in the photo. Don't see anything? The old i-Kiribati mariners, and many fishermen today, navigate between the thin, flat atolls by looking at the clouds. The shallow lagoons of the Central Gilberts shimmer an amazing greenish-blue. That green can often be seen reflected in the low clouds. It's fairly easy after a bit of practice, especially if you have a pair of polarized sunglasses.

The reflection is only one of the many tricks for navigating in this flat part of the planet. The cloud formations themselves are a good key, as are the currents, the birds and possibly also the fish, if you're got a line in the water.

For a real pro, it it easiest to navigate at night, when the sky is full of stars. I managed to work out was north and south, thanks to the Southern Cross, still visible this close to the equator, and the Big Dipper which points to where the North Star would be if we were further north. But that's amateur hour. As Tonana and others relayed with great pride, the old i-Kiribati mariners were experts at navigating by the night sky. That knowledge was all passed down orally, and much is being lost with today's generation. It takes time and patience to learn such skills, something that's in much shorter supply today, even in Kiribati.

I'm off again shortly to survey Abaiang, another key site for the coral research.

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Dispatch from Kiribati: Can you "see" sea level rise?

Tarawa, Kiribati - This is my fifth time visiting Kiribati for research. I'm here working on a coral monitoring project together with my colleagues at the local government. For more, check out my Scifund site, which is dedicated to raising funds for the in-country side of the coral research. People at home often ask whether I have seen changes in the islands. I don't think the questioner is interested stories about new maneabas, the emergence of kava as a social beverage, or the increased availability of vegetables. Back home, we do seem to have a morbid fascination with seeing the islands that are "sinking" due to sea level rise, never mind the fact that the islands aren't "floating" in the first place. I'll spare everyone a lecture on colonialism, race and definitions of vulnerability - there are, after all, towns in the Greater Vancouver Area with similar population to Tarawa and even less topographical relief - and get to the physical question.

The short answer, I suppose, is yes. I can point to many shorelines that don't look the same as they did seven years ago. The long answer, however, is that the change is quite often not what you might expect on a planet with a rising ocean. In many cases, there's more land.  The reason is that shorelines are constantly changing in response to natural variability and human disturbance, in addition to the global trend. That's the subject of my recent article in EOS and our video "Lessons of Bikeman".

Case in point: The above photo is of a house in Bikenibeu, a south Tarawa islet, during the 2005 storm I mention in the paper. My first trip to Kiribati happened to coincide with that El Nino-driven storm, the strongest Tarawa had experienced in ~30 years. Winds peaked right at high tide. The beach "should" be about the edge of the photograph. The combination of a high astronomical tide and 40 mph+ westerly winds blowing across the unprotected lagoon slammed waves into homes and buildings and over the causeways between islets.

I went by that house a couple days ago and snapped another picture, around but not exactly at high tide. It's not from the same angle, and some new foliage is obsuring the house, but you can still see the kitchen, and you can get a sense of the beach slope. That storm, and some subequent storms, scoured a lot of the sand off the beach, leaving the back part of the house perched more on coral rock (a bit hard to make out; the equatorial sun makes lighting photos difficult!). But, overall, seven years later, the house is not really much closer to the sea.

Is sea level rise a hoax? Of course not. There's overwhelming evidence that the global sea level is rising, and that humans are the cause. But that doesn't mean you can fly to Kiribati and find "proof". As I write in the conclusion of the EOS paper.

The coastal environment, like the weather, is evolving because of natural climate variability and direct human disturbance, as well as a global trend. A particular flood event, whether it occurs in a low- lying atoll like Tarawa or in New York City, cannot be blamed on global sea level rise any more than a particular heat wave can be blamed on climate warming.
Instead of incorrectly attributing individual flood events or shoreline changes to global sea level rise, scientists and climate communicators can use such occurrences to educate the public about the various natural and human processes that affect sea level, the shoreline, and the shape of islands. This would better prepare the public and policy makers for the changes that societies are likely to experience as global sea level rises in the coming decades.

I'll try to write more about our work here before hopping on a boat for the outer atolls.

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Is the sea ever actually level? The lesson of Bikeman, Kiribati

Ever wonder what's really happening to the low-lying islands in the tropics?

My former student Cory Kleinschmidt and I made this video about complicated geological and social dynamics at play in loss of Bikeman, an islet in the lagoon of Tarawa Atoll, the capital of Kiribati. The science behind this story and others in the ongoing "Battle of Tarawa" is described my feature in the latest issue of EOS, Transactions of the American Geophysical Union.

I'm heading to Kiribati to do some climate and coral reef monitoring with colleagues in the local government. I'll try to post about our work periodically, provided the internet cooperates, and our boat doesn't sink.

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Climate experience makes some corals more resistant to heat stress

Preserving coral reefs, and everything they provide to communities across the tropics, on a warming planet will require identifying what might make a coral less susceptible to heat stress.

One of the big questions being studied by a number of scientists in the community is whether past temperature experience can make individual corals (by individual acclimation or adaptation) or coral communities (by selecting for tougher species) more resistant or more resilient to heat stress. I've been leading field projects in the Gilbert Islands of Kiribati, where this whimsical coral can be found, because the unique El Nino-driven climate provides a great natural laboratory for studying that big question.

In the lastest publication on this research, my colleagues Jessica Carilli (the lead author), Aaron Hartmann and I describe how massive corals on the atolls which naturally experience more frequent heat stress appear to have been more resistant to the recent El Nino-driven ocean heat waves. For an accessible summary of our findings, I recommend listening to this past weekend's episode of CBC Radio's Quirks and Quarks. But you can also read the paper itself: the journal PLoS-One is online and open access to all.

The research involved drilling coral cores, Jess Carilli's area of expertise, from sites around three different atolls, followed by some exhaustive lab analysis by my colleagues. The logistics of collecting the samples from the outer islands was unbelievably complicated, even for someone who knows the challenges of working in a remote island country. Just getting all the gear to Butaritari (that's the seat beside my flip-seat on the plane), making it all work and bringing the samples back intact will probably go down as our greatest accomplishment in science. We owe a huge thanks to local colleagues Aranteiti Tekiau, Toaea Beiateuea, Iobi Arabua and the late Moiwa Erutarem, who sadly was lost at sea six months after our expedition.

In the month of May, I'll be fundraising for the in-country expenses of a planned, future expedition through the second Scifund crowd-sourcing science funding campaign. By sheer coincidence I will actually be in Kiribati during some coral monitoring during most of the Scifund campaign. I'll try to put trip updates on Maribo whenever I find internet access.

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Mountain pine beetle upends the Canadian emissions picture?

The lastest Canadian greenhouse gas emissions data looks very different if Canadian forests are taking into consideration.

There was some rejoicing over the fact that Canada's GHG emissions grew by only 2 Mt CO2e (that includes CO2 plus other GHGs converted to "units" of CO2) or 0.25% from 2009 to 2010, despite the fact that the economy was rebounding from the recession. But if you include land cover, land use change and forestry, GHG emissions grew by 86 Mt from 2009 to 2010.

Why such a large change? According to the Canadian government model, forests went from a net sink of 17 Mt in 2009 to a net source of 72 Mt in 2010 (see Table 7-1 in NIR). If you

break the GHG balance of forests up by region, the driver of this change was the "Montane Cordillera", or #14 on the map to the left. These forests of western BC were a net source of 100 Mt. The only other net sources regions in 2010 were the "Boreal Shield West" (#9 at 22 Mt), the "Pacific Maritime" (#15 at 5.7 Mt) and the "Taiga Shield East" (#4 at 1.7 Mt).

There are large, natural year-to-year variations in forest carbon balance, so it's important not to read too much into the jump from 2009 to 2010. What the 2010 number does reflect, however, is the very large amount of carbon, in the form of dead wood, in BC that is waiting to be respired to the atmosphere (if we don't use sequester it in buildings). For that, we can largely thank the Mountain Pine Beetle, the outbreaks of which have been linked to climate change. From the National Inventory Report:

The upward trend in dead organic matter (DOM) decay since the year 2000 reflects the long-term, growing effect of past disturbances, especially insect epidemics that have left substantial quantities of decaying DOM. Over the last decade, insect epidemics have affected a total of over 56 Mha3 of managed forests, with 72% being located in the Montane Cordillera reporting zone and corresponding to the epidemics of Mountain Pine Beetle. In contrast, much of the interannual variability of the GHG budget of managed forests hinges on the occurrence and severity of fires.

Before you start screaming "cover-up", it is standard UN reporting practice, to not include land use, land cover and forestry in the "total" at the top of the GHG inventory tables. This is done for a number of legitimate reasons, not the least of which being that net emissions from forests must be estimated by models and, as I've said, the results vary from year to year because of climate variability. Nonetheless, it is striking that climate change, via its effects on Canadian forest, might be undoing the reported progress in curbing, or starting to curb is a better term, greenhouse gas emissions from some sectors of the Canadian economy.

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Canadian GHG emissions in perspective

The Canadian government submitted the latest national Greenhouse Gas inventory report to the UN yesterday, which features data through the end of 2010. As was highlighted in the Environment Canada press release and the media, GHG emissions grew by only 2 Mt CO2e (that includes CO2 plus other GHGs converted to "units" of CO2) despite the fact that the economy was rebounding from the recession. This was viewed by some, including the Environment Minister, as good climate news, because it suggests that  the economy is decoupling from greenhouse gas emissions.

For some perspective, here's a plot of Canada's GHG emissions since 1990, together with various policy targets (Kyoto, Canada's own 2020 target, the EU reduction target for 2020) and emissions projections (Energy Information Administration's 2020 projection for Canada). It was quickly adapted from a recent presentation. The "decoupling", if real, which is questionable given that Canada's economy is shifting more towards resource-intensive industries, has to seriously accelerate even to hit Canada's much-criticized 2020 goal.

There's an important and very telling missing nugget in the emissions total. I'll get to that tomorrow.
NOTE: The lines look "steeper" because the y-axis on the chart begins at 400 Mt; the Canadian government report uses a y-axis from 0 - 800 Mt.

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Canada's unrealistic greenhouse gas target

Over the past couple years, plenty of policy experts have stated that there is little chance that Canada will meets its 2020 greenhouse gas target (17% below 2005 levels, which is ~3% below 1990 levels) without a serious, and unlikely change in federal policy. I've been rather blunt about this myself:

It is harder to find a seat at a Canucks game than to find an expert who thinks the mix of existing and proposed federal regulations and policies will come close to achieving even the government's own weak emissions target for the year 2020, let alone the much lower target set in the Kyoto Protocol.

For readers not familiar enough with Vancouver's love for the Canucks to appreciate the analogy, the local hockey team just sold out is 400th consecutive game.

The strident nature of comments like mine might take away from an important point. The conclusion comes from the government's own analysis.

Here's a figure from last year's report by the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy (NTREE) as a part of Canada's reporting obligations under the Kyoto Protocol. Even in the "policy" scenario in the Environment Canada model (the green line), greenhouse gas emissions are ~30% over the government's own target.

If you're never heard of the NRTEE, it's job, since 1993, has been to "help Canada achieve sustainable development solutions that integrate environmental and economic considerations to ensure the lasting prosperity and well-being of our nation" through preparing reports, convening perspectives from all sides of issues, and offering advice to the government on "how best to reconcile the often divergent challenges of economic prosperity and environmental conservation". The NRTEE was cut in yesterday's budget.

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Storm the Riding: UBC students getting climate change on the agenda

As was reported in Wednesday's Vancouver Sun, a group of UBC students, staff and faculty from a new campus organization UBCC350 will be canavassing door-to-door in BC Premier Christie Clarke's riding on Saturday to draw attention to climate change and carbon exports from Canada. However you feel about political action, it is terrific to see a group of young people willing to spend their free time taking a stance on a public issue. 

I've recently expressed my own view on the issue of carbon exports and the proposed oil pipelines, a view shared by UBCC350 founder and UBC political scientist George Hoberg and many in the group.

For more information, check UBCC350's website.

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Climate science, then and now

Kudos to Peter Sinclair for this great video about a talk by Mike McCracken that was delivered in 1982:

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Heat wave factoids

A personal favourite, thus far: 

At 7 pm EDT, it was 8 degrees C warmer in Sault Ste Marie, Ontario (26C) than in El Paso, Texas (18C). Last time I was in Sault Ste Marie, it was September, and I had just completed a paddling trip that involved fear of snow and hypothermia.

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Unprecedented heat wave continues

Assuming the ridge of high pressure lasts as long as forecasters expect, the heatwave in central and eastern North America, already unprecedented in the historical climate records, will rival the incredible Moscow heat wave of 2010. Temperature records are being set daily across the midwestern U.S., Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec.

Some of the record are simply stunning: I've been tweeting examples for the last couple days. in our national capital of Ottawa, the weekend temperature broke the previous high by 8 degrees Celsius.  The nighttime lows across a huge swath of the continent have been higher than the normal daytime maximum temperature. Today, it is 20 degrees Celsuis above normal across much of west-central Ontairo.

There have been plenty of other physical, biological and cultural impacts of the heat wave.  Here are three which came to my attention in the past day, I'd be happy to see more added in the comments:

- the Great Lakes are now almost entirely free of ice, as seen in these images from the Canadian ice Service. The heatwave has accelerated the end of the ice season. This should be "wettest" winter for the lakes since the beginning of the satellite record in 1980

- a friend in Madison, WI forwarded news about some unusually early bird appearances in the marshlands around town.

- if you type words like "patio" into Google Trends, you'll find a huge uptick in the search index, as people scramble for a place to have a beer on a hot March afternoon.

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I wouldn't try skating across the Great Lakes either

Following upon last week's news about a shrinking "skating" season across Canada, a paper in the Journal of Climate reports that the length and extent of the Great Lakes ice season has decreased rather dramatically since the early 1970s.

You don't need library access to Journal of Climate to get a sense of the data. The Canadian Ice Service has plots of total Great Lakes ice cover going back to the 1980s (right). One things that's striking about the data, and is analysed at length in the paper, is the periodicity, which seems to follow the El Nino cycle; ice cover is lowest during the 1982/83, 1986/87, 1991/2. 1997/98, and 2009/10, all El Nino event.

El Nino, however, does not tell the whole story. Ice cover is also low during much of the past decade, with the exception of two winters, one of which was a strong La Nina winter (2008/9). And this winter, which was not included in the analysis in the paper will go down as one of the most ice-free. The map at right shows the departure in ice cover from normal. The dark reds covering Lake Erie, Lake Superior and parts of Lake Huron/Georgian Bay are regions where there's "normally" ice in March.

Right now, you could almost swim across Lake Superior, something even these guys probably did not dream was possible. This is one part of the planet where we may need to redefine normal.

Unlike the reported changes in the ice season on small lakes, the subject of our video, or the outdoor skating rink season, the change in Great Lakes ice can have a weather and climate effect. One, that's a bit counter-intuitive, and is perhaps the only piece of good news here for skiers, is that less ice on the lakes can lead to more "lake-effect" snows in east-central Ontario and upstate New York (ever wonder why there are big "freak" snowstorms north of Toronto and around Buffalo in late November? It's from a cold north-westerly winds mass passing over the unfrozen lakes an picking up moisture). Of course, that can only happen with sufficiently cold air masses, which were rare this winter.

The other effect, which as far as I know has not been quantified, is the change in "albedo" or reflectivity. We hear about this all the time with the Arctic - less ice means less reflection of incoming solar radiation. A similar positive climate feedback, albeit smaller in magnitude, should occur in this region dominated by freshwater lakes.

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Climate change, outdoor skating and Canadian tradition

A clever new paper coming out in Environmental Research Letters later this week shows evidence that the outdoor skating season has shrunk in the past fifty years across Canada. The authors asked outdoor rink officials how they decide when the weather is right to start, and to the end, operations each year, and then applied the algorithm to historical data from Canadian towns and cities. The Guardian has a news story up describing some of the details.

I read an advance copy of the paper, and found that it very clearly compliments the widespread evidence that the lake ice "season" has been shrinking because of climate warming.  As we discussed in the video posted earlier this winter (below), climate change may have a profound impact on the winter traditions of many Canadian families, including my own.

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