Climate change lowering Great Lakes levels, retired Army Corps expert tells Bay City crowd – ‘The last time the water was this low for this long was the Dust Bowl’

By Justin Engel
22 February 2013 BAY CITY, MICHIGAN (The Bay City Times) – Climate change is real, a retired U.S. Army Corps of Engineers expert says: And it’s causing parts of the Great Lakes water levels to descend. Roger Gauthier, a retired hydrologist with the Corps, closed out the Saginaw Bay Watershed Initiative Network/Saginaw Bay Coastal Initiative Coordination Meeting in Bay City’s Delta College Planetarium on Friday, Feb. 22, by talking about the low water levels in the Lake Huron and Lake Michigan basin. “One thing I hear is, ‘This is all caused by drought,’” Gauthier told a room of about 40 people. “Don’t let people tell you this is caused by drought. We are in climate change. “There’s no politics here.” He said the lake’s current condition represented “a whole different paradigm.” “The last time the water was this low for this long was the Dust Bowl,” Gauthier said of the 1930s-era ecological event. He talked about the consequences of the low lake levels. Those include freighters which carry lighter loads, the reduction in hydraulic water power at sites such as Niagara Falls, impacts on the fishing industry, decreased recreational boating and collapsing seawalls. “When the lake dropped from (1999) to 2001 by 4 feet, half the boat ramps in Lake Michigan were high and dry,” he said. The ecological consequences include the changing landscape of wetlands and “the aggressive colonization of invasives,” Gauthier said. “It’s amazing the transformations that are going on around us,” he said. [more]

Climate change lowering Great Lakes levels, retired Army Corps expert tells Bay City crowd