Climate change is a hot button issue, but even without playing a blame game, there is weight to the data that has been collected. The Earth will warm as it has in the past, but the repercussions will be far reaching. Within North America, the Great Lakes and global warming will interact in a way that could change the region vastly.

This area is already dealing with the deleterious affects of invasive species, and something like climate change will only act like fuel to a fire. Twenty percent of the world’s fresh water comes from the Great Lakes, it is a major source of this finite resource and any depletion will have massive and widespread repercussions.

The importance of the region cannot be downplayed. Outside of the manufacturing of drinking water, it is also a huge producer of hydroelectric power, is a thoroughfare for shipping routes, as well as being a tourist attraction. A variety of species, both plant and animal, make their home along the shore and within the lakes themselves.

With all of these positives, there is a flipside to use and land development including air and water pollution and urban encroachment into habitats. Because of these issues, the region is more susceptible to being affected by global warming. Something as innocuous as climate change can reap disastrous results.

Warming temperatures will increase the melting away of the ice cover that is already quite thin upon the lakes. This melting will result in an increased evaporation of the lakes themselves, bringing the water level down.

Water loss has already been occurring and it was found last year the Lake Superior’s levels were at their lowest in seventy seven years. If the lakes decrease by the purported additional meter in the future, shipping routes will be severely disrupted and the water itself will diminish in quality due to the concentration of pollutants. The travel industry such as cruises will also be negatively affected.

Efforts are underway to restore the Great Lakes with billions of dollars needed to update the antique sewage systems as well as cleaning up the polluted sediment that already exists. Building up the wetland environments at the edges of the lakes will create a natural water cleanser and impediment to invasive species.

Climate change is not just increased temperature and decreased water levels, it can wreck havoc on weather systems. It is proposed that within the region there will be more storms, as well as more drought seasons. This will increase pollution run off, it will act as a viral incubator and the lakes could be littered with dead zones. Dead zones are the result of algae overgrowth that creates oxygen free zones.

By the end of this current century it is believed that the temperature of the great lakes region will increase by two to four degrees, with precipitation increasing by 25%. Lake levels are predicted to fall anywhere from 1.5 to 8 feet.

The future may seem to hold a number of destructive elements, but they can be tempered by being proactive in the present and working to make the Great Lakes as great as they once were.

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