In order to get a good witch burning going, all you need is a group of morons with a tiny bit of information and who are looking for someone to lynch.
The average reader, I suspect, knows about ice melting in the arctic and the habitat for the polar bear shrinking, but would not necessarily think this has any relationship to the lowering of Lake Michigan’s water level. But in fact, they are all part of the same phenomenon. How do I know this? Because nearly every expert in Egan’s story would tell you this — if the newspaper had ever bothered to ask.
Lake Michigan water levels have declined because they deepened the shipping channel between Lake Huron, Lake St. Clair and Lake Erie, which allows more water to flow out. What does that have to do with Polar Bears?
For instance, Jia Wang is an ice research climatologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, and did a report which found Great Lakes ice coverage has decreased by an average of 71 percent over the past 40 years. Egan reports on his research but skips Wang’s explanation for why this is happening. “We are seeing the impact of global warming here in the Great Lakes,” Wang told the Cleveland Plain Dealer. No, you won’t find that quote in the Journal Sentinel story.
Less ice than during the coldest years of the ice age scare? Who ever could have imagined?
Wisconsin just blew away all kinds of July cold records. Why doesn’t the author write about the 1871 Peshtigo Fire, which killed 1,200 people and burned more than two million acres? Or the summer of 1901, where the whole state was between 100 and 111 degrees?
