Climate change's effect on lake levels? Protecting the environment should be a goal for individuals of every political and economic stripe.
Is Great Lakes' rise due to climate change?
The relatively recent rise in Great Lakes’ water levels has caused some homeowners, environmentalists and even journalists to sound the alarm that something terrible, unprecedented and potentially catastrophic is occurring.
In March 2019, for example, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ominously reported that winter and spring precipitation will continue to increase until 2100, after which summer rains "should decrease by 5 percent to 15 percent for most of the Great Lakes states" because of climate change. In January 2020, the newspaper reported that the past six years have been the "wettest on record," causing rising lakes to "gobble up" the state's beaches.
Contrast those reports with a two-part investigation the same newspaperpublishedin July 2013, in which a 37-year-old member of Milwaukee’s South Shore Yacht Club claimed he had never seen water levels on Lake Michigan so low. The article’s author portentously added, “Nobody has.”
Later, the writer rhetorically asked, “So where did all the water go?”
His response? “This is not a story about climate change. It is a story about climate changed.”
A principle often missing in the climate change debate is the presumption of goodwill when it comes to ideological opponents.
One needn’t be a full-fledged Green New Deal activist to identify as an environmentalist. Likewise, writing off environmentalists’ concerns as a hoax does little more than give license to those who would exploit natural resources to the point of destruction.
Somewhere in the middle of the ideological spectrum are true conservatives.
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