Cool Temperatures Prevail in Year Ludington Moves to Adapt Master Plans to Factor in Global Warming

Have you went to any of our local beaches this summer, stuck a foot in, and recoiled at the coolness?  Have you noticed the dearth of days that featured temperatures above eighty degrees this summer?  Have you forgotten the extremely cool weather and extensive lake ice coverage over this last winter?

 

Back in February of this year, we were learning that the City of Ludington, the County of Mason, and the Townships of Hamlin and Pere Marquette were spending around $30,000 of our local tax money to enter into an agreement with the Land Information Access Association (LIAA) who would be giving us nearly $200,000 worth of assistance in formulating our master plans.  Master plans that usually get modified or created for well under $5000.  Much of this mega-expense would be paid for by the Kresge Foundation and grants from the State DEQ.  The City of Ludington entered into this contract illegally, although the other entities followed the proper protocols.

 

These four local governments met on February 19 to discuss planning and climate change concepts.  Alarming at this meeting to me was the general disdain one of LIAA's doctors, Richard Norton of the University of Michigan had for personal prope..., and that concerns for climate change should override these rights. 

 

On May 15, they had a meeting where they tried to sell their ideas to the public, carefully choreographed to not allow any opposition.  They followed that up with a Leadership Summit the next day to trot out their ideas to area leaders.  At both of these meetings, they pushed 'State Climatologist' Dr. Richard Andresen from Michigan State University to drill the tenets of climate change, i.e. global warming, into our local psyche.  His presentation was rather easy to refute with facts

 

Of course, if we consider ourselves of considerably lesser pedigree in climate science than Dr. Andresen, we can still just look at this year's weather records which seem to show that if we are to create our master/comprehensive plans under his forecast of temperatures being up to 11 degrees warmer by the century's end, we would be fools.  I would dare say that likelihood of that is about as probable as temperatures being 11 degrees cooler.  But let's look at what has happened since their first official meeting in February using stats from the Weather Underground history feature.

 

 

As noted previously the average of temperatures in Feb 2014 were 17 degrees lower than thirty years prior, Feb 1984, a length of time Andresen uses in some comparisons.  The yellow highlights note the days in February where the highs for a day in 2014 equaled or exceeded the normal average high for that day, or where the lows in 2014 kept above the normal low.   You will note from the point of February 24th onward the daily high never crept above the normal average low for that day throughout recorded history!  You will note that in only 8 of 58 readings, were the normal high/lows actually exceeded.  March was little better, with 11 of 62 readings getting above the normal high/low and the whole month was well below average:

 

 

This helped contribute to extensive and late lake ice levels this year which Dr. Andresen said in 2013 "the amount of ice on the great lakes, and the duration of ice cover on the great lakes is decreasing unquestionably... the amount of ice on the lakes is decreasing."  This May he stepped that back a little, along with the short term temperature predictions he made, but the rhetoric about the hot future with low lake levels continued. 

 

But the data coming in is really messing up that lowering lake levels rhetoric, since all the Great Lakes have rebounded significantly at where he had left off back in 2012, Lake Michigan going up nearly a full yard according to this recent article and map:

 

 

More, and cooler water.  One would expect our water temperatures to stay cooler late into spring because of all that ice remaining well into May.  Last week, our gem to the south, Pentwater, had water temperatures still in the forties at their beach.  It has rebounded this week to 58, but sub-60 temperatures have been the norm throughout the summer for our area, which is worse than a shark attack to keep people out of the water.

 

According to the stats at Weather Underground, only one time has the temperature at Ludington crested 85 degrees, way back on June 28.  In normally hot July, we have temperature patterns looking a lot like they did back in February and March, with only one time that temperatures crested the average daily high of that day, the only day July had an eighty degree day:

 

 

That trend has mostly continued into August which has a high of 82 degrees this year. 

 

So even though Dr. Richard Andresen's computer projections forecast a future for Michigan that will make it have the climate of Oklahoma by the end of the century (see his full presentation here), with temperatures much higher and more volatile weather conditions, 2014 has not gone according to their plan.  Mild, cool weather where the locals pray that global warming weather will someday come as promised. 

 

But meanwhile, our climate is looking more and more like Alberta's.  

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Terrific article X. Very good points all around.  Below are some charts showing water levels of the Great Lakes dating back to 1865. The fluctuations of water levels over the past 130 or so years that the charts cover is extremely small compared to the huge amount of water contained in the Lakes. My bathtub evaporates more water than Lake Michigan on a comparison basis.

Tricky Dicky Durbin the Illinois Congressman is the one who tried to derail the Badger and is an outspoken global warming alarmists trying to tell folks the Great Lakes will come up missing some day because of Climate change.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jun/28/rich...

Durbin does what Al Gore does without the need of any junk science backing him up. 

Thanks for the supplemental charts, you won't see them coming from the great minds of LIAA or anyone else associated with the International Panel on Selling Climate Change, since they show that water levels for the most part are higher than the historical average. 

Willy, can you elaborate on how they got the data before 1917 for the lakes?  They seem to distinguish that data from the other.

The charts were taken off the GLIN or Great Lakes Information Network, http://glin.net/. The link to the charts is http://www.great-lakes.net/teach/envt/levels/lev_3.html. On this link it explains the data received before and after 1918 as follows, "Levels have been measured on most lakes since 1865, with the current network of water level gages operating since 1918."

Check out the Resilient Ludington Survey that LIAA is providing at their Resilient Ludington website.  They want to get your opinion, even though the survey methodology is far from scientific to get any solid data.  Much of the questions seem innocuous enough on first reading, but check these out:

 

 

 

For the second year in a row, our global warming (i.e. climate change) has been a bit off in Ludington and we look to even have a colder February than we had last year, which was an incredibly cool 16 degree average.  If we look back twenty years ago (when global cooling was more in vogue) we find that 1984 had an average February temp. of 33 degrees, while 1985 had an average temp, of 23 degrees. 

Meanwhile, ice coverage on the Great Lakes is approaching record levels as the weather forecast sees the cold continuing:  http://www.mlive.com/weather/index.ssf/2015/02/record_great_lakes_i...

Thankfully, our resiliency plan being devised by LIAA will only focus on how to survive the coming killer warmer temperatures that will make our climate resemble Oklahoma's by the century's end, rather than Ontario's.

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