In my discussions with climate change skeptics and deniers on Twitter (and elsewhere) -- a pastime I plan to return to soon -- I've frequently brought up the trends in winter ice cover on lakes as a sure sign of warming. I've not pursued, as much, the problems that the loss of ice cover can lead to.
The Weather Channnel did it for me.
Northern Hemisphere Lakes in Danger of Losing Their Ice
To watch the video, you'll have to click the link; I can't embed that video here. However, here's the transcript of the video."The Great Lakes could go from this to ice-free by the end of the century; a new study looked at 51,000 lakes in the Northern Hemisphere using temperature projections to determine whether they would lose their ice.Researchers found that nearly 5,700 lakes are in permanent danger of becoming ice-free by the centuries end. 179 of them could lose their ice by 2031. The study also found ice on some large bays in Lake Michigan and Lake Superior could be gone by 2055, and even though no ice fishing would be a bummer that problem is much bigger than that.Ice cover helps water in lakes from evaporating during the winter, so if it disappears the water disappears quickly too, and winter ice helps regulate water temperatures in the summer. If the water gets too warm, algae blooms like this become more frequent and more intense. Depending on the lake, changes like these could be disastrous; Lake Michigan alone supplies water to 10,000,000 people."
The video references a paper in Geophysical Research Letters; so I searched around and after a bit of playtime with search terms, determined that the paper was the one linked below. It was intriguing because there are two other papers of interest about lake ice published in 2020. I may investigate them, too.
by Sharma, S., Blagrave, K., Filazzola, A., Imrit, M.A. and Hendricks Franssen, H.J.
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