Apparently the water level has been falling for some time now and shows no signs of recovering. This, of course, is particularly disconcerting to those who live around the lakes and who, in many cases, depend on the lakes for such things as transportation, agriculture, drinking water and the like.
My relative is one of these. She is retired and lives in a lovely home right on the margins of one of the lakes. Her lake front, however, is receding into the distance.
My first reaction to the complaint is that this change may well be yet another example of the ongoing process of climate change. I have no specific evidence of this, but the notion makes some sense. There also may be other factors involved. As I understand it, the geography around the Great Lakes has continued to rise as a result of the release of pressure from the last great ice age. But the most immediate reason seems like it would be climate change.
Regardless, my relative is expressing some level of despair about the changes and is wondering out loud what ought to be done. This presumes, I guess, that mankind might, in fact, be in a position to influence such climatic events. I do happen to be a person who believes that a good portion of the circumstances we now see as climate change are being influenced by human activity. Mostly the activity of those of us in industrialized nations, as well as those nations who are currently rapidly moving toward industrialization. In general, this attribution is related to the release of greenhouse gases.
A few weeks back I used a computer application to take a snap shot of one the human activities that contributes to the increase in greenhouse gases. The following is a snapshot of almost-world-wide commercial aircraft traffic at about 4:30 pm, Pacific Daylight time, August 28, 2013:
My understanding is that this image does not generally include smaller, non-commercial aircraft and does not generally include military aircraft. As I recall, there were in excess of 10,000 aircraft in the air at the time this snapshot was taken.
I and my relative are of an age and in a socio-economic strata, where many friends and acquaintances are happily fulfilling bucket list options with regard to retirement travel, or who think almost nothing about flitting about the globe to visit family and friends. My relative, in the last year or so, has travelled at least three times to far-flung areas of the globe for 'wonderful vacation' events. She has many more planned.
She is not alone in this regard among my acquaintances. In fact, among we retired people, one of the most common topics of conversation when we get together is to talk about the exotic places to which we have travelled lately, or to which we plan to travel in the near future. And when people of my age and stage are entering retirement, one of the most common plans for retirement is travel to distant and exotic places.
When I look at an image such as the above, I wonder about the degree to which many of these flights are booked mostly by such discretionary travellers.
As my relative expresses concern about the retreat of the lake in front of her home, and as she genuinely seeks for some solution to the water problem she sees, I have not yet had the heart to wonder out loud to her whether she has considered staying at home as one possible approach to the problem.
I should conclude by saying that I expect that a lot of the air travel one sees above also results from business-related travel. I do not know if such travel is increasing or decreasing, but in the technological age of social media, applications such as Skype and many others, one wonders if a lot more of the business of the world (including the facsimile of face-to-face) ought not to be conducted electronically?
I am not suggesting that reducing air travel is the human behaviour that ought to be first in line in order to address climate change, but the above image certainly ought to give us some pause.
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