cc  >> My name is Michael Notaro.  I work at the Center for  Climatic Research and I welcome  you all.  And today's part of our WICCI  seminar series "Bracing for  Impact: Climate Change  Adaptation in Wisconsin."  And for those who might be new  to the seminar series, WICCI is  Wisconsin's Initiative on  Climate Change Impacts, and it's  a collaboration between the  University of Wisconsin system,  the Department of Natural  Resources and other agencies  trying to better understand what  potential impacts in Wisconsin  might result from climate  change.  And today I'm very excited to  have two excellent speakers.  I'd like to introduce the first  speaker now.  The first speaker is Professor  John Magnuson.  He's an emeritus professor of  zoology and the past director of  the Center of Limnology at the  University of Wisconsin Madison.  John played a leading role in  the lakes and streams portion of  the 1995 and 2001 IPCC  assessments by the  Intergovernmental Panel on  Climate Change, as well as  confronting climate change in  the Great Lakes region,  developed in 2003 by the  Ecological Society of America  and the Union of Concerned  Scientists.  He serves as co-chair of the  Science Council for the  Wisconsin Initiative on Climate  Change Impacts or WICCI.  He earned his bachelor's and  master's degree from the  University of Minnesota St. 

 Paul in fish and wildlife  management and his PhD  from the University of British  Columbia, Canada, in zoology  with a minor in oceanography.  He joined the faculty here in  1968.  His most recent books is  Magnuson, Kratz and Benson 2006,  Long-Term Dynamics of Lakes in  the Landscape, published by  Oxford University Press.  He is a champion of the role of  long-term research in perceiving  the important changes in  Wisconsin and the world.  And recent papers have been on  the concepts of taking a longer  and wider view and addressing  environmental issues.  So I introduce our first  speaker, John Magnuson.  (applause)  >> Thank you, very much.  Thank you for coming.  Well, I'm going to talk about  lakes tonight and the responses  of Wisconsin lakes to climate  change.  I have to admit on the onset  that I'm not going to able to  cover all of the responses of  Wisconsin lakes to climate  change but I'm going to mention  three at least. 

 I'm going to talk about ice  cover because it's a wonderful  miner's canary for  what's happening to our  climate, I'm going to talk about  fishes because they're important  to people and they're a good  resource, and I'm going to talk  about waters and levels and  flows which we discovered not  only in Baraboo but in Madison  are topics of increasing  interest to us.  First I'd like to begin with an  idea about the invisible  present.  I think with an audience that's  largely older today, pardon me  for the youngest ones in the  group, but is older than some of  the college and high school  groups we talk to, people are  often trapped in the present and  they don't have a very long  point of view about what's been  happening or what might happen.  And I'd like to talk about the  idea of the invisible present  using the ice data on Mendota.  For example, this was a duration  of ice cover on Lake Mendota, I  believe it was around 1996.  And that's the invisible  present.  It doesn't tell you anything.  It doesn't provide any  information for decision-making  or at all.  And what I'm going to do with  this is I'm going to open up  this package and move it back to  when the first observations were  made in the 1850s.  So let's open it up for 10  years. 

 Soon as we open it up for 10  years all of a sudden we're a  little smarter.  That was an oddball year.  Another thing that's very  apparent, I don't know if you  noticed in the newspapers in  Madison, and it happens in other  places too, but when we have a  year like that red year that has  very short ice cover somebody  will chip in and say the world  is falling apart, climate change  has finally caught up with us,  this is a disaster.  If you look two years before  that, that high peak, the ice  cover was four months.  And in that year there'd be  another letter to the editor and  that letter to the editor would  say climate change is a bunch of  hooey.  Now what's apparent from even 10  years of data you know that  people are responding to these  very short-term year-to-year  variability and that's not  climate change.  Variability is part of climate  change but that, those  differences are not.  Here's what 50 years look like.  And in the 50 year data I've  cycled all those years that  curve just after the onset of an  El Nino and I'll explain briefly  what an El Nino is.  But you don't even need to do  any statistics here to see that  in those years just following  the El Nino Lake Mendota had  shorter ice covers in the last  50 years. 

  What an El Nino is is an  oscillation that occurs in the  central Pacific.  It's semi-periodic five to seven  years.  Scientists measure the  properties of El Nino by  measuring the air pressure in --  and Tahiti and in Darwin,  Australia.  So that's where you can get a  handle on how that oscillation  is occurring.  So there's something that's not  next door.  It's not caused by the MG&E  power plants; it's not caused by  the city.  It's caused by something that's  generated in the central  Pacific.  And that's just to get us to be  thinking about all the effects  right here in Madison,  Wisconsin, are not necessarily  locally generated.  Here's the whole record.  People in Madison, they started  a, pardon me, they started a lay  record in the 1850s and if you  took any period of time, any  where along here and took a 10  to 20 year period you probably  would not be able to demonstrate  even with the best statistics  that there's a trend. 

 You can't do that because the  variability is so high.  However, when you look at 150  years of data that trend is  there, it's real, it's changing  at about two days per decade  over that whole period and it  accounts for about 20% of the  variability in this record.  That's important because the 80%  that's leftover is this  year-to-year variability and  interdecadal variability which  keeps getting people really  messed up on trying to  understand climate change.  Well, let's talk briefly about  the invisible place.  We tend to think about Madison  is the center of universe.  Or maybe Wisconsin is or the  Midwest is, but we tend to often  have a very place-based kind of  feeling about what's happening  in the world.  And let's use the ice to try to  get that point across too.  Looking at Mendota does not tell  you what's happening globally.  It's what's happening in  Wisconsin.  I enjoy this graph because it  shows some of the interesting  aspects of ice in the Great  Lakes region on small lakes. 

 Every one of those dots is a  place where we have at least 30  years of ice off data, when the  ice breaks up.  And in the top graph we have the  rates at which ice is changing  in different parts of the Great  Lakes region, and notice down  here near Madison and Lake  Geneva, the southern part of the  state, the ice is changing very  rapidly.  The ice breakup dates were  changing almost 10 days per  decade.  If you go to northern Minnesota,  if you go to north eastern  United States and part of  Ontario, the rates are down a  couple days per decade.  So there's spatial pattern that  occurs in these ice out dates in  the same way that there's  spatial pattern in climate.  The bottom graph actually I  think is more fun.  What we did is we divided the  data up into five year periods,  and then for every five years  we, going across the Great Lakes  region, drew a line which was  the best fit for the April 1  breakup date.  Now the red line is the first  five years.  And the blue line is the last  five years.  And if you look at that you will  see that the April 1 breakup  date is moving northward. 

 And it's easier to see it in  Minnesota.  It's moved from about where the  Twin Cities is to about where  Lake Malax is.  That's the same thing as saying  that our climate is warming very  rapidly and the warm weather is  moving northward.  A very strong kind of a result.  If you go globally, everyone of  these straight lines summarizes  all the variability that you've  seen in some of these other  graphs and ones on the bottom  are the changes in the ice off  date and the ones on the top are  the changes in the ice on date.  And you will notice that ice off  is coming earlier and earlier,  on the bottom, and ice on is  coming later and later on the  top.  You see a couple of exceptions.  You see a very steep line on the  top.  That happens to be Toronto  Harbor and anybody who's been to  Toronto recently knows there's  more than climate change  affecting what's happening to  ice in Toronto Harbor.  It's a big city. 

 They've changed the  configuration of the harbor.  There's heated effluents, lots  of things.  If you've got a really good eye  you maybe see one going the  wrong direction.  Everybody spotted the wrong  direction one yet?  It's again on the top.  And that was one that really  baffled us.  It's a lake in Japan.  And it's in the Japanese Alps.  And we didn't believe it, we  thought something was funny  about the record.  And then I discovered that  during this time period in the  late 1800s Japan had a one month  calendar change.  And I said eureka, we've got it  and so I added a month or  subtracted a month, I can't  remember which way it went at  the moment, and then it fit in  with all the others. 

 And I sent that result with my  Japanese colleague and he said  John that's fine but we already  made the month correction.  (laughter)  But he was wrong.  And scientists are real  skeptics.  And what I did is I went to the  -- shrine in Lake Suwa that's  responsible for this and we got  the lead priest to look at the  early records before the  calendar change date and after  the calendar change date and lo  and behold the publications in  the Japanese scientific  literature were using those  dates uncorrected for the one  month.  So at the present time there's  not even an exception.  Except of course Toronto Harbor  is still changing really fast.  Here we have two things  summarized.  The red line is the average air  temperature in the northern  hemisphere over land.  And you can see that it's going  up.  Again you see a lot of  year-to-year variation. 

 And I made a running mean so you  could sort of follow the general  pattern but it's clearly going  up.  The blue line on the top is the  average winter ice duration for  only eight lakes around the  northern hemisphere.  They're well spaced though.  Two are in Wisconsin, one is New  York, three are in Finland and  the other one is Lake Baikal  which is in the far east of  Africa, pardon me, the far east  of Siberia.  And what you see is they're  highly correlated.  One's going up and as it's going  up the ice duration is going  down, in the northern hemisphere  you'd expect that.  If you look more closely, I drew  a vertical line on the right  hand side.  Do you see that vertical line,  it's a very fine line?  And looks what happening to the  temperature in the ice where I  drew that line.  It happens to be a year of  variation when the ice during is  especially low, and it happens  to be a year of variation when  the temperatures are especially  high.  So not only is the general  pattern the same, but they're  mimicking each other, in this  case in an inverse sense because  they're inversely related to  each other. 

 And, in fact, those eight lakes  share 47% of their variability  with the northern hemisphere  land temperatures.  And a couple interesting points  there.  One is how sensitive an  indicator of what's going on  with climate often measured by  temperature and precipitation  with these lakes.  Well, we're losing winter as we  knew it.  I've been on this matter for  some time and a lot of the  things we do in Wisconsin, and  some of us love winter.  I also love spring and summer  and fall but I love winter.  I used to live in Hawaii.  I came back, I like the seasonal  climate.  And some of the things that you  see on this graph or on the  table or this picture, pardon  me, are being threatened.  For example, we no longer have  Kites on Ice, the bottom left. 

 When we last had Kites on Ice  the people who run it kept  coming over to Limnology and  saying John is it safe?  Can we send 2,000 people out on  the lake this day?  And I kept telling them I don't  know if it's safe.  The last thing I was going to do  is stick my neck out on that.  On the day of Kites on Ice it  was raining and there was water  on the ice.  A little bit of a soggy Kites on  Ice, but anyway they had it.  But that's the last year they've  had it and I don't think there's  anybody in the Madison area that  would plan a large event like  that on the lake that would be  willing, six months ahead of  time, to say the ice will be  safe.  Ice fishing, in some years  Mendota's had so little ice you  can't fish on that.  And of course there's a comic  rendition of that in the corner.  The first time I gave a talk on  climate change in lakes was  15-20 years ago and it was up in  Duluth.  And I remember someone saying to  me these lakes are so big they  will not be affected.  That's nonsense John, you cannot  say these lakes are going to be  affected. 

 Well, they are affected.  And this is some work by two  people who work at the  University of Minnesota Duluth,  Austin and Coleman, and look at  the upper left hand corner,  that's the air temperature in  the Duluth, Lake Superior  region.  And look at the lower right  hand, that's the water  temperature in Lake Superior  along the south shore.  And the two things I've circled,  the water temperature has been  changing at about .12  centigrade per year and the air  temperature has been changing  half that fast.  And so now there's an  interesting predicament.  Why would this immense lake be  changing in temperature twice as  fast as the air temperature in  that region is changing?  It's a good puzzle.  I think we can explain it  though.  Let's look at the upper right.  Lake Superior has been losing  ice cover in the same way that  the Arctic has been losing ice  and snow cover.  What that means, as we go along  the right hand side, there's not  as much white material and when  the sun shines down on it, it  gets directly absorbed by the  water. 

 And so the area is losing that  albedo that it had where it  reflected most of it, and that's  one of the main regions that the  Arctic is changing faster than  the regions around here in terms  of that.  So that's one region.  The other reason is in the lower  left hand corner.  Lakes stratify at some time  during the spring to summer  where the warm water doesn't mix  into really deep water anymore  but rather there's a sharp  boundary.  In fact, EA Bersch from this  university many years ago was  the first person and he gave  that a name, the thermal climb.  And this shows the date of lake  stratification and you note the  lake stratification is coming  earlier and earlier and earlier.  Once the lake stratifies, the  water that's being heated by the  sunlight and the air is a  shallow layer.  And so there's not as much of  the lake to heat up.  And so those two things, the  loss of albedo and the fact that  the heat is only being  distributed in the upper mix  layer, and that's becoming more  prevalent for this reason.  Big lakes like Lake Superior are  being influenced. 

 Great Lakes water levels have  been an item of concern and some  of you probably come to the  table thinking that the reason  Lake Michigan is so low right  now is because of global climate  change.  And there's some reason to think  that might be true but let's go  through it.  First of all this is the Lake  Michigan historical water  levels, and you'll notice that  you see a lot of variability but  it's not like the ice data  variability.  The ice data variability was at  an interannual thing.  There was a lot of saw's teeth  in it.  This is much coarser.  And how many remember in  Milwaukee area and here reading  articles in the newspaper about  houses along the Lake Michigan  coast about 15-20 years ago  where the high water caused  erosion of the bottom of the  cliffs and, just like that house  in Lake Delton, slid off into  lake Michigan.  But they were sliding off again  because of high water and  erosion.  And if you look at that and you  go back, you see there's a high  water period, then there's a low  water period, then there's a  high water period, then there's  a low water period.  And so it's a little more  complex than just climate  warming. 

 Climate warming on an  interdecadal basis is not going  the way, climate warming is a  long haul.  Well there's at least three  things going on in Lake  Michigan, an oscillatory dynamic  that I just pointed out, and in  fact Hector Bravo at our  Milwaukee campus has a nice  paper that points out that those  are real and that they are  related to large scale  oscillators in the climate, like  when I mentioned that El Nino  for Lake Mendota's ice, only  they are called the Pacific  decadal oscillation which is up  near the Aleutian Islands.  And the north Atlantic   oscillation which is south of  Iceland.  And the Arctic oscillation which  is across the poles.  And he finds a very high  correspondence in that variation  that occurs in that decadal  scale in those oscillatory  dynamics.  A lot of people have thought  that the channel erosion where  Lake Michigan/Huron drains  southward was the reason.  And I've seen a few things on  that but I'm not too convinced  what's going on.  But apparently there is some  amount of water that's been  escaping there more than it did  in the past.  And the last idea is climate  change.  I'm going to show the you most,  well here's the reason that  people think that the water  level should be changing. 

 One of them was that the ice  cover on Lake Michigan, Lake  Superior, it's happening on all  the Great Lakes, but the idea  there is if you have less ice  cover, if less of the lake is  covered with ice, you have more  exposed water and the water  evaporates more rapidly and also  it's a little warmer so it  evaporates more rapidly.  Ice sublimates to a gas and  that's a very slow rate.  And so the idea was with the  less ice cover you have less  evaporation so that causes the  lakes to go up.  That's correct.  Okay?  But what else is happening?  Here you see the annual runoff  graphs for the world now  compared to the end of this  century.  So these are based on  Intergovernmental Panel of  Climate Change models.  And I've circled two areas, the  Great Lakes and the Southwest.  And it's interesting the  Southwest and dry and you know  it's getting dryer, our region  and wet and it's getting wetter.  The scenarios for the future say  that our region will get wetter  and there will be more runoff  and the Southwest will continue  to get dryer.  Now the idea there is if it's  getting wetter and we're getting  more runoff that should cause  the lakes to go up. 

 And so you've evaporation  increasing causing them to go  down.  You've got more runoff causing  them to go up.  What's the net affect?  Well, on a teeter-totter world  it's perfect.  It balances each other.  And that seems to be where we  are now.  These are some studies by Don --  at the University of Illinois.  Good climate scientists in which  he's taken a much more complex  model than just what happens to  ice and runoff, many other  things go into that model, and  if you look at the left hand  side of this graph it's what his  models say the contribution of  climate change is to the Great  Lakes level at the present.  And you notice it's zero.  In other words, he argues that  at the present time the increase  evaporation from warmer  temperatures and less ice cover  is balanced by the increase in  runoff that's occurring into the  lake.  Let's look to mid-century, and  he simulated what happens in  mid-century and towards the end  of the century, and what you see  is that by mid-century  evaporation begins to win and  the average water level goes  down maybe a foot. 

 And by the end of the century  perhaps two feet.  We like to express things with  variability about them and that  variability that you see in the  green line and the red line is  because he used two different  scenarios of how rapidly CO2  increases in the atmosphere.  So the present low is due to the  oscillation.  The oscillation is five or six  feet, every 20-30 years, is much  greater than the one or two feet  we expect from climate change.  Fishes, do they care about  climate change?  Well, everybody knows they do.  We have warm water, cool water  and cold water fish and they've  got those names for a reason.  Climate change affects fishes in  three ways: Water temperature,  water levels and flows and  invasion of exotics.  Well, let's take a look at Lake  Michigan first of all, the Great  Lakes.  Here we've got a graph that sort  of summarizes what temperatures  different fishes like.  And you'll notice the warm ones,  the bass, the gar, the blue gill  up in the upper right. 

 In the middle you see things  like the walleye and the perch,  sort of the cool water fishes.  And on the bottom left you see  the cold water fishes and I've  circled the lake trout.  And typically fishes, if they're  given a choice, will stay within  about a 10-degree band.  5-degrees higher than their best  temperature, 5-degrees lower.  And so we can specify a thermal  habitat that lake trout would  live in if they had it  available.  And of course sometimes the  environment is colder than that.  You'll notice the bottom of that  is not down near zero.  What do we propose is happening  to the thermal habitat for this  cold water fish in Lake  Michigan?  And here you see the results for  lake trout of four scenarios.  The top scenario gives the  temperatures, there's water  depth on the left, January to  July to December along the  bottom axis.  And you see the area of the lake  that is suitable for lake trout  to grow best, escape predators  best, chase prey best. 

 And then you see below three  different climate models where  the doubling of greenhouse  gases.  And we expect greenhouse gases  to be doubled certainly by  mid-century.  And you'll notice that all three  of those are bigger.  Now there was a  counter-intuitive result.  All environmentalists are what  looking for bad news?  That's good news.  Theoretically, based on this one  thing alone, that the amount of  habitat for lake trout, which is  a cold loving fish, in Lake  Michigan, that is usually too  cold for lake trout, will be  better.  Turns out so will perch and  walleye and even the small mouth  bass.  But when this was calculated for  the small mouth bass it would be  not be good fishing.  They just got their toe into the  water with the doubling of  greenhouse gases.  Well, how about our small lakes?  This was done for Minnesota  lakes but it wouldn't be much  different than for ours. 

 We grouped fish into warm, cool  and cold water fishes.  In the clear lakes like a lakes  you like to go swimming in and  green lakes like Lake Mendota,  and green lakes like lake  Mendota have more problems with  low oxygen during the summer  especially in the deep cold  water.  And here you see the warm water  fishes flourish.  Cool water fishes I don't have  error bars on that, maybe they  do a little better.  And the cold water fishes, the  thing like the trout, the siskel  and the white fish are what lose  in the small lakes.  So now there's another  contradiction.  Lake trout are maybe going to  better in Lake Michigan and do  poorer in the small lakes.  And be prepared for that.  The difference between different  habitats around the Midwest, you  don't get the same results.  And the reason you don't is that  the small lakes do not have a  very big cold water area under  the thermal climb and during the  summer the oxygen tends to be  used up in that and especially  in the green lakes that have a  lot of productivity in them. 

 And so by the end of the summer  what's happening to these cold  water fishes in the small lakes  they don't have any oxygen.  It's not that it got too warm  for them it's just that the  warmer thing contributed to a  longer period of stratification.  I could go on with that, let's  not.  Here are the distribution of  lakes in the boreal shield that  have lake trout.  And you notice we're right at  the southern edge and so is  Minnesota where there are any  lake trout.  So I think our inland lakes are  going have a serious problem  with lake trout.  If you look at these scatter of  lakes, the ones that are further  to the south where it's getting  warmer, you'd expect the ones  to the south to be more  sensitive.  And the depth, the ones to the  south are also shallower.  And so they have less of an area  under the thermal climb to live,  and sooner the oxygen will --.  So that, in fact, these lakes  along the southern boundary both  in the US and Canada are likely  because they're shallow and  they're going to experience more  heating. 

 Bad news for lake trout.  The ones in the northern part of  this region are deep, it's not  warming as fast, they will  certainly last longer.  And, in fact, the Canadians have  been thinking about triage  thing.  There's so many lakes in Canada  they can't work with them all.  And so why try to protect the  lake trout in a lake where  they're going to go anyway?  Why try to manage them in a lake  where they're going to do pretty  well for a long time?  And put their effort on those  lakes that are in the middle of  this distribution where they  might be able to make a  difference.  Last thing I'm going to talk  about is extreme events and this  comes out of the one of the IPC  publications and you see a  previous climate and a new  climate, and what you see is  that as you slide the climate to  the right even without  increasing the variability you  would expect to get more extreme  events.  I'm going to talk about extreme  events but I'm not going to talk  about hot weather.  I'm going to talk about water  levels and I'm going to talk  about ice.  First of all, let's just look at  our friend Lake Mendota.  What I did is I circled, I put a  red circle around the 10  shortest ice covers on Lake  Mendota. 

 And blue circle around the 10  longest.  And in fact, what's happening is  the odds of getting a really  short ice cover are increasing  in this distribution as you go  from the left side to the right  side.  And it's not just a visual thing  that you see here.  You can see it but it's true  statistically.  The odds are increasing.  And the odds of having a really  long ice cover are decreasing.  Now this graph looks a lot like  that.  But it's one that has a little  bit more concern to us.  This is the water level of Lake  Mendota and you could do this  for other lakes in the states  and other rivers in the states  and you'd see similar patterns I  think.  Each of those points is a two  day average and it goes back to  1915, and what you see again,  the 10 highest water levels, the  odds of those occurring are on  the right hand side. 

 They are increasing.  And in fact, if you look at the  last 10 years you see that  they're all scattered up there  and the highest ones that we've  seen, the two highest ones we've  seen have occurred in the last  10 or 15 years.  The lowest ones, you see a  cluster in the far left, so the  odds are decreasing.  But you even see a few in the  right hand corner.  So maybe variability is  increasing even.  Not just the odds for a high or  a low but maybe the odds will be  higher for both of them.  But what's of concern to cities  like Madison and other lakes  that should have been a concern  to Lake Delton residents is that  these really high years are  years when in fact, nobody gets  killed by the mean, nobody's  property is lost by the mean and  no lake ecosystem is disturbed  and becomes chaotic by the mean.  It's these extreme values that  are important.  I did it for ice here and I did  it for water level.  Well, is that due to climate  change?  The effect of global warming on  the climate and the water cycle  is pretty straightforward. 

 You warm it up, it speeds up the  water cycle and you get more  evaporation.  You get more evaporation off the  Gulf of Mexico.  The air has more water in it.  You tend to get more cumulus  cloud buildup, and you get more  storms, more floods, more  droughts.  And if you look at this region  you find that in the last  hundred years the frequency of  heavy rainfall has been  increasing, green side of this  graph.  And if you look at the blue  side, you see that we expect it  to increase based on global  climate models.  So we're in a transition and I  think a lot of you have noticed  that transition with the high  water levels we've experienced  in several places in the state.  Steve -- summarized it this way.  Since the 40s he's looked at the  occurrences in each decade of  greater than one inch, greater  than two inch and greater than  three inch rain events.  You'll notice that all three of  these are increasing and highest  decade we've had so far is the  decade we're in. 

 Entirely consistent with the  projections of the climate  models and what we expect to  happen to precipitation from  those.  Here is the storm in June 1 and  notice that 14 inches, I think  that's right over Baraboo, maybe  it's not quite over Baraboo, but  it's in that region.  You heard from other  climatologists that have  been speaking to us that that  occurrence of that highest  rainfall, this spatial scale, is  chaotic.  A climate science can't predict  where the highest rainfalls are  going to occur in southern  Wisconsin.  So I think the people that are  planning and working in Madison  should not say we only had a  4-inch rain.  We could have just as well had  a 14-inch rain or an 11-inch  rain or a 10-inch rain.  And I don't think we're prepared  for it, certainly the Baraboo  hills and that area we're not  prepared for that 14-inch rain.  And I don't think the people who  lived in Lake Delton figure they  lost their house only to climate  change.  And in fact no climate  scientists would say Lake Delton  emptied out because of climate  change.  What they would say is in a  warmer climate you can expect a  higher frequency of storms of  that intensity. 

 But it's sort of like when the  doctor tells you people your age  have a 50% chance of dying by a  heart attack in 10 years.  We have to talk in  probabilistics sense.  We can't say that you're going  to die of a heart attack in ten  years.  And the same thing, these are  very probabilistic statements  but we expect a higher frequency  and with that these kind of  things.  The water runs off, carries a  lot of nutrients of sediment,  contributes to lake  eutrophication.  I'm going to stop with this  graph because I'm just a hair  over.  And talk about the two things  that we're doing in Wisconsin  related to climate change and  one is mitigation and the other  was adaptation.  We're not very far along in  either one of them.  On this graph you see the  temperatures in the last century  on the left hand side and you  see a suite of possible future  scenarios that come from the  Intergovernmental Panel on  Climate Change for the next  hundred years.  The red one is what we call  business as usual. 

 China, India, Europe and America  never to decide to negotiate an  agreement of any kind.  We don't become more energy  efficient.  We don't shift away from a  carbon economy.  Basically we do it the way we're  running the world now.  If we do that, their best  estimate of where we might be by  the end of the century is 7.2  degrees Fahrenheit warmer  around the globe.  The blue line, the blue line is  one that some people think we  might be able to achieve.  That we might get our act  together enough that we end up  with the blue line.  And then we'd only be 3.2  degrees warmer.  A lot of people, you'll notice  none of them go down.  Not even within the imagination  of any of the climate scientists  are a scenario that would cause  us to cool in the next hundred  years. 

 If we take those two scenarios,  there's a lot of people working  to find out can we achieve the  3.2?  Can we achieve it  technologically?  Can we achieve it socially,  politically?  And is it possible to achieve  that?  And it's not entirely certain.  The 3.2  is more important to people  like me who work on the  adaptation size.  Is 3.2 degrees  warmer safe enough?  Are we content if everybody else  working on mitigation can get us  down to 3.2?  And a good example to worry  about greatly are things like  the sea level rise, is that safe  enough?  And a lot of people are trying  to figure out if it is.  For us and talking about fish,  you heard John Lyons and -- talk  about is 3.2  safe enough to preserve our  trout resources in the state,  the stream trout.  And if you remember his numbers,  3.2  would raise havoc.  We'd have major declines if we  end up with that.  Well, WICCI is involved in that  adaptation side.  And what we're trying to do is  come up with identifying where  the real risks are.  Trying to gather the information  about them, try to find out if  there are certain kind of key  data or research we knew to deal  with them and finally to suggest  adaptation strategies.  In some cases, let's be frank,  the ice cover disappears, we're  not going to put cooling coils  in Lake Mendota. 

 In some cases our adaptation  will just be to do without.  And people like ice boaters and  ice fishers will give up  something that they've treasured  for a long time.  In other cases, like some of the  storm runoff events, I think  with infrastructure we have a  chance of adapting and being  better prepared than we were on  this particular one.  Thank you, very much.  (applause)