A team of international researchers reported that some of the world’s most important freshwater sources — from the Caspian Sea between Europe and Asia to South America’s Lake Titicaca — lost water at a cumulative rate of around 22 gigatonnes per year for nearly three decades. That’s about 17 times the volume of Lake Mead, the United States’ largest reservoir.

Fangfang Yao, a surface hydrologist at the University of Virginia who led the study published in the journal Science, said 56 per cent of the decline in natural lakes was driven by climate warming and human consumption, with warming “the larger share of that.”

Climate scientists generally think that the world’s arid areas will become drier under climate change, and wet areas will get wetter, but the study found significant water loss even in humid regions. “This should not be overlooked,” Yao said.

Scientists assessed almost 2,000 large lakes using satellite measurements combined with climate and hydrological models.

They found that unsustainable human use, changes in rainfall and runoff, sedimentation, and rising temperatures have driven lake levels down globally, with 53 per cent of lakes showing a decline from 1992 to 2020.

Nearly two billion people who live in a drying lake basin are directly affected and many regions have faced shortages in recent years.

Scientists and campaigners have long said it is necessary to prevent global warming beyond 1.5 C to avoid the most catastrophic consequences of climate change. The world is currently warming at a rate of around 1.1 C.

Thursday’s study found unsustainable human use dried up lakes, such as the Aral Sea in Central Asia and the Dead Sea in the Middle East, while lakes in Afghanistan, Egypt and Mongolia were hit by rising temperatures, which can increase water loss to the atmosphere.

Lakes in Canada’s Arctic were part of the drying trend, the study found, “partially because of changes in temperature and PET (potential evapotranspiration), which is in line with broader climate changes toward increasing evaporative loss due to higher lake temperatures and reduced lake ice extents.”

Water levels rose in a quarter of the lakes, often as a result of dam construction in remote areas such as the Inner Tibetan Plateau.

Declines seen in naturally occurring lakes were in part offset, the study found, by “precipitation- and runoff-driven LWS (lake water storage) gains” in others such as the Great Lakes and Lake Winnipeg.

In all, the study said, between 1984 and 2015, satellites have observed a loss of 90,000 square km of permanent water area — an area equivalent to the surface of Lake Superior — whereas 184,000 square km of new water bodies, mainly reservoirs, were formed elsewhere.

Trends and drivers of global lake water storage have remained “poorly known,” the study added, which “impedes sustainable management of surface water resources, both now and in the future.””

— Gloria Dickie is a Reuters climate and environment correspondent in London. Includes files from Glacier FarmMedia Network staff.

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“What we are seeing is a big change in the weather pattern. For most of January we’ve had some really warm temperatures,” Kehler said, noting this has been due to Pacific air flowing across the region.

“A lot of cold air that was previously contained in the Arctic is going to come south and bring us a prolonged period of extreme cold,” he continued, expecting the system to reach the Prairies late in the week or during the weekend, then sticking around for at least two weeks.

Kehler forecast highs in the upper-minus-teens to the low -20s. C The lows are to push down into the high -20s and low -30s C.

“The -30s is probably going to happen,” he said with temperatures in the -40s very unlikely. However, he warned the windchills could reach that cold, given the expected windspeeds accompanying this Arctic system could be rather brisk.

“Once the Arctic air becomes more entrenched, we switch to a high-pressure system,” Kehler explained, noting windspeeds would then decrease. “But when you get things that cold, it doesn’t take much wind to drag windchills into the -40s.”

He said temperatures that cold are rather uncommon on the Prairies, depending where one is. It’s been 15 years since Winnipeg had temperatures that frigid.

— Glen Hallick reports for MarketsFarm from Winnipeg.

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The data compiled by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA also revealed that the last eight years were the eight hottest and the last decade was the warmest since record-keeping began in 1880, officials said.

Global warming is “very real. It’s now, and it’s impacting real people,” Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview. Last year’s extreme heat wave in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, intense rains from Hurricane Ida and flooding in Germany and China were linked to global warming, he said.

A key indicator of climate change, the heat content of the world’s oceans, reached a record level in 2021, the agencies said. Oceans absorb more than 90 per cent of the excess heat trapped in the earth’s atmosphere by greenhouse gases, and those warmer waters influence weather patterns and changes in currents.

“What’s scientifically interesting about that is it tells us why the planet is warming,” Schmidt said. “It’s warming because of our impacts on greenhouse gas concentrations.”

According to NOAA, 2021 average temperatures were 1.51 F, or 0.84 C, above the 20th-century average, putting it just ahead of 2018. NASA’s analysis, which uses a 30-year baseline period, showed 2021 temperatures tied with 2018 as the sixth-warmest year.

The greatest warming occurred in the Northern Hemisphere, both on land and in the Arctic. The Arctic is warming more than three times faster than the global mean, the agencies said.

In an overview of its report earlier this week, NOAA said last year was the fourth-warmest on record for the United States.

— Reporting for Reuters by Nichola Groom.

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“Happy to report the successful completion and departure of the first grain vessel of the season from Churchill,” Arctic Gateway said on Twitter and Facebook.

The vessel arrived at the port on Aug. 25, but loading was delayed due to adverse weather, according to reports.

Arctic Gateway described the shipment as “a really important first step in re-establishing the Port of Churchill as an important part of Canada’s position as an agricultural export leader in the world.”

When reached, Arctic Gateway officials declined to comment and said they would not provide any details on the cargo beyond the available social media posts on what was a “commercial transaction.”

According to Canadian Grain Commission data, there were 35,400 tonnes of durum and 11,500 tonnes of lentils in storage in Churchill as of Sept. 1.

Online tracking data shows a cargo ship named Federal Satsuki left Churchill on Saturday, with Sarroch, on the Italian island of Sardina, its next port of call. The vessel has the capacity to carry 43,561 tonnes of grain.

The Port of Churchill, on the shores of Hudson Bay in Manitoba, is Canada’s only deepwater Arctic port and a typical season runs from late July through October.

OmniTrax, the previous owner of the port and rail line servicing it, abruptly halted grain shipments in the 2016 season, after fewer than 200,000 tonnes moved through the facility the previous year. Grain movement had slowed since the demise of the Canadian Wheat Board’s single desk in 2012.

Sections of the rail line washed out in 2017 and were left in disrepair until the Arctic Gateway Group took over in 2018 and began repairs.

AGG is a partnership of First Nations and other northern communities, Toronto financier Fairfax Financial Holdings and Regina-based pulse processor AGT Food and Ingredients.

— Phil Franz-Warkentin writes for MarketsFarm, a Glacier FarmMedia division specializing in grain and commodity market analysis and reporting.

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Examining long-term trends for ice floating on the ocean since the 1950s, scientists in Germany and the United States projected the ocean around the North Pole would be ice-free in summers by the mid-2040s at current levels of emissions.

In the historical records, they found that every tonne of carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere meant on average the loss of three square metres of ice in September, when the ice reaches a minimum extent before expanding in winter.

That made it possible to “grasp the contribution of personal carbon dioxide emissions to the loss of Arctic sea ice,” scientists at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center wrote in the journal Science.

Each passenger taking a return flight from New York to Europe, or driving a gasoline car 4,000 kms, would emit about a tonne of carbon dioxide, they estimated.

A long-term retreat of Arctic sea ice is already causing profound changes, disrupting the lives of indigenous peoples while opening the region to more oil and gas exploration and shipping.

Scientists usually deal in more abstract terms such as billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases. “Here it’s more personal,” lead author Dirk Notz of the Max Planck Institute told Reuters.

Some other scientists said the study was simplistic.

“This sounds like a rather crude equation,” Peter Wadhams, a professor of ocean physics at Cambridge University, told Reuters.

He said ice could disappear from the Arctic Ocean as early as 2017 or 2018 because of other factors triggered by man-made climate change, such as shifts in winds and rising sea temperatures.

In September 2016, sea ice shrank to an annual minimum extent of 4.14 million square kilometres (1.60 million square miles), matching 2007 as the second smallest in the satellite record behind 2012.

The study said goals set under the 2015 Paris Agreement for curbing emissions were insufficient to avert the loss of ice.

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Greenhouse gas emissions from industry left their first traces in the temperatures of tropical oceans and the Arctic around 1830, researchers wrote in a recent journal article, challenging widespread views that man-made climate change began only in the 20th century.

The Industrial Revolution began around 1750 in Britain, with a surge in the use of coal to power factories, ships and railways, and gradually spread around the world.

Greenhouse gases at the time were only a fraction of those now blamed for trapping excessive levels of the sun’s heat in the atmosphere, stoking more droughts, floods, heat waves and rising sea levels.

“Our findings show that the climate can respond very quickly to changes in greenhouse gases,” lead author Nerilie Abram, of the Australian National University, told Reuters of the findings published in the journal Nature.

The scientists detected a rise in temperatures in the 19th century by studying the growth of old trees, corals, the makeup of lake sediments and air trapped in ice cores in Antarctica.

Their computer models showed that natural factors — such as changes in the sun’s energy output or the Earth’s orbit — could not fully explain the warming trend.

The rising heat only made sense when factoring in an early dose of man-made greenhouse gases, they wrote.

Previously, many scientists have reckoned a small rise in 19th century temperatures was a rebound after a sun-dimming volcanic eruption of Tambora in Indonesia in 1815.

“This is further evidence that the climate has already changed significantly since the pre-industrial period,” said Ed Hawkins, a climate scientists at Reading University who was not involved in the study.

Last year, almost 200 nations agreed at a Paris summit to shift from fossil fuels and set a goal of limiting rises in average surface temperatures to “well below” 2 C above pre-industrial times, ideally below 1.5 C.

The Paris deal does not define pre-industrial. Temperatures this year, likely to set new records, are just over 1 C above levels in the 1880s, a widely used baseline in climate science.

Abram said using a baseline of 1800 would make the Paris Agreement harder to achieve by adding perhaps 0.2 C.

“We are frighteningly close already to 1.5,” she said.

— Alister Doyle is a Reuters correspondent covering environmental and climate change-related issues from Oslo.

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“The elevator is starting to fill up and the rail cars are lining up for delivery on time. We’ve got ships predicted to start,” said Merv Tweed, president of OmniTrax Canada, the railway company that operates the port.

“We’ll be full steam ahead with as many weeks as we can get in.”

The Hudson Bay port is budgeting for a 500,000-tonne grain season, and Tweed said it’s three-quarters of the way there with commitments.

Last year the port handled 540,000 tonnes of grain.

Heat has posed some issues, causing the company to cumulatively lose two-and-a-half to three days of work to avoid damaging the rail’s track bed.

“We have to make certain decisions to delay until the evening when it’s cooler, where repairs are absolutely necessary,” Tweed said. “It has been a challenge.”

Rail movement to Churchill this year started about two weeks later than normal to reduce the cost of maintenance on the track, but Tweed said the change hasn’t has much of an impact.

In the past, the port relied on the Canadian Wheat Board, which has since been privatized and renamed G3 Canada Ltd.

“Obviously with their own infrastructure they’re trying to utilize their equipment the same way we are, and we expected that; we’ve built that into our business plan.”

The Port of Churchill is North America’s only deep-water Arctic seaport. Its shipping season is expected to run until early November or until the bay’s ice is too thick for ships.

— Jade Markus writes for Commodity News Service Canada, a Winnipeg company specializing in grain and commodity market reporting. Follow CNS Canada at @CNSCanada on Twitter.

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