New study reveals remote lakes in Ecuador are not immune to climate change
From Queen’s University
A study of three remote lakes in Ecuador led by Queen’s University researchers has revealed the vulnerability of tropical high mountain lakes to global climate change – the first study of its kind to show this. The data explains how the lakes are changing due to the water warming as the result of climate change.
The results could have far-reaching consequences for Andean water resources as the lakes provide 60 per cent of the drinking water for Cuenca, the third largest city in Ecuador.
“Until recently we knew little about the effects of recent climate changes on tropical high-mountain lakes,” says Neal Michelutti (Biology), lead author and a senior research scientist at Queen’s University’s Paleoecological Environmental Assessment and Research Lab (PEARL). “We saw major changes in the algae consistent with the water warming that indicates changes in the physical structure of the water column.”
Dr. Michelutti and his research team visited three lakes in Cajas National Park. They retrieved water and core samples from the centre of each of the lakes for analysis. The lakes are accessible only by hiking trails and boats are prohibited. There is also no development within the park meaning the lakes are still in pristine condition.
“Andean societies are amongst the most vulnerable when it comes to the impact of climate change,” says Dr. Michelutti. “Warming in the Andes is occurring at a rate nearly twice the global average and it’s already impacting water resources as shown in this research. These changes are also a sign of bigger changes that are coming.”
Dr. Michelutti and his team are planning to return to the region for further research this summer and will be working with lake managers in the area to try to preserve the water.
“We have previously recorded similar types of threshold shifts in polar and temperate regions,” says research team member John Smol (Biology). “These changes are harbingers of processes that will likely affect the food chain and reverberate throughout the ecosystem. We now have data showing that lakes from the Arctic to the Andes, and everywhere in between, are rapidly changing due to our impacts on climate.”
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Also working on the research team are Alexander Wolfe (University of Alberta), Colin Cooke (Government of Alberta), William Hobbs (Washington State Department of Ecology) and Mathias Vuille (University at Albany, SUNY).
To read the study, visit the PEARL website.
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The paper:
http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchObject.action?uri=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0115338&representation=PDF
Four decades ago a professor in the Environmental Studies Faculty at a fine Canadian University where I was studying for my Masters Degree, did a presentation on Cloud Forests from the very area near Cuenca where these lakes are located. This professor was contributing to the then Ecuadorian government’s development of a National Plan of “Buen Vivir” to protect sensitive and unique environments (and the subsequent lucrative “academic” tourist resource) through the development of National Parks. The Professor was very doubtful of a positive outcome since illegal farming and resource exploitation in these areas is extensive. The professor noted that increasing numbers of the indigenous human population had been moving into these protected areas since the 1950’s to eek out living. One of the more interesting slide photo’s he presented showed a squatter farm on a slope beside a lake in the same ecological zone at 4000+ meters elevation. In the photo of the couple who were farming this plot, the man could be seen to be having a “dump” into the lake while a woman about 20 meters away was drawing water for cooking. That being said, plankton do bloom and prosper when nutrients such as agricultural fertilizers find their way into the water shed… and, since I live less than a kilometre away from Queen’s, should I be concerned about the “hot air” (gullible warming) coming from there?
Research is all bullshit huh
I neglected to mention in my previous post the presence of numerous ungulates (llamas?) and obvious grazing patterns in the pristine alpine grasses.
No! No! No! WE HAVE SEEN THIS BEFORE!
It is acid rain that is heating up these lakes! As everyone knows acid is hot — that is why you get acid burns.
To save those pristine lakes we need brave climate activists to fly over them and drop in tons of crushed limestone! We must counter this hot acid boiling from our skies! Greenpeace, where are you! These lakes scream in agony. Soon the waters will be on fire! Start a fund raising campaign immediately!
Eugene WR Gallun
I wrote a long post as an addition to my earlier one. I found a lot of information that suggests the authors may not have considered all of the potential impacts other than climate. Unfortunately, I did not save my work while writing it and WordPress lost the post before I could publish it. I will try to recover most of it later.
I agree opluso. The higher lake went first, but is 800m above the lowest lake. The temperature change of higher faster must assume the missing “hot spot”. Even if true, they have to produce evidence that the elevation differences have been accounted for (lapse rate). Warming faster, and being warmer are not the same thing. Using one weather station doesn’t provide that data. RSS and UAH readings may provide better data but are not given (probably because they don’t confirm warming). Limnologists and algae specialists have been studying these species for decades. Surely they have run controlled temperature experiments to determine if there are indeed “critical” temperature tipping points that alter species compositions.
Other than the climate change garbage and assumptions, the paper is well done. Years ago it would have been a welcome one sample, three-site analysis published as a note. It really is a shame that everyone involved in environmental research has to bow to the climate change meme to stay in the game.
Yes, WordPress is wonky. I’ve set up a secondary, WP-cookie-dumping profile in Firefox to deal with some of the issues. Cookies can interfere with posting when you’ve opened more than one WP blog in any one session.
Be aware (if you’re not already) that WordPress manages your account via your eddress, not your user name. If you’ve set up more than one WP blog with a particular eddress, bad things can happen.
This Park hiking map shows that two of the selected lakes (Toreodora and Llaviuco) are quite close to paved roads. http://parque-nacional-cajas.org/maps/Tor2LLaviucoviaB.pdf
Laguna Chorreras appears to be northeast of the main highway, possibly just outside the Park boundaries. It is a bit more of a hike from the road than the other two and is identified on the map provided by this study of vegetation around the lake. http://www.pitt.edu/~mabbott1/climate/mark/Abstracts/Pubs/Hansenetal03PPP.pdf
The Pitt study cited above pointed out that in this region of Ecuador, “most of the original forests are gone, being replaced by agricultural areas and by pine and eucalyptus plantations.” They also identified a history of slash-and-burn agriculture (through charcoal in lake sediments) lasting from the end of the last ice age until at least the Spanish conquest.
Could it be the researchers are trying to mis-represent the lakes inaccessibility and “pristine condition”? Well “inaccessible” does sound better than “has no boat ramps”. Imagine the courage and dedication required to hike 50 meters to a lake from a paved road.
One natural and the other claimed to be
by mancaused by ‘Climate Change Forces’Just curious, was any of the same methodology, equipment, contractors, personnel used in this assessment as was used in Paraguay — or the SNOTEL system in the West US?
Just curious…
3 Step Climate Research for dummies.
1. Find some place where something, anything in the local ecology has changed.
2. Say it ruins everything.
3. Blame it on Climate change.
Note the only robust scientific step in the process is step 1 where change has to be identified and measured. Step 2 and 3 is open to all scientific and artistic license. If you become especially good at steps 2 and 3, then you you should consider a career writing novels.
it’s not like these Andean areas have not been hit before,
“The role of drought in the collapse of the ancient states of the Andean Middle Horizon has received a great deal of attention in recent years. The only Andean valley where both principal states of this time period, Wari and Tiwanaku, had established settlements is in Moquegua, Peru. Based on a GIS network analysis of ancient irrigation systems and detailed palaeoclimatic data, I assess the assertion that a centuries-long drought caused the collapse of state colonies in this valley circa AD 1000
The Cañar weather station appears to be on the edge of the town of Cañar, potentially close enough to be influenced by recent population growth, etc. But the Lat/Long I found may not be sufficiently precise to determine its exact location: 2.55 S / 78.94 W
I attempted to create a regional map on Google to relate the distance from the Park’s lakes to the weather station (about 20 miles NE of the Park):
https://www.google.com/maps/@-2.5831375,-79.0736996,10z?hl=en
Of course, the significant elevation changes involved would be extremely important in any effort to compare climate apples-to-apples.
Nifty map. I toggled the terrain feature. Still can’t quite figure out which lakes were studied. Probably not important, since the entire paper is warmist drivel. No prior studies, so it’s all handwaving and guesswork. Typical.
If a location is warming at twice the global average, it is automatically assumed to be due to climate change. But if a location is below the global average, it is automatically assumed to be due to natural variation. Why couldn’t it be the other way around?
…To save those pristine lakes we need brave climate activists to fly over them and drop in tons of crushed limestone! We must counter this hot acid boiling from our skies! Greenpeace, where are you! These lakes scream in agony. Soon the waters will be on fire! Start a fund raising campaign immediately!
Eugene WR Gallun…
That would be the Eugene WR Gallun of ‘Eugene WR Gallun’s Crushed Limestone and Cargo Planes, Inc’, would it?
Why yes, yes it would.
…And storm-door company.
So the water is warming because of “climate change”, not “global warming”. Got it. And the reason they “know” the water is warming is because of algae change. Classic agenda-driven “science”.
C’mon Bruce, be reasonable.
Are you suggesting there is some other way to detect the water temperature change?
I mean, we are talking real science here, not that theoretical modelled, data-manipulated stuff.
Fine, I’ll say it, IT’S WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT!
I’m not detecting any sincerity from you.
/grin
I will note that the CAGW lies, half-truths, misdirection, and misconceptions are not worse than we thought – they are exactly as bad as we think.
I don’t know why they are bothering to return. They could write their report from home. It will say that the warming at these lakes is much worse than they expected and it is now urgent that something is done about climate change and it will be released just in time for the Paris Con ( ference ).
Free air miles , nice photos for their facebook pages , allows them to show how they spent their grant money and it gets them out of the office .
Of course it gives them something to show at conferences they fly to where they can say the worlds doomed if people don’t stop doing things like ‘flying ‘ too.
The whole thing seems rather rediculous. Plankton will chage in a lake from one year to the next without any outside forcing. It is all part of natural cycles. To believe that 1.15°C change in air temperature is going to somehow be the major cause of planton changes, considering public recreation (Fishing/camping/ and maybe swiming) seems ludicrous.
thinking of finnlandia, land of 100.000 lakes.
Thinking of malaria in italys po region;
chinese farmers dump corpses of dead swine in the Jangtse.
and so on…
BUT: the andes have serious problems with 3 lakes due to 1.7C temp abberation!
Remarkable. Hans
O, the huge Andes T!
The timing of the changes could also correspond to the introduction of trout to the area. Fish have been shown to have a significant impact on nutrient cycling. The paper notes that these are super-oligotrophic lakes. In lakes with a nutrient deficit, any increase in nutrients would be expected to have a pronounced impact on the resident phytoplankton. The tourist information shows that one of the study lakes has 2 fishing piers, and trout fishing is encouraged in an effort to manage the population.
bangladesh’s braggwater, ‘natural induced’ beaver fewer in Alasca, Canada –
SAY: STOP IT !
Hans
If you would like to see the paper (free), it’s here:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0115338
.mods, you might want to add that link to the bottom of the article. (TIA)
and they have been “right” all along!
9 Feb: WaPo: Puneet Kollipara: Why climate scientists are right about how hot the planet is going to get
One key concept that climate scientists and policymakers use to forecast future global warming — and estimate how much we should reduce greenhouse-gas emissions — is known as “climate sensitivity.” …
But given how complex the climate system is, how do we know that the IPCC’s sensitivity estimate holds true?…
It’s in this context that a new piece of evidence — just published in the journal Nature — backs up the IPCC. And it comes, of all places, from a set of tiny microorganisms, preserved in ocean sediments, whose shells hold chemical fingerprints of past carbon dioxide concentrations going back millions of years. An analysis of these carbon dioxide fingerprints, in conjunction with other climate records stretching back millions of years, shows that Earth’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide has long fallen in that familiar 1.5 to 4.5 degree range…
In other words, the Earth’s climate is as responsive to rising carbon dioxide concentrations as we’ve long suspected…
”This suggests that the research community has a sound understanding of what the climate will be like as we move toward a Pliocene-like warmer future caused by human greenhouse gas emissions,” said study co-author Gavin Foster of the University of Southampton
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/02/09/why-climate-scientists-are-right-about-how-hot-the-planet-is-going-to-get/
Pat, really… your citations need to better than just newspapers and magazines if you want to prove CO2 is a menace.
Most of us are here to learn the real truth, not somebody’s take in the media.
And, who is “they”, anyway, who’ve authored empirically indisputable models so far?
Gawd, “who are they” (lived in hill country too long)
I’ve read the paper. It has a lot of pretty graphics, but the only really new data are pCO2 determinations for the latest Pliocene and earliest Pleistocene from two high resolution cores. This shows that pCO2 dropped fairly steeply about 2.8 MA ago. However the first major glaciation (the Praetiglian) only started about 2.6 million years ago, at a time when pCO2 was actually rising and about as high as it is now (400 ppm) according to the new data. No comment on this in the paper of course.
Oh by the way, the paper is at:
http://www.nature.com/articles/nature14145.epdf?referrer_access_token=SIYEVHgd1CCi0ePUvzU1lNRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0PA34R-B7no1IDgBoCUO277zwRubxmm2WmPEjJC_AttfFcmTswA5ckt_s84OORoQvniHaChldxvo_vuMpnIDHat
This is part of a “Nature Content Sharing Initiative”, which is by the way a pretty nasty piece of goods. You can read the paper but you are not allowed to download it and you can´t copy the graphics, so no serious analysis is possible. Which is undoubtedly the object of the whole exercise.
tty February 10, 2015 at 3:37 pm: Yes, you can’t print or even copy either, and attempting to Share via email crashed Safari. BUT, you can take screen shots of each page, and you CAN print those. /Mr Lynn
Apparently there is an abandoned hacienda right on the beach at Laguna Llaviuco. Picture here:
http://render-2.snapfish.com/render2/is=Yup6aQQ%7C%3Dup6RKKt%3Axxr%3D0-qpDPfRt7Pf7mrPfrj7t%3DzrRfDUX%3AeQaQxg%3Dr%3F87KR6xqpxQQGex00nxeJQxv8uOc5xQQQGGoe0aQnQGqpfVtB%3F*KUp7BHSHqqy7XH6gX0QPGe%7CRup6lQQ%7C/of=50,590,442
One wonders when it was built and when it was abandoned, and about sewage. These lakes look less and less pristine it seems.
Good study at first read. Commenters need to realise that this paper is about ecology rather than climate. Nice to see no mention at all in the article about the possible causes of the climatic changes in the study area, just the consequences of such changes on the lake ecosystems. It is also gratifying to see the authors put a time frame on their statements. For example, in the first sentence of the Discussion they say
“The combined effects of increasing temperatures and reduced wind speeds have resulted in marked ecological restructuring in the Cajas study lakes, which are unprecedented within the recent centuries spanned by our sediment archives”
The time frame of recent centuries is repeated several times in the paper when referring to their data coverage for the ecosystem.
I would only take issue with the final sentence in their Abstract: “Our results demonstrate that these lakes have already passed important ecological thresholds,…” seems overly sensationalist to me without a longer-term historical context for their findings.
From the abstract:
“Ecological restructuring in these lakes is linked to warming and/or enhanced water column stratification.”
######
Note the “and/or”.
You see, “enhanced water column stratification” does not cut the mustard with the funders. Got to have that warming if you want to go places in this world.
Were the winds measured or estimated?
The distance of the weather station seems to far away to be representative. By “pristine”, do they mean there has been zero human influence – no animals, houses, etc?
What are the characteristics in the first half of the century with respect to algae, plankton? Did they not core deep enough to measure that? Or have these results been conveniently ignored? There was a warm spell in the 1930’s. What did that do?
“Were the winds measured or estimated?”
Estimated from reanalysis data. One wonders why since there is apparently a weather station fairly close.
Great excuse to get a fully funded holiday hiking in the mountains – “we need to go up there to investigate climate change” – funding assured
Not too much hiking though, two of the lakes are within a couple of hundred meters from a main highway.