Global Warming has its advantages

A bit of good news from the land O lakes:

DULUTH, Minnesota (AP) -- Lake Superior has been warming even faster than the climate around it since the late 1970s because of reduced ice cover, according to a study by professors at the University of Minnesota Duluth.

Summer surface temperatures on the famously cold lake have increased about 4.5 degrees since 1979, compared with about a 2.7-degree increase in the region's annual average air temperature, the researchers found. The lake's "summer season" is now beginning about two weeks earlier than it did 27 years ago.

It's about time. I grew up about 10 blocks from the lake shore, and in the winter there was so much ice that they used to hold an annual auto race on St. Louis Bay called the Minnesota Cup. I had a buddy who got married one May and we have a picture of us on the beach and there's frigging ice floating in the lake behind us. In May! And even in July, when we have our family picnic on Park Point in Duluth, the weather is often hot and the sand hotter but the lake is still so cold that your legs are numb after just a few minutes in it.

Global warming, er, climate change may have a lot of bad theoretical effects, but count me as one of those who thinks Lake Superior's water getting warmer is not going to be one of them.