The arrival of the new year also marks the official start of Maine’s ice fishing season.
But December’s roller coaster-like weather means many Maine fishermen hoping to spend their holiday on the ice may have to travel considerable distances — or resort to smaller ponds — to find ice thick enough to safely support them.
“There may be some isolated places where it could potentially be safe enough to fish,” said Cpl. John MacDonald with the Maine Warden Service. “Overall, compared to recent years, it has been a particularly poor year.”
Few, if any, of the larger lakes in Maine have developed a thick enough cap of ice to support fishermen, and Saturday’s wet and warmer weather won’t help. According to the Warden Service, ice needs to measure at least 4 inches thick before anyone should dare walk on it and at least 5 inches thick to support a snowmobile or ATV.
And those figures are for clear, solid ice on lakes and ponds. MacDonald said Friday he was not aware of any rivers where the ice is thick enough to be safe. He said people should use “extreme caution and good judgment” and check the ice before venturing onto it. The warden service also recommends not traveling on ice alone and repeatedly checking the thickness with an auger or spud.
“The one good thing is it is easy to see right now that the ice is poor” due to lack of snow cover, he said.
In southern Maine, some lakes don’t even have a skimming of ice much less enough to support a person.
Roger Knights, owner of Knights Bait Shop in Raymond, said Sebago Lake typically freezes over by Jan. 1. But on Saturday, Knights was seeing white caps as he looked out at the wind-swept lake, which isn’t exactly good for business.
“No ice, no nothing,” he said.
Things were just a little better in central Maine, where several Bangor-area bait dealers said they were hearing reports that some smaller lakes and ponds were frozen over. But many of their customers were planning to head north, where reports were mixed.
Up in Aroostook County, Ben LeBlanc was getting customers in his shop, Ben’s Trading Post, despite the freezing rain in Presque Isle on Saturday.
“A lot of the smaller lakes and ponds are off to a good start,” LeBlanc said. “Some of the bigger lakes, such as Eagle Lake and Long Lake, haven’t quite frozen over yet, though.”
Rangers in the Allagash Wilderness Waterway, meanwhile, are warning potential anglers about unsafe ice conditions in the headwater lakes. Chamberlain Lake, for instance, had open water throughout the main body of the lake. As of mid-week, Round Pond in T9 R13 and Churchill both had 3 inches of ice with slush and open water while Telos/Round Pond had 3 to 5 inches of ice plus open water in some areas, according to the Maine Department of Conservation.
South of the Allagash, business was halfway decent at Moosehead Bait & Tackle in Rockwood. Owner Brad Scott said some of the smaller ponds in the area were ready for ice fishing and that nearby Brassua Lake was frozen over.
“I wouldn’t venture a snowmobile out there, though,” he said. But Scott was still waiting for Moosehead Lake to freeze and for the bigger snows to arrive so that he could begin renting snowmobiles.
Anglers living in ice-free areas of Maine who are desperate to fish may still be able to wet their lines, however. Many lakes and ponds in southern and eastern Maine are available for open water fishing year-round under rule changes adopted in recent years.
To be considered open water fishing, anglers cannot take a fish “through a man-made hole in the ice, from the ice or from any object supported by the ice,” the regulations state.
Fishermen are advised to consult the state’s fishing law book for rules applicable to specific waterways.
There is NO global climate change……..I repeat, there is NO global climate change. Move along……
I am 100% in agreement with the general scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change, but a single warm winter in the northeast (if it actually ends up being a warm winter), is not evidence of anything. The same goes for when the southeast or other warm region gets an unusually cold season; that is not evidence against climate change. In both cases that is normal climate variability, and only longer term trends averaged over the entire planet tell the real story.
The long-term perspective is that Maine winters have warmed significantly since the 1930s. Most people living here today are unaware how severe winters were in the 19th and early 20th centuries compared to those of recent decades. Perhaps the most dramatic example is that Penobscot Bay. The Bay used to freeze over with sea ice thick enough to support horse drawn sleighs laden with cargo, and in later years, cars. The Bangor Daily in Feb. 1918 reported that a man named Albert Gray drove his car across the sea ice from Harborside (near Castine) to Belfast (and back again; trip repeated several times). The last historical account of the Bay freezing over I have found is dated Feb-March 1934. It was a common occurrence in the 1800s.
Temperature records from across Maine are consistent with these anecdotal evidences of very cold winters. Daily measurements from Portland and Orono, for example, extend to at least the 1870s, and measurements from Millinocket and Caribou extend to the early 1900s. The temperature records all show significant wintertime warming after the mid 1930s, then again in the 2000s.
Winters with severe cold are now anomalous. The last “cold” season from a historical perspective was that of 2002-2003. Remember days-on-end of below freezing daytime temps and double-digit below zero nighttime temps? Parts of Portland Harbor freezing over, along with most small bays and inlets along the coast? The ’02-’03 winter more or less matched the coldest winters of the 1970s and 1980s. Believe it or not, those winters we now perceive as “cold” register only average to slightly warmer than average compared to winters of the pre-1930s climate. No one could drive a car across sea ice from Belfast to Castine in Feb of 2003. I don’t think anyone would want to try such a thing this February either.
As I write this, there are 15-20 deg C warm anomalies over MOST of the Arctic. Wintertime temperature anomalies of this magnitude have become the norm each year since a major collapse of sea ice over the Arctic Ocean in the summer of 2007. At the end of the ’07 melt season, ice covered an area of the Arctic Ocean only 50-60% the historical average. The Northwest Passage has opened every summer since. No ice. Clear as a bell. Smooth sailing. (By all historical accounts, the Passage was choked with ice all summer, every summer since at least the 1500s, and probably since the 1200s based on proxy evidence from records of sea ice in the Nordic seas; it took Roald Amundson two years to push through the Northwest Passage during the early 1900s when he pioneered the route). Record-breaking low sea-ice extent, late freeze-up, and early ice-out have emerged in every corner of the Arctic in the past few years. Cold airmasses that pass over Maine originate from Canada and the Arctic Basin. As Arctic sea ice continues to decline, Maine’s winters will continue to warm.
Thus, the late fall/early winter warmth we are experiencing is not within the realm of “normal” long-term variability. Nor is the unprecedented warmth confined to the northeastern U.S.; it is spilling out of Canada and the Arctic.
That is all well and good, but a single season and a few data points are meaningless on their own, which was my point. There are records of very warm winters in Maine in the 1800’s, so how do you know if a single warm December in 2011 is not normal variability?
Again, I have no doubt that humans are impacting climate, but to shout global warming at every warm spell is as bad as contrarians denying global warming everytime it gets a little chilly somewhere. Global temps have gone up somewhere between 1.3-1.5F in the last 100 years, and that is not something that can be measured with anecdotal observations.
I think that the prior poster gave evidence to support his argument…….much more than you have given. You seem to be “kicking and screaming” your way to accepting that climate change is indeed happening……..
Hardly. I am very much in agreement with what the actual science states, not anecdotal alarmism, which I think damages credibility of the position and drives doubters further away. I read the actual science and I understand it as well as anyone can wh0 is outside of the field, and you will not find a serious climate scientist who blames any single warm period specifically on global warming. Lastly, you state that the previews poster supplied evidence? All I see are opinions and anecdotes.
Look at actual data analysis for 2011: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/2011/11 (yep it was a fairly warm year, but we are talking about fractions of a degree above the 100 year average)
Even look at climate blogs, none will support the extremist position taken above:
http://www.realclimate.org/
http://www.skepticalscience.com/
The doubters can doubt all that they want……..hope that they have fun snowmobiling, ice fishing, etc. this weekend!…………
No NP for you Jeff, stop crying!
No snowmobiling or ice fishing for you this winter…….stop crying!
Hey Jeff, what about the mainers who believe in global warming, do you wish them fun snowmobiling, ice fishing, etc this weekend???
It is not my “opinion” that Maine’s winters have warmed appreciably since the 1930s. Rather, the data show that Maine’s climate has warmed. The Orono temperature station, operated by the University since ca. 1869, shows that on average over the past three decades winters had ~500 freezing degrees (C) compared to ~800 for winters of the late 1800s. That’s almost a 38% reduction in the number of freezing degrees on average from 1900 to 2000. The Portland record shows a more severe trend, but the signal may be biased by the urban heat island, therefore I do not trust its meaning. Other records in Maine generally do not extend beyond 1900. All temperature records I mention should be available from either the NWS or the GHCN.
As an aside, have a look at the 20th Century Reanalysis (http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/20thC_Rean/). Not perfect, but simulates the general circulation of the atmosphere back to the 1870s and fits observations reasonable well.
It is not my “opinion” that Penobscot Bay used to freeze over. Here is one reference in which it is mentioned that mail service to Isleboro was disrupted in 1918, 1923, and 1934 because of the bay freezing over: http://islesboro.mainememory.net/page/1049/display.html. 1918 you may recall was the year that Albert Gray drove across Penobscot Bay by car (see http://gen3antiqueauto.com/bayfroze.htm). Here’s another one for fun: http://www.penobscotbayhistory.org/content/show/697
When you download and process Maine temperature station data, look at the prominent cold spikes that register 1905, 1918, 1923, and 1934.
It is also not my “opinion” that Arctic ice has been all but impenetrable until the past few decades. I referred to Roald Amundson’s completion of the Northwest Passage in 1903-1906. Refer also to the disastrous Franklin expedition of the 1840s. Hudson Bay Company ships logs are also a great resource for information on ice conditions in Hudson Bay, Davis Strait, and Baffin Bay.
Another good read is the book “The Little Ice Age” by Jean Groves: http://www.amazon.com/Little-Ice-Age-Jean-Grove/dp/0415014492. In it you will find informative reconstructions of sea ice around iceland since ~1200 AD, along with a thorough synthesis of glacier changes in the Northern Hemisphere over the past few centuries. The winter sea-ice edge off southeast Greenland used to extend to the northern tip of Iceland during most years; hasn’t happened since the 1960s.
It goes without saying that it is not my “opinion” that Arctic sea ice loss over recent decades has been unprecedented. Visit here to visualize the satellite observations: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/
And here is a an informative climate blog an English chap who is a retired engineer and linguist. Many of his postings are better referenced than some peer-reviewed papers. This is one of his discussions of sea-ice, which includes an old map drafted in the 1930s which happens to show the approximate summer sea-ice minimum of the time: http://www.science20.com/chatter_box/arctic_ice_september_2010.
As far as your link to the current global average annual tempertaure: Useless if you haven’t a grasp on historical climate, regional climate, or the physical mechanisms driving the observed changes.
I find it quite a stretch to call my position “extremist.” I also do not see how comparing past winter climate (based on historical observation and real weather data!) with that of the last few decades constitutes anecdotal “alarmism.” Maine’s climate has changed significantly since the 19th century — that is a fact. Do with this information as you wish.
Happy ice fishing.
Yes it is warmer, yes we are seeing fewer cold spikes and more warm, but your own links also shows tremendous warm spikes prior to human influence. Again, you simply cannot attribute a single warm period to climate change. It isn’t scientific and that is the extremist view I take issue with. Otherwise, when we get a cold period again (like we did for a good chunk of last winter) does that mean the earth is cooling? Obviously the answer is no.
Stick to the data and drop the anecdotal interpretation. That is the same thing the deniers do every time it gets a little chilly in Florida. We are warming, humans are likely a large part of the cause, but there is still normal climate variability mixed into it all, and only the long term trend tells the full story.
You are spinning my words.
Does this one warm winter season in Maine by itself prove that global climate has changed over the past 100 years? No! HOWEVER: A key boundary condition underlying the large scale circulations that produce Maine wintertime weather — ARCTIC SEA ICE — is far different now compared to what is was during the 19th century. The northerly airmasses reaching Maine during the winter are unequivocally warmer on average now than they were prior to the mid 1930s. THIS IS A FACT. I have provided you with abundant information in this regard.
Does this mean there will be no more “cold” winters? No! There may well be winters in the future that we perceive as cold. HOWEVER: A return to the severe cold winters comparable to those experienced during the 19th and early 20th centuries is unlikely in the absence of an exceptional recovery of Arctic sea ice thickness and extent. That Penobscot Bay hasn’t frozen over since 1934 exemplifies the climate change that has already taken place.
Warm winters of the 19th and early 20th centuries: They are a part of natural variability. The warm winters of the past few decades: They are part of variability superimposed on significant climate warming that has taken place over the past century and a half (probably in response mostly to humans altering the chemistry of the atmosphere, a scientific consensus that you claim to accept). If your historical perspective is limited to the last ten years, then, yes, I guess you could write off the present warm anomaly as just part of natural variability. But if you take the long-term historical perspective sought in your post to which I responded initially, then the present warm anomaly stands out from what would be considered “normal.” There are no November-December warm anomalies in the pre-1930s Maine temperature records that match that which we are experiencing. These warm spells are becoming more frequent (one other example is the record-breaking early ice out of lakes across the state in March, 2010). I am not just guessing or rendering some whimsical “opinion.” I am basing these words on my analysis of actual data.
Climate is an integration of weather. No single weather event in one small area can by itself prove climate change; but we now have more than a century of accumulated weather data (thousands of stations around the globe outside of Maine; The longest record, one from central England, extends to the mid-1600s), and therefore we can trace with some confidence the origin of some extreme events.
Let me put it another way: If Arctic sea ice had not declined over the past century, then Maine winters would now be measurably colder. Warm anomalies of the past ten years reflect dramatic, abnormal sea-ice decline. The circulation over Maine, which includes airmasses from the Arctic, carries the signature of abnormal sea-ice loss, and thus the observed temperatures have begun to depart from what we would expect to see in “normal” variability. The a priori assumption is that Arctic sea-ice loss constitutes a major feedback in the climate system, one that amplifies much more subtle circulation changes induced from industrial greenhouse gas emissions. Does this make sense?
Bottomline: Maine winters ain’t what they used to be.
Again, an anecdotal opinion not taking into consideration the historical temp record. Ice core data has showed very warm periods in the past at each pole, and it is likely arctic sea ice was all but gone then. This of course predates humans burning fossil fuels. So there are clear examples of such warming periods, and such variability that may or may not be playing a role in what we are seeing today. Again global temps have risen less than 2F in the last 100 years, and that alone does not explain all of the warming we are seeing.
Find me a specific climate report or climatologist who will attribute current arctic sea ice or slightly warmer Maine winters solely on anthropogenic warming. I don’t think you will be able to do that.
I have countered each of your criticisms point-by-point, yet you make no direct acknowledgment. Time to call it quits. Best wishes this New Year.
No, you have mostly posted anecdotal observations/interpretations and I don’t think you understand the difference between that and what climate science actually states. Again, I agree with you on climate change being real, I agree that humans are a big part of it, but you seem to be discounting normal variability that the earth goes through on top of human influences. Again, with that line of thinking, one could easily point to last winter and tell us global warming had ended, which would an equally wrong line of thinking.
You cited the need for long-term perspective. I gave you that perspective. I also explained why Maine’s winter climate has warmed over the past century. Much of the change is driven by Arctic sea ice loss. Your conclusion that I base my bottomline on a single data point leaves me almost speechless.
As for your second charge: I am not shouting global warming. I am providing for you historical context and an explanation for the dominant mechanism driving Maine’s changing climate.
I would place the global average temperature change (since ~1850) nearer to 1 deg C. A Northern Hemisphere average T change would probably be closer to 1.5 deg C. This based on my read of glacier mass balance studies, not Wikipedia. The composite record in Wikipedia, by the way, excludes data from the coldest part of the 19th century in most places, 1840-1860.
Last, subtle changes in climate can indeed be inferred from anecdotal observations; especially when those observations are corroborated by data, as is the case for the examples I gave for Maine winter climate.
…and the Vikings used to grow grapes in Greenland!! What “anthropogenic” causes would anyone be willing to postulate were occurring then?? LOL!
If Gore never got everyone’s fur up with his kooky claims, then the weather would still be just the weather, instead of a clue to something more sinister.
Why does Al Gore always factor into the climate change discussion? The science was cranking along before him and it is much stronger today. Gore was just a dork who made a movie about it; that doesn’t change the state of the science.
You’re like the guy who at a blues club shouts out “Freebird” for no reason at all other than to be heard.
That was RICH!! Although the sound would be muffled due to the cranium/rectum convergence factor!
The news will now go from hunting “accidents” to lost ATVs and snowmobiles in lakes, followed by people falling in the ice.
Let’s all live in our mommas basement, living off the state (if you can call that living) typing stuff on various website blogs crying to everyone about how the 99%’s have it so bad. HAPPPPPPPPPY New YEAHHHH.
Or we can all have some common sense……..that may be a problem for many of today’s Mainers!
Correct …. Since when did the lack of ice ever stop a numb redneck from ice fishing ….. It’s perfect weather for the race to the bottom of Moosehead – pickup and sled divisions still looking for a champ!
You and Jeff can stop crying anytime, It is truly comical to see you guys cry and dump on mainers because you will never get your NP. Please keep it up, it is truly comical..
I have saved soo much money not buying soo much oil damn this is the best winter ever….yayayayay for global kimdness
Waht’s “kimdess”???
Enjoy your snow removal and fuel bills in the meantime; the ice will be here soon enough.
When will that be?…….March???
It was last year
________________________________
This sux…
ICE FISHING was phenominal today! Plenty of ice out there, you just got to be smart.
I thought this article was about ice fishing or lack there of and not the liberal religon of global warming
Climate change is a religion? Is that like the conservative religion of politics?
Of course it is…”are you a climate change denier?” …”What, don’t you ‘believe’ in global warming?”
With constanty repeated terms such as ‘believe’ and ‘deny’ thrown around by the libs, it sure sounds like a group of maniacs out there running around trying to get everyone to have faith in their latest deity…no better than the evangelicals telling us to change our ways and repent for our sins or some imaginary being is going to punish after we die. You people are simply loons…just like the crazy religous zealots of the world.
Either refine the message, or suffer the consequesnce of nobody taking you seriously,
My shovel is ready and is in great shape for this time of year. Maybe I can get another year out of it or maybe two. I bet the State’s pojected revenue for winter fun will cost the welfare another cut in the system. BOO HOO..
Do you think thats all it will effect ??
Nope
So tell me how many jobs has this warm spell cost the state 1,000 or more ?
Give Al Gore another Academy and Nobel and maybe he will make it go away
“The one good thing is it is easy to see right now that the ice is poor” due to lack of snow cover, he said.
Wrong! Right now in Jackman there is 8-9 inches of clear ice on Bigwood lake, because there is little to no snow to insulate it.