GIBRALTAR ISLAND, Ohio — In 2013, leading Great Lakes scientists convinced a state task force that western Lake Erie’s annual onslaught of toxic algae could be reversed — in only a year or two — if the vast Maumee River watershed across northwest Ohio and into Michigan and Indiana could achieve an ambitious 40 percent reduction in phosphorus loading.

Most of that load comes from agriculture, in the form of animal manure and commercial fertilizer that escapes fields after heavy rains.

Now, just as that lofty goal is gaining traction from the region’s governors and premiers, U.S. and Canadian environmental regulators, and other key policy makers, scientists are seeing more evidence that climate change is the real wild card.

They find themselves caught between galvanizing more support for that 40 percent reduction or stepping back and reanalyzing Lake Erie’s needs to account more for climate change.

Doing the latter is almost impossible, because — as recent events have shown — nobody quite has their finger on what the Earth’s disruptive climate patterns will bring.

Billions of dollars in losses from Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy have occurred. A prolonged drought in California and other parts of the West threatens havoc on America’s food supply and its economy.

A weakened jet stream has allowed the polar vortex to wobble like a spinning top, crushing some parts of the world with bone-chilling temperatures while allowing some normally frigid areas, such as Alaska, to have record warmth.

And northwest Ohio’s highly unusual and heavy June rainfall this year has made western Lake Erie so nutrient-rich that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration now believes the lake is in for its second-worst algal bloom.

All, none, or some of the above could be symptoms of climate change.

Climate scientists such as Katherine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University have said no single event can be attributed to climate change.

But, she said, the accumulation of weirdness — the frequency and intensity of things being out of kilter — raises questions.

Ask Peter Gleick, one of the world’s leading water researchers, what climate change is doing, and he’ll say it’s creating more suffering.

Drought-prone areas are getting drier, and water-blessed areas are getting wetter.

The problem with climate change is it’s not evenly distributed. Places desperate for water now are becoming more desperate, according to Mr. Gleick, president and co-founder of the Oakland-based Pacific Institute.

Jeff Reutter, the long-time Ohio Sea Grant and Ohio State University Stone Laboratory director who now serves as a special adviser to those organizations, was one of the earliest supporters of a 40 percent reduction in phosphorus loading.

Mr. Reutter remains one of the staunchest.

He has remarked that given a fighting chance, western Lake Erie is capable of healing itself quickly,

It is the warmest, shallowest, and most biologically responsive region of the Great Lakes.

But as he addressed about 50 reporters and policy makers Thursday inside OSU’s Aquatic Visitors Center on South Bass Island, then some of those people and about 500 listeners on a public webinar from Stone Laboratory’s main building on Gibraltar Island that afternoon, he expressed guarded optimism because of climate change.

“There’s a weakness in our strategy here,” Mr. Reutter said. “And the weakness is climate change. If we continue to have really, really heavy rains like we had this June, we'll need to adjust our model.”

Lake Erie’s most dominant form of toxic algae is not really an algae at all.

Microcystis is a bacterium — called a cyanobacterium because of its blue-green hue — that mimics algae because of its color and characteristics.

Although it is believed to be 3.5 billion years old — far older than the Great Lakes, which were formed from glaciers about 10,000 years ago — microcystis did not start to emerge as western Lake Erie’s most dominant form of algae until 1995. 

Algae that plagued the lake up until the 1970s were a different species.

Nearly as old as Earth itself, microcystis is classified by scientists as one of several types of harmful algal blooms, or HABs.

Some scientists theorize its ability to produce a toxin, known as microcystin, is nature’s way of giving it a defense mechanism to ensure the survival of its species.

But in recent years, as populations have grown, land has been farmed more intensively, and Earth’s climate has warmed, microcystis has become a dominant algal species in many parts of the world.

At Lake Taihu in China, microcystis can bloom nine months of the year, according to Hans Paerl, a distinguished marine and environmental sciences professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, who has studied algae there.

Tim Davis, a scientist with NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor, said that bloom in China is larger and more toxic than Lake Erie’s.

In many areas, including western Lake Erie, algae now forms earlier and stays longer.

The type of storms are changing too, not just the rainfall amounts.

The Ohio Phosphorus Task Force’s recommendation was viewed as incredibly ambitious — yet possible — when it was made in 2013. Better farming practices, from cover crops to drainage-control structures to buffer strips, had been advocated for years.

But no state task force had quantified the goal as a 40 percent reduction.

Officials point to 2012, when Ohio and much of the Midwest were mired in the worst drought in 50 years, as an example of how rapidly Lake Erie can respond when given the chance. With little rain, there was little runoff that year, and Lake Erie had its most algae-free season in years.

The Ohio Phosphorus Task Force is a group with an innocuous title that many Ohio residents haven’t heard about. But unlike other task forces, its chief recommendation didn’t get lost on a shelf.

Task force Chairman Gail Hesse, the Ohio Lake Erie Commission’s executive director, said she’s pleased how widely its call for a 40 percent reduction is being embraced now in response to Toledo’s water crisis last August, which made tap water temporarily unsafe for nearly 500,000 city water customers.

At their annual summit in Quebec a few weeks ago, the Council of Great Lakes Governors and Premiers endorsed it.

Before that, support came from the venerable International Joint Commission, a State Department-level body that has advised the United States and Canadian governments on boundary water issues since 1909.

On June 30, a binational committee comprised of Environment Canada and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials also weighed in with an announcement that it will recommend a 40 percent reduction in phosphorus loading.

That committee, which expects to finalize its work in February, is developing goals for Lake Erie under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, which the United States and Canada first signed in 1972 and most recently updated in 2012. The agreement’s overriding theme is for better binational Great Lakes management.

The Northeast-Midwest Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit that helps unify congressmen from those two regions on policy matters, recently agreed substantial changes are needed in farming practices, as have representatives of the agriculture industry.

“What’s affirming is the science has coalesced around that recommendation,” Ms. Hesse said.

She said it has inspired the agriculture industry to come up with more voluntary incentives. “All in all, it’s really about momentum,” Ms. Hesse said.

Contact Tom Henry at: thenry@theblade.com, 419-724-6079, or via Twitter @ecowriterohio.

First Published July 13, 2015, 4:00 a.m.