Businesses on the banks of the Great Lakes are flailing in shallow waters this year. Hundreds of marinas either have had to haul boats into winter storage early or have lost mooring space. The team at Great Lakes Marina in Muskegon, Mich., has had to rescue boats that have run aground almost every week since July. Water levels in the Great Lakes have been falling all year and on two days in October skimmed levels that are record monthly lows.

Climate change is likely to be worse than many computer models have projected, according to a new analysis. The work, published yesterday in Science, finds evidence that Earth's climate is more sensitive to the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than some earlier studies had suggested.