Lake ecosystems are jeopardized by the impacts of climate change on ice seasonality and water temperatures. Yet historical simulations have not been used to formally attribute changes in lake ice and temperature to anthropogenic drivers. In addition, future projections of these properties are limited to individual lakes or global simulations from single lake models. Here we uncover the human imprint on lakes worldwide using hindcasts and projections from five lake models. Reanalysed trends in lake temperature and ice cover in recent decades are extremely unlikely to be explained by pre-industrial climate variability alone. Ice-cover trends in reanalysis are consistent with lake model simulations under historical conditions, providing attribution of lake changes to anthropogenic climate change. Moreover, lake temperature, ice thickness and duration scale robustly with global mean air temperature across future climate scenarios (+0.9 °C °C_air^–1, –0.033 m °C_air^–1 and –9.7 d °C_air^–1, respectively). These impacts would profoundly alter the functioning of lake ecosystems and the services they provide.

气候变化对冰层季节性和水温的影响危及湖泊生态系统。然而，历史模拟尚未用于正式将湖冰和温度的变化归因于人为驱动因素。此外，这些属性的未来预测仅限于单个湖泊或单个湖泊模型的全球模拟。在这里，我们使用五个湖泊模型的后报和预测来揭示全球湖泊上的人类印记。近几十年来重新分析的湖泊温度和冰盖趋势极不可能仅用工业化前的气候变化来解释。再分析中的冰盖趋势与历史条件下的湖泊模型模拟一致，将湖泊变化归因于人为气候变化。此外，湖水温度，_空气^–1、–0.033 m °C_空气^–1和 –9.7 d °C_空气^–1）。这些影响将深刻改变湖泊生态系统的功能及其提供的服务。