What Major American Cities Climates Will Be Like In 60 Years, Mapped
At this point, dramatic climate change is a horrible inevitability, but it still feels like an abstraction to many people. Good data visualizations can help make abstractions feel more concrete, and that's definitely the case with a new interactive map by environmental scientists Matthew C. Fitzpatrick and Robert R. Dunn, who "used climate-analog mapping to identify the location that has a contemporary climate most similar to each urban area's expected 2080's climate." For instance, New York City in 2080 will feel a lot like how Jonesboro, Arkansas feels today.
Chicago will feel the way Lansing, Kansas feels today.
And, in a particularly dramatic shift, Los Angeles will feel the way Las Palmas, right at the very southern tip of Baja California, feels today.
The creators of the map emphasize that there are no perfect matches between the climates of North American cities of today and the projected climates of North American cities in 2080, writing,
An interesting, but not necessarily surprising finding is that there are no perfect matches. In other words, for no city did we find a present-day climate that is identical to a city's climate in 2080. In fact, because of the magnitude of expected climate change, for many cities the "best" match is not all that similar. This means that many cities could experience a future climate unlike anything present in North America today, especially if rates of greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced.
Go play around with the interactive version of the map, which allows you to adjust the settings to see 27 different climate projections for each city (instead of just the average of those different projections). Also, if you're feeling optimistic for some reason, you can see how the projections change if we reduce carbon emissions.
