In The Year 2080, Your City Will Feel Like It's 500 Miles Away

Your home town will feel different when you are older. That is true for everyone. The changes will be hard for people to ignore.

Climate change is usually measured in terms of rising temperatures. Scientists say there is another way of thinking about it.

In 2080, the cities of North America will feel 500 miles away from where they are now, because of the drastic changes that are taking place in their climate.

Assuming carbon emissions stay on course at their current, dismal, business-as-usual rates, that is an average result for 540 urban areas across the US and Canada.

This 500-mile trek is not just a random city-hop. In North America at least, places tend to become hotter and wetter in the south.

There is a map of climate analogues. Matthew Fitzpatrick is from the University of Maryland.

Theclimatic analogues were designed to provide a more realistic place and were designed by study co-author Matt Fitzpatrick from the University of Maryland Centre for Environmental Science.

These swaps are almost science-fiction-like and can be calledatable. Washington, DC will feel like Mississippi. New York will feel like northern Arkansas and Houston will feel like Mexican territory.

Fitzpatrick explained at the time that the technique could be used to translate a future forecast into something we can better visualize and link to our own experiences.

It is my hope that people will have that wow moment, and that it will sink in for the first time the scale of the changes we are expecting in a single generation.

At the current rate of carbon emissions, many transformations that are known to be taking place cannot be easily visualized.

The researchers found that many places in North America today don't have existing climatic analogues, and their projected future weather is a nightmare we haven't encountered before.

The authors of the study said that by the 2080s many cities could experience novel climates with no modern equivalents.

Unless we do something about this right now, North American cities and cities all over the world are going to hot places they really don't want to be going.

You can drive to these places in your car. Some don't exist yet.

Make no mistake, your home town is transforming.

Nature Communications reported the findings.

This article was published in February of 2019.