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Explore present and future climate zones for dozens of global cities. “With climate change, your city isn’t just getting hotter: it will resemble the distinctive climate of completely different places.”

Discussion  1 comment

Paul Pomeroy

This is similar in many ways to CityApp which came out in late 2018 as I recall. The kind of data these apps present is interesting but incomplete (and somewhat misleading). One thing both of them leave out is how the speed of the changes they present are often too fast for an area's "native" flora and fauna to adapt to.

You can, for example, find out using CityApp, that in 2080 Montpelier, Vermont will be much like current day Barnhart, Missouri. It is easy to imagine someone in Vermont looking at that and thinking, "Well, heck! Isn't that near where Aunt Betty lives? And she likes it just fine there!" It's less easy to also imagine what moving Barnhart's climate up to Montpelier would do its local plants and animals, but it wouldn't be pretty.

Another problem with these apps is that they wrap a timeframe around their presentation and pretty much ignore its artificiality. Climate change doesn't magically stop in 2080 (or wait until then to ramp up temperatures). The momentum behind that change (and behind the physics that is causing that change) doesn't suddenly dissipate. It keeps on building, making things hotter, year after year, decade after decade until the root causes are reversed or eliminated.

We're not very good at imagining things like that. We're better, for example, at understanding 2023 was the hottest year yet than we are at coming to terms with the near certainty that 2023 is also cooler than all the years that follow. We've just recently experienced our first 12-month period with a +1.5°C anomaly (compared to the preindustrial average). In less than a decade we will have experienced our first 5-year average above 1.5°C and by 2050 we're very likely to have had our first +1.5°C 30-year average.

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