The East Coast May Become the Gulf Coast in Terms of Future Weather

While Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer,  and many in the GOP continue to admit the reality of global warming and climate change, many living on the nation's coastlines beg to differ.  Now, a new study suggests that in addition to higher sea levels, coastal cities need to be planning for sharp changes in the seasonal  temperatures and rainfall.  Meanwhile, Mid-West farmers will see significant decreases in rainfall as the east coast becomes much wetter. A piece in The Atlantic looks at what our children and grandchildren may witness in their lifetimes. One has to wonder what it will take to make climate change deniers open their eyes. Here are highlights:

Sixty years from now, climate change could transform the East Coast into the Gulf Coast. It will move Minnesota to Kansas, turn Tulsa into Texas, and hoist Houston into Mexico. Even Oregonians might ooze out of their damp, chilly corner and find themselves carried to the central valley of California.

These changes won’t happen literally, of course—but that doesn’t make them any less real. A new paper tries to find the climate-change twin city for hundreds of places across the United States: the city whose modern-day weather gives the best clue to what conditions will feel like in 2080. It finds that the effects of global warming will be like relocating American cities more than 500 miles away from their current location, on average, mostly to the south and toward the country’s interior.

For instance, the Philadelphia of the 2080s will resemble the historical climate of Memphis. By the time kids today near retirement age, Philadelphia’s average summer will be about 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it is now. Winters in Philly will be nearly 10 degrees more temperate. Memphis’s scorching, sticky weather provides the best guide to how those climatic changes will feel day after day.

Meanwhile, Memphis’s climate will come to resemble that of modern-day College Station, Texas, by 2080.

“Everything gets warmer,” says Matthew Fitzpatrick, an author of the paper and a professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. “I don’t think I’ve seen a place that doesn’t.” In the West and Midwest, cities also tend to get drier as the Great Plains shift east. So Chicago comes to Kansas, Denver drifts to Texas, and San Francisco starts to feel like Los Angeles.

[N]o city will perfectly match its climate twin, especially when it comes to rainfall. Many cities in the South simply do not have a good twin: “The climate of many urban areas could become unlike anything present” in North America, the paper says.

In the Northeast, you can envision the future as one big Arkansas-ification. The paper finds that if the world meets its goals under the Paris Agreement, then Washington, D.C., will enter the 2080s feeling a lot like Paragould, Arkansas. But if the world follows a worst-case scenario, then D.C. will more closely resemble northern Mississippi—and New York City will feel like Jonesboro, Arkansas.

[T]he eastern U.S. will become hotter and wetter, while the [Midwest] will become drier and hotter,” she told me. Her own research focuses on eastern bluebirds, which have historically spent the summer in New York before migrating south for the winter. But “they’ve started staying in New York” for the winter, she said, “so I know it’s getting warmer there.”

She also warned future New Yorkers about what Jonesboro has in store: “Summer-wise, it’s like Florida here. And I cannot imagine New York like Florida … it’s hard to think about how humid it will be.”

“If I have grandkids and they lived in the same place I do,” he said, “they might not recognize this climate that we’re living in now.”