A clever study finds modern analogs for what our cities will feel like in 2080.
. That just never resonated with me,” he says. In his normal scientific research, he uses modeling to figure out how climate change might impact where other species can live, so he wondered whether he could use similar techniques to note the shift’s impact on humans.Most of the East Coast will start to look a lot more like the South, and many parts of the South will start to look like Mexico.
Some of these points go so far south they’re nearly off the map. And in fact, it’s worth noting that for a number of these cities, there weren’t even accurate analogs to point to. In their study, Fitzpatrick and his co-author focused on the western hemisphere above the equator, but for many of the cities, there simply wasn’t a good comparison. They calculated mathematically how close each urban area was to its closest analog with a value called sigma—a sigma less than two indicates a pretty good match.
A sigma over four, though, meant that there was truly no accurate analog above the equator. “Had we looked globally we may have found a closer analog in India or Africa,” Fitzpatrick says. “But once you do that, people aren’t gonna know what some town in India feels like.” If the point is to make climate change feel real, they had to stick within a relatively familiar area. But there are quite a lot of cities that won’t look like anything we know in the U.S.
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