New Study Predicts Year Your City's Climate Will Change
New York City and Washington, D.C., will have radically altered climates by 2047.
Manokwari, Indonesia, is one of the places facing a "climate departure" within a few decades.
Photograph by Maartje Geels, Hollandse Hoogte/Redux
Ben Jervey
National Geographic
Published October 9, 2013
In seven years, inhabitants of New Guinea could be living in an unfamiliar world, one with a wholly different climate. A new analysis published today in the journal Nature .. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v502/n7470/full/nature12540.html .. finds that by 2020, New Guinea's climate will permanently enter a state never seen before, outside of the bounds of historical variability and short-term extremes.
To put it simply: The coldest year in New Guinea after 2020 will be warmer than the hottest year anyone there has ever experienced.
The global analysis also predicts that if greenhouse gases continue to be emitted at a "business as usual" rate, New York City and Washington, D.C., will experience radically altered climates in 2047 (plus or minus about five years for a margin of error). So in about 35 years, even the coldest monthly dips in temperature on the eastern seaboard will be warmer than any time in the past 150 years.
"We're providing a new metric on when ongoing climate change will lead to environments like we have never seen before," lead researcher Camilo Mora .. http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/mora/Team.html .. of the University of Hawaii told reporters, "when the coldest year of the future will be warmer than the hottest year in the past."
The study's authors refer to this new metric as a "climate departure."
By combining data from 39 different climate models, Mora and his team built a timetable of these climate departures for any given location on Earth. Along with their study, Mora and his colleagues published an interactive map that allows users to find the year of climate departure anywhere on the globe.
Identifying the Date of Climate Departure
The index uses temperature records from 1860 to 2005 to set the historical bounds of climate variability, then crunches projections from the 39 climate models to identify a year, specific to any point on a global map, when the temperatures will shift outside of those historical bounds for good.
The study actually makes two projections: one "optimistic" scenario that, in Mora's words, "reflects a strong and concerted reduction in carbon dioxide emissions"; and one "business as usual" scenario in which emissions rise unimpeded by international climate agreements or strong domestic policies in the developed world. (The dates given so far all refer to this "business as usual" scenario.)
The average date of climate departure globally is 2047, according to the more pessimistic model (putting New York City and Washington, D.C.—as well as Ankara, Turkey, and Kampala, Uganda—right at the global mean). If greenhouse gases are stabilized at what Mora refers to as an "optimistic" level (538 parts-per-million of atmospheric carbon dioxide), the global average pushes back to 2069, but inhabitants of New Guinea still would experience the climate departure in 2025.
Either way, say the study's authors, climate departure at some point in the relatively near future is inevitable. "We hope that this analysis will bring home the clear message that change is on its way, and that it will occur soon," said co-author Abby Frazier.
In addition to the temperature records, the scientists generated climate departure timetables for other variables, including surface evaporation, precipitation, ocean surface temperature, and the acidity of the sea surface.
The calculations for ocean pH were stunning. Mora and his team found that ocean acidity in 2008 (give or take three years) already exceeded historic bounds. (A separate study .. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/oct/03/ocean-acidification-carbon-dioxide-emissions-levels , conducted by researchers based at Oxford University, recently reported that the oceans' rate of acidification is the fastest in 300 million years.)
Lower Latitudes First to Leave the Norm
Climate scientists often refer to the polar regions as the "canary in the coal mine" for climate change, as the physical changes in the upper latitudes are most dramatic and the temperature spikes the greatest.
But according to Mora, this focus on the startling absolute changes at the poles paints an incomplete picture. "In fact," said Mora, "our study shows that the tropics, not the poles, will be experiencing unprecedented climates first." Why is this? Mora explained that tropical regions have relatively little variability from year to year, whereas the Arctic and Antarctic are subject to much broader ranges of extremes.
Mora referred to this as a sort of "double jeopardy" of climate change. "The largest absolute changes are happening at higher latitudes," he said, but those dramatic temperature increases don't fully break out of the range of historical extremes. "Unprecedented climate is happening more rapidly at the tropics."
On average, tropical locations will reach their climate departures 15 years earlier than the rest of the world. All of the locations where the impacts will occur earliest—for instance, under the baseline scenario, New Guinea in 2020, Jamaica in 2023, Equatorial Guinea in 2024—sit at lower latitudes.
Mora said that this is particularly troubling for a couple of reasons. First, the tropics are "home to the greatest diversity of species on the planet," he said. "These species are adapted to a stable climate, and thus it's very easy for these small changes to exceed what a species can tolerate." Past studies have already shown that tropical species like coral are pushing up against their environmental limits.
Second, because the world's population is disproportionately concentrated in the tropics, unprecedented climate conditions will impact a larger percentage of the world's population.
Study co-author Ryan Longman, also at the University of Hawaii, pointed out that "countries first impacted by unprecedented climates are the ones with the least economic capacity to respond." Added Longman, "Ironically, these are the countries that are least responsible for climate change in the first place."
Map: These are the cities that climate change will hit first
By Max Fisher, Published: October 9 at 4:23 pm 72 Comments
Climate scientists sometimes talk about something called "climate departure" as a way of measuring when climate change has really changed things. It's the moment when average temperatures, either in a specific location or worldwide, become so impacted by climate change that the old climate is left behind. It's a sort of tipping point. And a lot of cities are scheduled to hit one very soon.
A city hits "climate departure .. http://tiny.cc/hl3r4w " when the average temperature of its coolest year from then on is projected to be warmer than the average temperature of its hottest year between 1960 and 2005. For example, let's say the climate departure point for D.C. is 2047 (which it is). After 2047, even D.C.'s coldest year will still be hotter than any year from before 2005. Put another way, every single year after 2047 will be hotter than D.C.'s hottest year on record from 1860 to 2005. It's the moment when the old "normal" is really gone.
A big study, just published in the scientific journal Nature, projected that the Earth, overall, passes climate departure in 2047. The study also projects the year of climate departure in dozens of specific cities. Here, from The Post's graphics team, is a map of their findings:
(Leonard Bernstein and Gene Thorp/The Washington Post)
The cities marked by dark red dots are projected to hit climate departure really, really soon. Bad news: Many of these are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Lagos, Africa's largest city, with a population 21 million .. http://tiny.cc/1s3r4w .. and rising, is already vulnerable to flooding. It's got only 16 years before it hits climate departure. Also vulnerable are Caribbean cities such as Kingston, Jamaica, which passes the tipping point in 2023.
The light red cities have a bit more time but are some of the most worrying cases, including megacities in China and India, not to mention the major urban centers of the Middle East. Food insecurity and drought are difficult issues in many of these areas. The fact that these cities pass climate departure so soon is a scary reminder of how rapidly they're going to feel the effects of climate change.
Temperate cities in Europe and the United States look a bit better, but we're talking about a difference of maybe 20 years separating Western capitals from Kingston or Lagos. In the long run, 20 years is not much of a difference. The study published in Nature projects 2047 for Washington, D.C., and New York City -- just 34 years from now. Los Angeles will hit the mark the next year and San Francisco the year after. Even the best-off cities, such as Moscow and Oslo, have just 50 years before passing the milestone. That feels like a long time right now, but in historical terms it's not.
As Christopher Field, who directs the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science and was part of this study's research team, told my colleague Lenny Bernstein .. http://tiny.cc/nv3r4w , "The boundary of passing from the climate of the past to the climate of the future really happens surprisingly soon."
The good news is that, while it's too late to stop the world or any of its cities from passing the point of climate departure, we can slow the process -- and thus significantly mitigate the effects of climate change. Here's what that map would look like, according to the Nature study's projections, if the world can substantially bring down carbon dioxide emissions:
(Leonard Bernstein and Gene Thorp/The Washington Post)
It looks a little better! The world average, in this hypothetical version, would pass climate departure in 2069. D.C. would pass it in 2071. As a sign of how deeply the climate is already changing, though, Kingston would still hit it in 2028 -- a delay of only five years.
.. forget the strawman 'cause' .. climate scientists overwhelmingly are convinced by the science we 'influence' our environment .. simply put .. you are either a climate science denier .. or not .. sadly Australia's new PM it seems still is ..
See also:
Wrong Side of History .. exquisite bits .. Sarah Palin finally got her death panels — a direct blow from the Republican House. ... About 30 or so Republicans in the House, bunkered in gerrymandered districts while breathing the oxygen of delusion, are now part of a cast of miscreants who have stood firmly on the wrong side of history. ... In truth, they are the Know-Nothings from the 1850s ... They are the foes of science and modernism, denying evolution, climate change and, on election nights, math. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=92706629
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