This Scary Map Shows How Climate Change Will Transform Your City

The central contradiction of climate change is that it is at once the most epic problem that our species has ever faced yet it is largely invisible to the average human. From the comfort of your home, you may not realize how climate change is already affecting mental health, or ripping apart ecosystems, or how cities like Los Angeles are taking drastic measures to prepare for water shortages. The challenge for scientists, then, is raising the alarm on something that’s hard to conceptualize. But a new interactive map is perhaps one of the best visualizations yet of how climate change will transform America. Click on your city, and the map will pinpoint a modern analog city that matches what your climate may be in 2080. New York city will feel more like today’s Jonesboro, Arkansas; the Bay Area more like LA; and LA more like the very tip of Baja California. If this doesn’t put the dire threat of climate change into perspective for you, I’m not sure what will. The data behind it isn’t anything new, but the public-friendly repackaging of that data, known as climate-analog mapping, represents a shift in how science reaches the public. “The idea is to translate global forecasts into something that's less remote, less abstract, that's more psychologically local and relevant,” says University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science ecologist Matt Fitzpatrick, lead author on a new paper in Nature Communications describing the system...MORE

The link to the map is here.