Spin the dial and see where your children will live six decades hence

An almost perfect broad-framing tool on climate change

SCIENCE ALERT story on a website (Future Urban Climates) that can tell you how far your desired 2080 landing spot will have had its climate shift by then, using current city equivalents.

For example, you type in Chicago and the site tells you that its present-day equivalent to 2080 Chicago is actually located in Oklahoma.

This is another way to transmit the notion of climate velocity, indicating here that the climate we’ve long associated with Verdigris OK will have shifted in a northwest fashion to Chicago in roughly the year 2080. If you went straight north from Verdigris to the same latitude (roughly), it would be a shift of 400 miles north to just above Omaha NE. From Omaha to Chicago is about 450 miles, making the straight shot from Verdigris to Chicago somewhere roughly 600 miles (closer to 700 by actual roads).

So, the Windy City becomes the Windy-and-Dusty City?

How about my preferred retirement spot of Green Bay?

Well, what the hell! Why not just move the entire Great Lakes down to Oklahoma!

Green Bay to … what is this place? Oh, Medford.

The variation in natural vegetation types is stark: forests shifting to grasslands and shrublands.

Will that happen by 2080? Seems unlikely to me, and yet the clime will be working inexorably on the local plant life, forcing a fierce accommodation/adaption over time. Plenty of species won’t be able to handle that 12-13 degree shift (Fahrenheit).

Now, let’s do the counterfactual and say I’m from Medford OK and am wondering whether or not to make the move to Green Bay so I can stay with my preferred climate. What will happen to me if I don’t?

Here, I have to approximate because the database, while citing Medford as an equivalent, isn’t a big-enough urban area to qualify as a query subject. So I go with Ponca City right to its south and this is what I get:

Unsurprisingly, the closer one gets to the equator, the shorter the shift: here, a mere 250 miles southward. But check out that average temp jump by roughly 10 degrees! That is radical.