Scientists see mild winters across nation by 2080
CLIMATES COULD SHIFT HUNDREDS OF KILOMETRES IF EMISSIONS CONTINUE UNABATED, SCIENTISTS SAY
Climate scientists are envisioning a future in which the typical Montreal winter warms by nearly 10 degrees Celsius, frosty Quebec City starts feeling like comparatively balmy southern Ontario and snowbound cities across the Prairies get a whole lot wetter throughout the coldest months of the year.
Come 2080, the weather in scores of North American cities could bear closer resemblance to the present-day versions of places that are hundreds of kilometres to the south, including several Canadian centres whose winters are expected to become much milder if emissions keep rising over time.
These projections are among the major takeaways of new environmental research that predicts sweeping changes to temperature and precipitation rates all over urban North America in the next six decades.
Where the study, published in Nature Communications this week, diverges from the wealth of existing scientific literature on climate change is the decision of its authors, Maryland-based ecologist Matt Fitzpatrick and biologist Rob Dunn of North Carolina, to create an interactive map that displays the future forecast for every city they studied.
Fitzpatrick says he was motivated to undertake the research when, some years ago, he was browsing a relative’s bookshelf and came across an Ann Coulter title. Inside, the American conservative commentator scoffed at the looming dire consequences of climate change by questioning why people who attend a cookout should care if the temperature rises by two degrees that day.
“I was like, ‘Well, that’s ridiculous,’” Fitzpatrick said. “But then I thought, well, yeah, we hear all the time about these global climate projections and things like the Paris climate accord, trying to hold global temperature change to 1.5 C. But what does that actually mean for me where I live? What does that mean for my climate?
“The goal of the study was then to convert these abstract, descriptive, often distant in space and time projections into something that people could relate to a lot better.”
Fitzpatrick’s study comprises 540 urban areas in North America, including 10 in Canada, and his map lists an analog city — the place elsewhere on the continent whose present-day weather most closely matches the researchers’ 2080 estimates — for each one.
If people keep pumping emissions into the atmosphere to the same degree as now, the researchers predict that 2080 Montreal, for example, will resemble Chester, Penn., where an average winter is 9.5 C warmer and 10.7 per cent wetter than in Quebec’s largest city.
A second model the researchers designed, one that assumes emission output will peak around 2040 and then begin to decline in line with policy shifts and behavioural changes, pegs Niles, Mich., as Montreal’s analog, with winters that are 5.4 C warmer and 17 per cent drier.
The researchers’ findings suggest that Toronto could morph into Secaucus, N.J., 800 km to the southeast, with winters that are 5 C warmer and 45.4 per cent wetter. Calgary’s analog is 1,300 km in the same direction: Spearfish, S.D., whose winters are 4.6 C warmer and 19 per cent wetter. Winnipeg’s parallel is Maplewood, Minn., 750 km away, where winter is 7.7 C warmer and 17.7 per cent wetter.
“We’re talking about cities in the northeast becoming like places in the south and southeast. Those are really big changes,” Fitzpatrick said. “Children alive today, they’re going to witness this dramatic transformation of climate.”
Fitzpatrick and Dunn made their forecasts for 2080 by synchronizing each city’s mean weather conditions between 1960-1990 with future projections from established global climate models.
“These rapid changes are going to shift places to the point where the old rules no longer apply in a lot of cases.”