Scientist's Map Explains Climate Change

[intense music]

Climate change is the most epic threat

our species has ever faced, but it's a really difficult

thing to conceptualize because even though climate change is

touching literally every square inch of this planet,

it's hard to to show people how it might

be affecting them personally.

But what scientists are finding recently

is that maps can help communicate the threat.

We spoke with one of those scientists, Matt Fitzpatrick,

who created an interactive map to show

what the future climate of cities might be.

Click on San Francisco for example,

and you'll see that in 2080, it's climate will feel

closest to present day Los Angeles.

Chicago will feel more like Eastern Kansas

and Washington DC will feel

more like the middle of Mississippi.

So as a scientist and a science communicator,

what is the biggest challenge you're facing

when communicating climate change to the public?

One, it's a complex topic, but one of the biggest things

is the amount of misinformation out there, right?

People see and read and hear all sorts of things

that are presented as facts and they're not.

And the science is often attacked,

even though the scientists are very robust.

All that collectively is trying not to speak

in abstract terms, trying to speak about personal values,

personal experiences, personal stories

that people can relate to.

I think that's the angle that this approach,

climate-analog mapping tries to take.

So can you explain to us what this map is?

And what it is showing?

So what the map shows for 540 cities in North America,

is the current location that is

most like that city's future climate.

Speaking in terms of a particular city is helpful,

so we can take New York City and we can say,

what location now has a climate

like New York's is expected to be in 2080?

We can do that for two different futures if you will,

one future assuming we don't put policies in place

to change our behaviors and fossil fuel use.

So that's kind of a high emission scenario.

And the second scenario assumes that we address

the emissions problem and reduce emissions

to look at those two possibilities and understand

how addressing climate change can help.

Did you see any kind of generalizable trends here?

Yeah, I mean, the strongest consistent patterns

were actually about the eastern half of North America or so,

so cities in the east, their closest match

in almost all cases, was to the south or southwest.

If you're a resident in a city in the east,

you would have to drive about 500 miles to the south

to find a climate today like your city's

gonna experience in 2080.

If we think of eastern cities, we think four seasons,

we think snowy winters.

A lot of those cities are moving

from those kinds of climates to the more like what we might

consider subtropical humid, southeastern, deep south US.

The west is a little bit more complicated.

Mainly because of the terrain, right?

There's mountains and things like that.

The weather patterns are a little bit more complicated

and precipitation tends to be a lot more seasonal

in the west, you get a lot of winter precipitation

and drought in the summer.

But all places in the west are warming up as well.

A lot of the places in the west are becoming

more like Southern California, more desert.

I think another powerful thing about this map

is the implications for things like public health.

So in a place like San Francisco here, we have

very few residences with air conditioning

because it's just a mild climate.

That will not be the case in the future

where we start looking more and more like Los Angeles.

How might a tool like this inform, really,

public health policy going forward into a much warmer world?

I think there are opportunities for people involved

in that area and to look at these maps and say,

If our city is gonna become more like a city in the south,

how are they handling heatwaves?

What do they have to deal with higher temperatures?

How do they protect their most vulnerable

population during those times?

I think another big component of this is water.

Not just rising temperatures, but the way that rainfall

will be changing, so a place like Los Angeles

is projected to have fewer storms,

but those storms will be more intense,

dumping more water at one time and LA is actually

preparing for that with some catchment systems.

Could we talk about the importance here

of considering climate change both as a temperature change,

but also a change in rainfall?

A lot of similar work to ours that had been done

previously and still being done,

it mainly focused on temperature.

And we experience temperature directly, right?

I mean, of course, we get rained on, but

it's easier for us to experience a heatwave

than it is a 30% increase in precipitation.

But precipitation is really, really important

for the reasons you mentioned, right?

We of course, rely on fresh water.

And so, places that have built infrastructure

and have planned around a certain amount of precipitation

falling in a given year, drastic changes in that

is gonna affect a lot of people.

So I think it's really important to bring in the dimension

of rainfall and to incorporate that into the analysis.

Can you talk about what kind of ecological effects

we might see in the coming years as the planet warmed.

Your climate is a really important determinant

to what organisms live where, right?

So that means plants, insects, animals, what have you.

And when we start changing the environment

and climate starts changing, animals tend to move around

to in essence, find their preferred habitat.

You know, some of these organisms that are moving around,

are disease vectors, more mosquitoes,

certain species of mosquitoes and certain diseases

that they carry are all going to be affected

and respond to climate change.

And that's gonna directly affect humans,

when those are vectors of disease

and other things like that.

So given the enormous scope of climate change,

the dire nature of it for the future of the human race,

what as individuals, might we be able

to do in eliciting change?

Well a couple of things, I like to say we all contributed

to the problem, so we can all contribute to the solution.

If we look at what contributes to emissions,

transportation's a big one, power generation's a big one.

I live in Maryland, in Maryland we're able to choose

our power supplier and so, we're able to choose

a supplier that purchases renewable energy.

So if people live in a state where they have

that ability to pick where their power's coming from,

they can switch today, they can switch from

fossil fuel source to renewable sources.

That would have a major impact.

What's the utility of a map like this in communicating

the really dire consequences of climate change?

Climate change is hard for people to,

not understand per se, but maybe to appreciate

the risks because, one, we experience a lot of variability

in climate, daily, weekly, seasonally, right?

We might see a 20 degree Fahrenheit change

from the nighttime to the maximum temperature of the day.

But then we hear climate scientists talking

about climate change and being worried about,

you know, a four degree change in mean global temperature.

And it's like, well you know, that doesn't seem so bad.

And so I think the utility of this tool

is to translate those abstract global averages

that we hear all the time into an actual impact assessment

of where people live.

I think it's powerful for people to see the magnitude

of change that we expect just given

relatively small changes in mean global temperature.

Okay, well thank you very much for joining us.

My pleasure Matt.