[MCN] Heat in the city, in the lifetime of children living today

[Lance Olsen]

Excerpts: Within the lifetime of children living today, the climate of many regions is projected to change from the familiar to conditions unlike those experienced in the same place by their parents, grandparents, or perhaps any generation in millenia1 <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08540-3#ref-CR1>,2 <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08540-3#ref-CR2>. 

Collectively, the 540 urban areas we analyze in this study include approximately 250 million inhabitants, including >75% of the population of the United States and >50% of the population of Canada.

We find that if emissions continue to rise throughout the 21st century, climate of North American urban areas will become, on average, most like the contemporary climate of locations 850 km away and mainly to the south, with the distance, direction, and degree of similarity to the best analog varying by region and assumptions regarding future climate. For many urban areas, we found substantial differences between future climate and the best contemporary climatic analog, underscoring that by the 2080s many cities could experience novel climates with no modern equivalent in the study domain. 

In addition to the summaries we report here, we visualize climate analogs for all 540 urban areas and 54 future climate scenarios using an interactive web-based application (available at https://tinyurl.com/urbanclimate <https://tinyurl.com/urbanclimate>) that provides a means to communicate abstract forecasts of future climate in terms that are more locally relevant to the nearly 250 million people who call these urban areas home.

Nature Communications [ open access ]Published: 12 February 2019 <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08540-3#article-info>

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08540-3 <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08540-3>


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Standard of living versus life on Earth. 
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“The ecological systems upon which humans rely for life support are in crisis, and human behavior is the root cause.”
 
Elise Amel, Christie Manning, Britain Scott, Susan Koger

Beyond the Roots of Human Inaction. Science 21 April 2017

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“Consumer expectations of ever-higher living standards were fuelled by more lenient and readily available bank lending, …. 

“Social status and identity became closely associated with consumption, in particular with the concept of luxury. 

"Identifying oneself with the good life meant being able to live beyond traditional understandings of basic needs. Debt was the price one paid for the joys of being part of a hedonistic consumer culture.”

Kenneth Dyson. The Morality of Debt. Foreign Affairs. May 3, 2015
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2015-05-03/morality-debt <https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2015-05-03/morality-debt>

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“The American way of life is not negotiable.”

George H. W. Bush. 1992

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"We are not able even to think adequately about the behavior that is at the annihilating edge."

R. D. Laing. Introduction, The Politics of Experience. 
1967, New York. Pantheon Books, a division of Random House

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