HEAT ON THE MOVE: A screenshot of a tool that predicts how climate will change in 60 years shows the migration of Jonesboro-like temperatures to New York City.


The Atlantic reports
on a study predicting how the changing climate will be felt in years ahead. Example: By 2080, New York’s weather will be more like that in Jonesboro, Ark.

The headline of the article on the study at the University of Maryland: “The East Coast Is Going to Get Arkansas-ified.” Possible subject of new study: Would the change in climate make New York more like Dixie politically? Don’t they always say hot weather contributes to crime rates? The article begins:

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Sixty years from now, climate change could transform the East Coast into the Gulf Coast. It will move Minnesota to Kansas, turn Tulsa into Texas, and hoist Houston into Mexico. Even Oregonians might ooze out of their damp, chilly corner and find themselves carried to the central valley of California.

These changes won’t happen literally, of course—but that doesn’t make them any less real. A new paper tries to find the climate-change twin city for hundreds of places across the United States: the city whose modern-day weather gives the best clue to what conditions will feel like in 2080. It finds that the effects of global warming will be like relocating American cities more than 500 miles away from their current location, on average, mostly to the south and toward the country’s interior.

So the big question: What will Arkansas be like? Maybe rising sea levels will put El Dorado’s new arts district on the coast someday.

The short answer is that everything gets warmer. Even if the Paris Accords produce some mitigation of climate change, the article says Washington, D.C., already famous for clammy summers, will be more like Paragould. Not good.

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“I wouldn’t wish the hot and humid summer climate of Arkansas on anyone,” agreed David Stahle, a climate scientist at the University of Arkansas, in an email.

The research has produced a lookup tool so you can see how your region of the country will fare in this prognostication. I’ve been unable to access the link this morning I think the article must have produced a flood of clicks.