The Northeast Is the Fastest-Warming Region in the Lower 48. Part 33 In The Rest Of The World Is Warming Up Twice As Fast As The Rest Of The World.
https://www.nrdc.org/stories/northeast-fastest-warming-region-lower-48
Boston is wicked cold. Most of Florida’s snowbirds are native to New York, and hurricane-force blizzards are called nor’easters. To put it another way, in a game of word association with warm, the northeastern United States doesn’t exactly top the list. But when it comes to warming from climate change, the top of the list is just where the Northeast sits.
The Northeast is the fastest-warming region in the contiguous United States, according to a recent study—and it’s heating up at a rate 50 percent faster than the global average.
Climate change negotiations, like the 2015 Paris Agreement, revolve around this global average temperature. But here’s the thing about averages: By definition, they represent a set of numbers that includes both larger and smaller values. In the context of global warming, that means some regions of the planet are warming faster and others more slowly. And while the global average is useful from the standpoint of international collaboration, basing a particular region’s strategy for climate resilience on it is a bit like buying your suit based on the global average body weight—there’s a very good chance it won’t be tailored correctly. Only in this case, the error could mean the difference between life and death.
Knowing all this, Ambarish Karmalkar and Raymond Bradley, researchers at the Northeast Climate Science Center (NECSC), decided to get a clearer picture of regional warming rates across the Lower 48. The 200 or so countries that came to Paris in 2015 for the United Nations Climate Change Conference agreed to limit long-term warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius—after vulnerable Pacific island nations talked them down from the long-championed 2-degree target. But Karmalkar and Bradley suspected that many states may cross those thresholds sooner than the planet as a whole.
They had good reason to think so. Previous studies have shown that the Northern Hemisphere is warming significantly faster than the Southern Hemisphere, largely because it has more landmass. Water takes much longer to heat than land does (think of how long it takes to boil a pot of water compared with how long it takes to burn your hand), and the Southern Hemisphere is, well, swimming in it.
The two climate scientists worked with the same set of models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, comparing future scenarios depending on how aggressively the world chooses to respond to the climate crisis. They looked at what will be happening stateside as the world approaches 2 degrees and 1.5 degrees of warming and found that every region of the contiguous United States will reach 2 degrees Celsius 10 to 20 years before the global average gets there.
The Northeast’s emergence as the leader of the pack, however, was unexpected. “That was a big surprise to me, actually,” Karmalkar says. According to their results, by the time the world hits an average of 2 degrees of warming (which they project will happen between 2040 and 2050, depending on carbon emissions), the Northeast will have already seen the mercury rise by 3 degrees.
The dramatic temperature increases and associated weather patterns that are outlined in the researchers’ paper aren’t new to hydrologists, ecologists, and other resource planners working across the Northeast. The time line of these changes, however, is news, and it has added a great sense of urgency to their work. “Based on the rates of warming projected, in another few decades the Northeast will not be the same as it was 50 years ago, or even today,” says Michelle Staudinger, a marine biologist at NECSC.
It goes on and on if you care to follow the link.
It becomes obvious that you can pay an expert, or a scientist to say what you want them to say, no matter how many places make the same claims.
Climate change worse everywhere than everywhere else