Climate change will bring blistering heat to U.S. cities by this century's end, and could have citizens of cities like Boston wondering if they're living in Miami, a climate report says.
"Summer temperatures in most American cities are going to feel like summers now in Texas and Florida -- very, very hot," says lead study researcher Alyson Kenward of non-profit climate science organization Climate Central.
Americans could experience an average rise of summer temperatures of 7 to 10 degrees with some cities becoming 12 degrees warmer by 2100, the report says.
Phoenix and Las Vegas and could be in for the worst hits, the researchers say; Las Vegas may see summer temperatures hit 111 degrees, similar to what Saudi Arabia sees today, while Phoenix could regularly swelter in 114 degree heat like present-day Kuwait City.
Even if greenhouse gas emission are reduced or stabilized, "U.S. cities are already locked into some amount of summer warming through the end of the century," Climate Central researchers say.
"Summers across the country are going to get considerably hotter," Climate Central meteorologist Bernadette Woods Placky says, "particularly if our greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow at the rate they are."
The report analyzed daytime summer heat, predicting the daily highest temperatures from June through August, and did not include dew point or humidity, both of which can increase the discomfort experienced with summer heat, the researchers say.
U.S. citizens wondering how their city will fare with increasing summer temperatures can take advantage of an interactive graphic prepared by Climate Central that they've dubbed "1,001 Blistering Future Summers," where users can enter their home city and find it matched to locations around the world whose current climate they can expect to feel in their city by 2100.
Most cities in the United States are already warmer than they were in the 1980s, with an average 0.4 degree F increase per decade since then.
Another temperature study released in June showed the southwest and northeast corners of the United States have been heating up more quickly than any other regions of the country.
Cities in Canada won't escape the warming either; by 2100 Toronto will feel more like North Miami, while citizens of Montreal will feel weather more like Charleston, S.C.
On the other side of the country, Vancouver will feel more like Southern California, with summer temperatures rising to an average 81.5 degrees.
