Scorching heat in U.S. cities by the year 2100 could have residents of northern cities feeling like they've moved thousands of miles south, a new report on future climate suggests.
Cities could see average rises of summer temperatures of 7 to 10 degrees with some cities becoming 12 degrees warmer by 2100, the report by the non-profit climate science organization Climate Central 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.
And some will become so hot you have to look to other parts of the world to find comparisons, the researchers say.
By the end of the century Las Vegas could see summer temperatures reaching 111 degrees, similar to summers in Saudi Arabia today, while Phoenix could regularly swelter in 114 degree heat comparable to present-day Kuwait City.
The report predicts daily highest temperatures expected in June through August, and does not include in its analysis humidity or dew point, factors known to make high temperatures even more unbearable.
"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."
Climate Central has created an interactive website, "1,001 Blistering Future Summers," to give U.S. residents the opportunity to see for themselves what living in their cities will feel like in 2100.
When a visitor enters their home city's name, the interactive graphic will match it to another city, either in the United States or around the globe, that features current summer climate the visitor can expect for their future.
The future predictions by Climate Central are based on current warming trends, which have seen increases of an average 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit every decade since the 1980s cause by greenhouse gas emissions.
The projections assume those emissions and resulting warming will hold to that trend until 2080.
Even it greenhouse emissions are eventually reduced, "U.S. cities are already locked into some amount of summer warming through the end of the century," Climate Central researchers say.
Boston, for example, can expect average summer high temperatures 10 degrees F above they are now, making it as warm as Miami is today, they say. Summers in Seattle, Washington will reach 83 degrees F. more like what much of Southern California sees now.
