Most major US cities will "move" 400-600 kilometers to the south as a result of global warming, which will have an extremely negative impact on their residents and cause massive restructuring of their ecosystems. Climatologists write about this in the journal Nature Communications.
Most scientists studying the Earth's climate today do not doubt that global warming exists and that it will radically change the face of the planet if the rise in temperatures cannot be contained at around 1.5 degrees Celsius. This is supported by the results of measurements from dozens of climatic satellites, thousands of meteorological stations and buoys in the sea, and hundreds of computer models of the planet's climate.
Globally, an increase in average annual temperatures will change the location of the planet's climatic zones and ecosystems in a special way. In its most general form, this will be expressed in the fact that the belts will become wider and their northern and southern boundaries will shift by several tens or hundreds of kilometers towards the poles.
This, in turn, will force many animals and plants, accustomed to certain environmental conditions, to become a kind of "climate refugees" and flee north to colder regions. Such migrations will inevitably force them to come into conflict with local flora and fauna, which are less sensitive to temperature fluctuations.
Matthew Fitzpatrick from the University of Maryland (USA) and his colleague Robert Dunn from the University of Copenhagen (Denmark) decided to find out how such shifts would affect the climate of five hundred of the largest cities in the United States and the lives of their two-legged and four-legged inhabitants.
For this, scientists not only calculated the typical average temperatures, rainfall and other climatic parameters, but tried to find analogues of these megacities in 2080 among modern settlements in North and South America.
On average, their position shifted about 580 kilometers south and several hundred kilometers west, leaving much of the United States in the conditions prevailing today in the south of the country, in Mexico, Guatemala and the Caribbean islands.
The result will be a kind of climatic chaos - cities in the northeastern United States will "move" to the hot and very humid tropics, and the entire western United States will become even drier and hotter than today. As Fitzpatrick and Dunn note, deserts will appear not only in southern California, but in all states on the Pacific coast.
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Such dramatic shifts, as climatologists suggest, will not only be a big problem for infrastructure and urban services, but also for various animals that have adapted to living in large cities. They will be threatened not only by "migrants" from the south, but also by new diseases and a lack or excess of moisture.
Such changes, as the scientists emphasize, will occur even if the Paris Agreement and subsequent restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions are fully or partially implemented. Therefore, preparations for them should start right now, given that the current volumes of CO2 emissions exceed even the gloomiest forecasts of the UN.
