Experience Exactly What Climate Change Will Do to Your City, in One Mind-Blowing Interactive


The news: Short of finding a cure for mortality, most of us will not be around by the year 2100. But thanks to this crazy new interactive, you can get a sense of how hot America will be that year.

Nonprofit group Climate Central has released a ridiculously extensive interactive graphic that displays the projected summer high temperatures for 1,001 U.S. cities in year 2100. The feature also shows which cities currently experience other cities' projected temperatures: Boston will be as hot as modern-day Miami, Montana will be nearly as warm as Riverside, California.

Certain cities will get so hot that there aren't contemporary American examples that can be used for comparison. "In some cases, summers will warm so dramatically that their best comparison is to cities in the Middle East. Take Las Vegas, for example. Summer highs there are projected to average a scorching 111 Fahrenheit, which is what summer temperatures are like today in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. And at 114 Fahrenheit, living in Phoenix will feel like summering in sweltering Kuwait City," Climate Central's report reads.

Try typing your city below and see how toasty it will get in the next century.

This is more than just a cool graphic. While the temperatures listed are projections, they do capture the inexorable increase in heat that the U.S. and the greater planet have been experiencing. Summers in most American states are already warmer than they were in the 1970s; by 2100, people might fondly look back on the heatwaves that we experienced as cooler times.

While the reality of climate change is contested in politics and in the media, overwhelming scientific evidence indicates with near certainty that man-made factors contribute to the phenomenon. Even if we won't witness the effects of global warming, this graphic is a firm reminder that our descendants will.