Study Suggests the Fun Part of Global Warming Will End Soon
So far, global warming seems pretty OK. On Christmas, I took a walk around the neighborhood with my family and didn’t even wear a coat. It was great. But according to a newly published study, nothing gold can stay.
Party-crashing climate and public policy researchers at Duke and NYU say that even before climate change inundates us with hurricanes and tropical storms and disintegrates the ice caps, it may also make our day-to-day lives a little less pleasant. Lead author of the study Patrick Egan told the AP, “They’re getting the good parts and haven’t had to pay the price of the bad part.”
That won’t be the case for long. The researchers made a model of the kinds of weather Americans prefer, based on the cities they choose to move to. Within 90 years or so, climate predictions show the weather emerging on the other side of the sweet temperate spot it’s currently sitting in (sweater weather in January, manageably sweaty butt cracks in July), giving us summers we’re likely to find intolerably hot.
Of course, there are many more serious things to worry about with global warming than bad beach weather, such as the floods, the natural disasters, the extinction, the spread of disease, the prospect of leaving future generations with a scorched hunk of rock instead of a livable planet. But hey, maybe the threat of gnarly heat rash will finally get us thinking about how we might fix this thing.