Across most parts of the planet, the coldest years will be warmer than Earth’s hottest years in the past, according to scientists at University of Hawaii of Manoa quoted in this New York Times article today. 

Average temperatures in each year around 2047 will be hotter across most parts of the planet than they had been at those locations in any year between 1860 and 2005.

The New York Times quoted a paper published in the journal Nature, which can be found here. 

“Go back in your life to think about the hottest, most traumatic event you have experienced,” Dr. Camilo Mora, the lead scientist, said in an interview. “What we’re saying is that very soon, that event is going to become the norm.”

The Times explains about Mora’s process here:

The Mora paper is a rarity: a class project that turned into a high-profile article in one of the world’s most prestigious scientific journals.

Dr. Mora is not a climate scientist; rather he is a specialist in using large sets of data to illuminate environmental issues. He assigned a class of graduate students to analyze forecasts produced by 39 of the world’s foremost climate models. The models, whose results are publicly available, are operated by 21 research centers in 12 countries, and financed largely by governments.

Thousands of scientific papers have been published about the model results, but the students identified one area of analysis that was missing. The results are usually reported as average temperature changes across the planet. But that gives little sense of how the temperature changes in specific places might compare with historical norms. “We wanted to give people a really relatable way to understand climate,” said Abby G. Frazier, a doctoral candidate in geography.

So Dr. Mora and his students divided the earth into a grid, with each cell representing 386 square miles. Averaging the results from the 39 climate models, they calculated a date they called “climate departure” for each location — the date after which all future years were predicted to be warmer than any year in the historical record for that spot on the globe.

Photo: The New York Times

— Gene Park