How does climate change affect me?
There is much content written about the impacts of climate change but these are often descriptions on a global or regional scale (for example NASA’s The Effects of Climate Change)
But how will climate change directly affect me and the location where I live? Can we see the effects of climate change in local weather history?
In this article we use historical weather records to understand whether or not we are directly impacted by climate change.
Is the weather changing for my location?
The most basic analysis we can do is to understand whether or not the temperature is increasing for a location. Let’s starting considering the weather for Washington, DC in the United States. Here’s a graph of the average hourly temperatures per year from 1950 to 2018.
Source: https://www.visualcrossing.com/weather/whats-my-climate-change
The chart on the left highlights the average temperature for all the years as 57.8F and then displays each year as red for those years warmer than the average and blue for years that are colder. There definitely does seem to be a trend towards warmer average temperatures in recent years.
The above dashboard also applies a linear regression to highlight any trend within the data. In this case the data is suggesting that average hourly temperatures are increasing approximately 0.3F every ten years. Whilst small, this number is similar to predictions of what has been expected.
Another view of the data let’s us look how other weather might be changing. While the mean temperature change is unlikely to directly affect me yet, changes to severe weather might be a higher impact. Here’s the chart highlighting the number of ‘Extreme precipitation days’ per year. Extreme rainfall is defined as days where there was at least an inch (25.3mm) of rainfall.
Again, we see a wide variation in the data across the years but it is possible to identify a slight increase in the number of days with heavy rainfall — in this case, the trend is fairly small — the additional extreme rainfall events increase by a day every 17 years (0.6 days/decade).
The warming predicted by climate change is not even throughout the globe. Let’s consider a few more places:
In the desert south west city of Las Vegas, USA we see temperatures increasing by more than double that of Washington, DC. at 0.7F.
Source https://www.visualcrossing.com/weather/whats-my-climate-change
On particularly interesting feature of this is that the average temperature change hides different trends in the daily minimum and maximum temperatures. The maximum temperatures are increasing significantly more slowly than minimum temperatures. The minimum temperature for the days are increasing by 1.1F per decade. This can have important effects on agriculture and insect control in places that normally experience killing frosts.
We see similar temperature increase rates across the world:
Sydney, Australia: 0.7F/decade
Moscow, Russia: 0.7F/decade
London, UK: 0.8F/decade
Are these changes going to really affect me when I walk out the door today?
The temperature increases we see from these results are unlikely to make you change your daily behavior significantly. There are cold and warm days just as before and it is unlikely a change in temperature by a degree will impact your choice of clothes or activity.
We may be starting to experience changes in the frequency of more severe weather events such as the high rainfall days. A good exercise would be to investigate whether there are more extreme high temperature days.
Some activities are more impacted by small changes in the weather. For example gardening is highly dependent on days below freezing as they impact the length of the growing season.
Whilst warmer temperatures may be welcomed in some areas, the threat of insects increases with warmer temperatures. Locations that may have been immune to the impacts of insect threats such as mosquitoes will begin to experience problems.
Are the climate changes real where you live?
The daily effects of climate change may not be readily apparent but historical weather data shows consistent increases in temperatures across the world.
If you would like to see how the climate is changing in your location, head over to https://www.visualcrossing.com/weather/whats-my-climate-change. You can easily discover how the temperatures and rainfall are changing for any on the earth.
