Quote:
Originally Posted by jhausner
As for us becoming San Diego, I think that is wishful thinking. You can't change our location vertically on the globe, San Diego is in a particularly special spot where the Earth's tilt is less extreme than here in Vancouver so as you switch seasons the shift away and toward the Sun is far less than in Vancouver.
We could see summers LIKE in San Diego (or maybe worse), but our swing between Winter + Summer will stay the same, it is not like climate change is affecting the tilt of the planet and therefor how much time the Sun is up every day here. What that means is we will see more extremes between the two likely so hotter summers and colder winters, or just more inconsistent weather.
But we will not be San Diego, not unless you scoop Metro Vancouver off the earth and plonk it down in southern California. :| Sometimes I wonder who writes these articles. I mean let's face it, people can't predict weather with accuracy more than 3 or 4 days out even with the most sophisticated super computers. Short term and even medium term climate fluctuations are also barely modellable still. I just think the best anyone even "climate scientists" can actually say about a specific point on Earth is that "shit is going to be changing" but how and when is all pure speculation on their part.
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Well, it was a Vancouver Sun journalist called Larry Pynn 'a veteran environmental journalist, the recipient of some 30 writing awards, including eight Jack Webster Awards.' So he probably understood the science, and had no doubt been asked to write a piece based on the 70 page report that Metro Vancouver published in 2016.
That report isn't about short term change - so it wasn't trying to predict weather events in the current decades. It's about the climate change the region will likely see (based on the best mid 2010s climate modelling) in the 2050s and for some topics, the 2080s as well. It's also about the impact this will have on demand for heating, cooling, water supply and the likely effects on agriculture, for example.
It doesn't actually state that Metro Vancouver will be 'like' San Diego. The reference to that city is that the average summer daytime temperature here is expected to rise to around 25 in 2050, and 27 in 2080 - both higher than San Diego's average daytime summer temperature of 24 today. But the nighttime high isn't expected to be as high as San Diego, and the winter high is projected to rise, but not by as much as in summer, and nowhere near the average 19 degrees San Diego sees in January, for example.
We're not expected to have colder winters - they'll be (on average) warmer too; model suggests a much lower snowpack in the future, with some serious consequences for recreational employment, power generation and water supply. The modelling suggests longer dry spells in summer months, more precipitation in fall, winter, and spring, and more intense extreme events.
It appears that we're seeing many of those changes already. That might suggest that imminent climate change, and its impacts on the built form, the liveability and the economy of cities, and health of the residents is something to take far more seriously than some of the dismissive comments here suggest.
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