Study Predicts Warmer Winters By 2050
Winter in Forsyth County and much of North Carolina could lose much of its freezing bite by 2050, according to a national climate-change report issued last week.
The first in a series of Weather 2050 reports from media outlet Vox determined that the local winter low would rise from an average of 31 degrees now to 34.5 degrees.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, the local summer high would jump from an average of 88.1 degrees now to 92.9 degrees.
That 3.5- to nearly 5-degree increase would be constant through much of the year, with the January highs going from 50 to 54 degrees and the July lows from 65 to 70 degrees.
Essentially, that would means the year-round temperatures in Forsyth and much of North Carolina in 2050 will be more like those associated with Georgia and northern Florida.
By comparison, the average temperatures in January 2009 was 37 degrees with an average high of 56 and an average low of 18, according to measurements taken at Smith Reynolds Airport as listed at www.wunderground.com.
Winston-Salem Mayor Allen Joines said Friday that the report "clearly reinforces the reason why I and most of the country's large-city mayors are being aggressive in local actions to reduce carbon emissions."
Joines has participated in the U.S. Conference on Mayors' Climate Protection initiatives, which include efforts to reduce carbon emissions by city transit and other vehicles. The agreement, signed in 2005, committed the mayors to three main changes:
Strive to meet or beat the Kyoto Protocol targets in their own communities, through actions ranging from anti-sprawl land-use policies and urban forest-restoration projects to public-information campaigns;Urge their state governments, and the federal government, to enact policies and programs to meet or beat the greenhouse gas-emission reduction target suggested for the United States in the Kyoto Protocol - 7 percent reduction from 1990 levels by 2012; andUrge the U.S. Congress to pass the bipartisan greenhouse gas-reduction legislation, which would establish a national emission trading system
"The city is currently moving to restructure and re-energize our sustainability program," Joines said.
Other cities
Vox said it determined the averages for 1,000 cities in the continental U.S., comparing recorded and modeled temperatures from 1986 to 2015, as well as projections for 2036 to 2065.
"This offers us the best possible estimate on how much winters and summers will shift from 2000 to 2050," Vox said.
The media group said it relied on researchers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in drawing on 32 different global climate models. The models also determined the average world temperature would rise by 3.6 degrees by 2040.
Vox acknowledged its model could be considered as "too pessimistic, ignores progress we've already made on de-carbonization, and majorly overestimates how much coal we'll burn."
"The majority of the 67 cities that will see their average winter lows rise above 32 degrees are in Southern states, like North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia," Vox said.
For example, the report determined Winston-Salem could lose as many as 70 days of freezing temperatures in 2050 compared with 2000, along with 71 in Richmond, Va., 64 in Baltimore and 60 in Nashville, Tenn.
"The winters (in these states) aren't especially cold to begin with, so even a slight amount of warming can push temperatures above the melting point of ice," Vox said.
Vox said that the temperature shifts may not register as alarming to individuals that would prefer a warmer winter.
"You may be thinking an average increase of a few degrees to your summer and winter weather doesn't seem that bad," Vox said.
"But buried in these averages are extreme weather events - heat waves, severe rainstorms, and droughts - that will be much more damaging and dangerous than the smaller shifts in averages."
Dangerous heat waves
The amount of precipitation would increase overall between 2035 and 2065 by about a half-inch during the spring, while staying about the current average in the summer, fall and winter periods.
Vox said the climate change will influence more than just the outside temperature.
"So much of a city's culture and economy depends on the particulars of the local climate," Vox said, citing less snowfall in the Appalachian Mountains curtailing the winter skiing season, higher summer cooling bills, and potentially more dangerous hurricanes striking the North Carolina coastline.
"Some of those changes will mean stretches of days where it's so hot, it'll be dangerous to go outside. Heat waves around the country could last up to a month."
There also is projected to be an environmental health aspect in that animals and insects that die off during the winter because of freezing ground temperatures could become more abundant with warmer winters.
That would correspond into more Lyme's disease because of the presence of more ticks, more pollen, more mosquito-borne diseases and more diseased trees from bark beetles.
The current climate-change pledges by most countries, but not the U.S. under the Trump administration, "are not enough to limit warming to 2-degree Celsius this century above pre-industrial levels, the target under the Paris accord," Vox said.
"That means countries will still have to do more to fight climate change, drastically slashing fossil fuel use, electrifying their economies, and sucking carbon dioxide out of the air.
"They'll also have to adapt to the warming that's already happening. We can't escape its effects, even during the coldest times of year."
[email protected] 336-727-7376 @rcraverWSJ
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