Temps may climb 10 degrees by 2080
Published 9:00 pm Thursday, May 10, 2007
WASHINGTON – Future eastern United States summers look much hotter than originally predicted with daily highs about 10 degrees warmer than in recent years by the mid-2080s, a new NASA study says.
Previous and widely used global warming computer estimates predict too many rainy days, the study says. Because drier weather is hotter, they underestimate how warm it will be east of the Mississippi River, said atmospheric scientists Barry Lynn and Leonard Druyan of Columbia University and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
“Unless we take some strong action to curtail carbon dioxide emissions, it’s going to get a lot hotter,” said Lynn, now a scientist at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “It’s going to be a lot more dangerous for people who are not in the best of health.”
Instead of daily summer highs in the 1990s that averaged in the low to mid-80s Fahrenheit, the eastern United States is in for daily summer highs regularly in the low to mid-90s, the study found. The study only looked at the eastern United States because that was the focus of the funding by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Lynn said.
