You've Already Lived Through It
The rise in extreme heat is not a distant, abstract threat. It is something your city has already lived through, and how much worse it gets is still partly a choice.
Find your city →Explore four kinds of extreme day, each a different face of the same warming. Look for:
- Hot days and nights: San Juan, Puerto Rico, Singapore, and Lagos, Nigeria, all closing in on a year-round hot season, with once-rare hot nights becoming common in San Juan and Lagos.
- Dangerous heat (40°C and up): Phoenix and Laredo, Texas bring it home to the United States; Dubai, UAE and Khartoum, Sudan show the extreme.
- Freezing days: winter shrinking in Chicago, receding across the Arctic and Antarctic, and nearly vanishing in the high Andes at Potosí, Bolivia and Puno, Peru.
Each city is counted in a unit you can feel: the number of extreme days in an average year. A global average creeping up half a degree is easy to ignore; a concrete count of days is not. Since the 1980s, Miami has added 53 hot days to its average year, Dubai has added 40 hot nights, Phoenix has added 17 days above 40°C, and New York has lost 16 freezing days.
Pick any city and its story unfolds the same way: the past is already measured, the next twenty years are largely locked in by past emissions, and the decades after that fork into two futures whose gap is still ours to decide.