Study sees fastest temperature rise in US Northeast

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently published a study that indicates that climate change will cause the Northeastern United States to warm much faster than rest of the world.
 
While the study, undertaken by the university's Northeast Climate Science Center (NECSC), points in particular to the Northeast, it also suggests that the rest of the Lower 48 states will see faster temperature increases than elsewhere.
 
“Policymakers need information that is useful at the local, not global scale,” NECSC postdoctoral researcher Ambarish Karmalkar said. “Our study provides this information for several regions in the U.S. in the context of the global temperature targets set in Paris.”
 
The Paris Agreement, signed last year, holds countries to cooperating on maintaining a temperature change of no more than 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels by 2100. The Northeast is expected to reach that level 20 years sooner than elsewhere, to the point that the region will have seen a 3-degree C temperature rise by the time the global average has reached 2 C.
 
“…[T]he 2 C number is a global average, and many regions will warm more, and warm more rapidly, than the Earth as a whole,” UMass Geosciences Professor Raymond Bradley said. “Our study shows that the Northeast United States is one of those regions where warming will proceed very rapidly, so that if and when the global target is reached, we will already be experiencing much higher temperatures, with all of the related ecological, hydrological and agricultural consequences.”