How Much Hotter Your Town Is Going to Get by the End of the Century

Most of us are well aware that climate change means that the world is going to get a lot warmer in the coming years. It’s already toasty—2017 was one of the hottest years on record, and the top four hottest years have all occurred since 2014. (And 2018 is poised to knock 2014 off the list as the fourth-hottest year.)

It’s hard to picture what this means, though, other than that we’ve all been sweaty. A new interactive graphic from The New York Times makes it easy to understand, for better or for worse. It allows you to plug in your hometown and birth year to see how many average days per year the temperature has reached 90 degrees throughout your lifetime. And then it projects how many of those extra-hot days will occur each year, on average, for the rest of the century.

Say you were born in Los Angeles in 1985. That year, the LA area was projected to experience around 55 days of 90°F or higher. Today, that number has climbed to 67 days a year. By the time you reach 80 years old, there will likely be 81 to 99 of those extra-hot days.

To get a sense of how climate change will affect younger generations, consider the plight of someone born in LA in 2000. That year, LA could expect 59 days a year of 90°F weather. By the time that person reaches age 80, they can expect to see an average of up to 103 days a year of that weather. Yeesh. And it will be worse for places that already experience a lot of hot weather. Someone born in New Delhi in 2000 can expect to experience an average of up to 243 days a year of 90°F or higher weather. That’s two-thirds of the year. It will be especially awful in tropical locations. By the end of the century, Jakarta, Indonesia will be 90°F or higher for almost the entire year.

It’s hard to do the graphic justice without experiencing the interactivity for yourself, so go ahead and play with it over on the Times website. But instead of weeping, take action.