(Newser)
– A new study finds that summers have been getting longer and warmer over the years, but it also suggests that we haven’t seen anything yet. Research a Geophysical research letters suggests that summer in the northern hemisphere will last six months by the end of the century if climate change continues on its current path, the Science Times reports. Scientists examined the data from 1952 to 2011 and calculated that summer grew during that period from 78 to 95 days, according to NBC News. At the same time, winter was reduced from 76 to 73 days, spring from 124 to 115 days and autumn from 87 to 82 days. In this trajectory, the summers would last approximately six months by 2100 and the winters would reach less than two months. For the study, the researchers defined the onset of summer as the onset of the warmest 25% of temperatures and the winter as the onset of the coldest 25%.
“This is the biological clock of all living things,” says lead author Yuping Guan of the State Tropical Oceanography Laboratory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “People are arguing about raising the temperature by 2 or 3 degrees, but the global warming that changes the seasons is something everyone can understand.” In a press release, the researchers say that such prolonged heat temperatures would have far-reaching effects on almost every aspect of life, in the form of increased heat waves, forest fires, wilted crops, and so on. A Kent State scientist not participating in the study tells NBC another possible side effect: “You could get to a point where insects like malaria mosquitoes that normally stay out of high-altitude areas because they don’t they can survive at night they could survive longer and at higher altitudes “. (Read more climate change stories.)