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A new study finds that summers have become longer and warmer over the years, but it also indicates that we have not seen anything yet. The research in Geophysical research letters suggests that summer in the Northern Hemisphere will last six months at the end of the century if climate change continues on its current path, reports the Science Times. Scientists looked at data from 1952 to 2011 and calculated that summer had grown for 78 years to 78 days per NBC News. At the same time, winter shrank from 76 to 73 days, spring from 124 to 115 days and autumn from 87 to 82 days. On this trajectory, the summers would last about six months by 2100 and the winters would turn into less than two months. For the study, the researchers described the beginning of summer as the beginning of the warmest 25% of the temperatures and winter as the beginning of the coldest 25%.
“This is the biological clock for every living thing,” said lead author Yuping Guan of the Key Key Laboratory of Tropical Oceanography at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “People are arguing about temperature rises of 2 degrees or 3 degrees, but global warming changing the seasons is something everyone can understand.” In a news release, the researchers say that such prolonged hot temperatures will have a major impact on virtually every aspect of life, in the form of increased heat waves, veld fires, withered crops, and so on. A Kent State scientist not involved in the study. tells NBC of another possible side effect: “You could get to a point where insects like malaria mosquitoes that are usually kept out of high areas because they can’t survive overnight can survive longer and at higher altitudes.” (Read more stories about climate change.)