DES MOINES, Iowa — Scientific data can be difficult to understand if you don’t have a background in science, but a new and free website looks to now change the way we view climate information.

For those just curious about what life will look like to those who make decisions for their city, Probable Futures was created to allow everybody access to the climate data scientists have and use those data to form their own opinions and make decisions about the future.

This site is interactive and allows you to manipulate the maps to show the range of possibilities at certain levels of warming ranging from 0.5°C to 3.0°C. Currently, the Earth has warmed 1.2°C since the mid-1800s.

Examples

• At 3° of warming, parts of the Rocky Mountains will have a significantly higher chance of experiencing extreme drought.
• At 2-3° of warming the 1-in-100 year storms we experience in the United States will become 3-4 times as likely.

Dr. Spencer Glendon is the founder of Probable Futures and said, “Probable Futures is a non-profit enterprise initiative, to provide high-quality information at a local level to everybody in the world, for free. There are for-profit businesses that are selling climate intelligence, and only to people who can pay, which is not great, and also only in places where there’s a lot of capitalism. There are an incredible feat by our species to understand our world and the idea that information should only be available to people who can pay high fees is not right.”