In the midst of a global pandemic, I cannot help but feel vulnerable. For the first time in my life, it is tragically clear that humanity cannot simply bend nature to its will: that nature will fight back. That our way of life is not pre-ordained. In fact, things might actually get worse.

Enter climate change. I don’t need to belabor the adverse effects associated with this global crisis. Perhaps thankfully, I no longer even need to argue that it is real (worldwide, or even in America). Most of us know it’s not good.

Now, this article isn’t about how we can slow the adverse effects. Please read those first and foremost, get activated, fight the good fight. This article simply asks the question —

If life is projected to get worse everywhere, where will it be the least miserable?

While the running joke these days seems to be “I’ll just move to New Zealand or I’ll move to Sweden”, the reality is that most of us likely would never consider (or have the privilege to consider) such a drastic change. The more you dig in, the more you’re presented with reams of data or really impressive visuals that still don’t give you a clear answer to a very reasonable — and dire — question.

So begins my search for Goldilocks — THE city to live in, not too hot, not too cold, but jussssttt right. Or at least relatively better off than the rest, as our planet continues to implode. While a global hunt would have been ideal, it was much easier to find and coalesce consistent data on the United States. So here I’ve picked roughly 50 of the biggest cities in the US of A. Venturing outside of the States might be the optimal move for those with that opportunity, but for the over 300M people who call this country home — let’s at least try and locally optimize.

Step 1: “Feeling hot, hot, hot!”

When you think about climate change, the first thing that comes to mind is the weather. In particular, rising temperatures. So that’s where I started. I was enamored by the idea of “good days”, as made popular by Kelly Norton. A “good day” is one where the temperature is pleasant.

However, while knowing the number of days of pleasant weather would be nice, when it comes to climate change, the real fear is awful days. You’re not going to leave Los Angeles because there are a few more pleasant days now in Kansas City. But, you might leave the sunny beaches of LA if half of the time you’re gonna be baked like a potato.

I defined “awful days” using a simple poll from YouGov, which, despite a small sample size, matches intuition well enough. When it’s above 86 degrees Fahrenheit, that’s too hot. When it’s below 37, that’s too cold.

Using that definition, I started churning through climate forecasts from NASA. For those who like wading deep into the weeds of these forecasts, I combined about 20 available models predicting a fairly aggressive, yet sadly realistic scenario (known as RCP 8.5).

Counting the number of ‘awful’ days by city, year after year, get’s you something like this. Here’s the forecast for the 50 most populated cities in the US, year 2100:

Be warned there’s gonna be a lot of charts and data, but I promise I’ll coalesce them into something easy-to-interpret at the end. For those curious though, yes, the above map suggests that more than 250 days per year the temperature is ‘awful’ in Albuquerque (NM), Miami (FL), and Phoenix (AZ). Okay, so the number of ‘awful’ days is going to be input #1 into our final rankings.

Beyond the total number, we also want to look at the expected increase in ‘awful’ days as compared to today. Why does this increase matter? Well, the market and our perceptions of cities already account for today’s reality. For example, you already 1) know that Phoenix is hot, 2) the prices of houses already factor in Phoenix’s heat, and 3) the industry and amenities that exist in Phoenix account for its weather. So, we care how much worse Phoenix gets relative to today. How much change it will experience. That’s input #2 in our search.

Let’s then consider these two factors — the total number of ‘awful’ days and the expected increase in those days for each city:

Here I’ve drawn big color coded circles indicating the good quadrant and the bad one. Being in the upper right quadrant of this scatter plot means you have a lot of ‘awful’ days to come AND you’re seeing a relatively steep increase in those days as compared to now. One thing is quite clear: Poor Honolulu and Miami! Phoenix and Mesa in Arizona are also starting to boil, with more than 70% of the year being awful.

On the other end of the spectrum, you can see that Anchorage is the place to be, go Nanooks! There’s going to be fewer ‘awful’ days in the year 2100 as compared to today — the only city that can boast that claim. Now, to be clear, temperatures are still rising in Alaska — perhaps even more dramatically than elsewhere — but, this conveniently shoves some currently ‘awful’ cold days into pleasant weather territory.

Scanning the rest of the map, we can see that Northern California and the Pacific Northwest are also fairing quite well 80 years from now, while Southern California is seeing some of the largest increases in awful days — LA is projected to feel a bit more like Phoenix by the year 2100. Lastly, it’s harder to tease out what’s happening in that jumble in the middle, so I’ll point out a few more good options for your retirement home: Salt Lake City (UT), Washington D.C., Columbus (OH), and Boston (MA).

Step 2: The seas, they are a-rising…

It’s all well and good to say that San Francisco still looks like a great place to live, but climate change is going to wreak more havoc beyond tweaks to the thermometer. Perhaps the most costly impact will be the rising sea levels — effectively wiping out entire stretches of coastline and displacing large chunks of the population.

If you don’t believe me, watch Miami turn into the Atlantic Ocean given an extreme sea level rise scenario (10 feet). (Being covered in blue is not good).

So, let’s make sure to factor that in. Depending on your source, you can find reports of sea level rise reaching much higher than 10 feet by 2100. But, I’ll pull the relatively conservative level produced by climate.gov. This suggests a range of more like 1 to 9 feet, depending on whether we actually curb emissions or not. The “Extreme” scenario means we don’t cut emissions. “High” means we do a little bit, but not enough.

Using the “High” scenario, we can get a bit more precise for each city, since sea level rise varies by region. The variance is only a foot or two by 2100, but that can make a huge difference. Climate Central has a ton of great tools and data for this — here’s the forecasted rise in the High scenario (which we’ll use) for Miami:

Okay, now that we know the expected rise, let’s look at the percent of population exposed to flooding in each city correlated to that rise. I’d like to point out here that even a relatively small number here can mean a lot — 3% of the population under water in Jacksonville (FL) would mean 30,000 people having to relocate. This will be input #3 in our final evaluation.

As we’ve already seen in Step 1, it’s clear that Miami is destined for disaster. More than 30% of the population is expected to be flooded! Other parts of Florida, Boston, Virginia Beach, and Honolulu appear to be decimated as well. Interestingly, despite being near the coast, cities like Seattle (WA), San Francisco (CA), and San Diego (CA) aren’t in terrible shape.

Let’s layer in one more variable: percent of property value we expect to be impacted. Of course, property value and population are highly correlated, but it’s sorta nice to realize that even if you believe people can move, that’s a crap ton of property value sinking below the sea. This is input #4.

If we zoom past the worst offenders in the top right, we can still see that New York (NY) isn’t in great shape (5% of population and property value will be flooded). In San Francisco (CA) and Oakland (CA), while the population impact is perhaps manageable, losing 5–7% of property value is bound to be challenging. So we’ll make sure to factor that in.

Step 3: When the going gets tough… get going.

Okay, now we know a bit about the changes in temperature and sea level. But the reality is, no matter where you go, you’re going to experience an increase in extreme disasters, refugees, and general unrest. Some cities have the infrastructure, welfare programs, and more to deal with this. Some don’t.

Let’s make sure the cities that are best positioned to adapt get bumped up in our rankings, and let’s avoid those that aren’t. The University of South Carolina leads the way in this kind of research — and is kind enough to share their evaluation with us. They derive a Social Vulnerability Index from a host of factors. “SoVI” is a percentile based on all the counties in America; scoring high is bad. Being in the 99th percentile means you are one of the most vulnerable cities to an environmental hazard.

Layering on these scores, we can begin to separate the prepared from the… well, places that have their hands full if a crisis strikes.

Miami (FL) continues to serve as a useful anchor for the color on the chart you don’t want to be. New York (NY), Baltimore (MD), Philly (PA), and Detroit (MI) also aren’t scoring so well. On the opposite side of the spectrum — places like Anchorage (AK), San Jose (CA), Salt Lake City (UT), Raleigh (NC), Seattle (WA), Virginia Beach (VA), and Colorado Springs (CO) stand out as being well equipped to handle environmental hazards. Adding SoVI to our list, we now have 5 inputs to consider.

Step 4: To COVID or not to COVID

No analysis of the end of the world is complete without factoring in the latest tragic doomsday scenario. Of course, the spread of COVID-19 likely won’t mimic the spread of the next virus we face exactly 1-to-1, but let’s make an assumption that some of the characteristics of cities and their populations play a part in how viruses are able to be contained. So cities not built to handle COVID-19 currently, are likely to struggle the next time a deadly virus pops up. While we don’t need to weight this as heavily as the other inputs, let’s be safe and make sure we factor it in.

Let’s look at proliferation of COVID cases per 100K people by city (from the NYTimes as of July 2nd), this will be input #6 in our final rankings:

We can also compare this to deaths per 100K people (input #7):

As in the case of sea level rises, here again it’s more about the big losers. Places that seem to struggle — New York (NY), Newark (NJ), Boston (MA), and New Orleans (LA) — have not dealt well with COVID. As the likelihood of pandemics rise in conjunction with climate change, we might want to avoid those as long term settlements.

Finding Goldilocks

That was a whirlwind, and surely there’s other factors we have yet to consider. But, for a moment, let’s try and bring what we do know together — so we can find Goldilocks for our future selves and families. I’ll combine the above seven factors into something I’m calling an “Awfulness Index” — not so surprisingly, you want a low score (being awful is bad). As a reminder, those factors are:

1. Number of ‘awful’ weather days in the year 2100
2. Increase in ‘awful’ weather days compared to 2018
3. Percent of population flooded by sea level rise in the year 2100
4. Percent of property values flooded by sea level rise in the year 2100
5. How vulnerable a city is to environmental hazards (SoVI)
6. COVID19 cases per 100K people, as of July 2
7. COVID19 deaths per 100K people, as of July 2

Of course, combining seven factors into one is going to be inherently subjective. However, I can say that if you care about the factors I walked through, then no matter how you mash them together you’re gonna get a list that looks a lot like the final rankings here. Is Omaha (NE) always gonna score higher than Dallas (TX)? Maybe not, but they’ll certainly land in the middle of the pack no matter how you slice it.

So, without further ado…

At long last, we arrive at the dramatic conclusion to our search… drum roll please… Goldilocks resides in Anchorage, Alaska! In fact, Anchorage is such an outlier in the dataset that the sea level in Alaska appears to be sinking (you miiight wanna do a bit more research on that before buying your retirement home).

However, Alaska aside, what I love most about this data is that it does not pigeon hole you into one region of the country. If you do not want to leave the continental US, head to Seattle (WA) or Portland (OR) for a Pacific Northwest vibe. Or if you can afford Northern California — San Jose, Oakland, and San Francisco all make the top 10! If you‘re an East Coast guy or gal, you’d do fine in Raleigh (NC). More interested in the middle of the country? Consider Salt Lake City (UT), Columbus (OH), or beautiful Colorado Springs (CO).

Sadly, it’s important to remember that every city on this list is really just a consolation prize. Don’t be distracted by the green on these charts: everyone will be worse off in 2100. And looking at the data, most of America’s largest cities are projected to suffer. Will millions of people in the US simply be able to relocate from Florida and New York? What about incoming refugees from Central and Southern America? Only time will tell whether emissions can be curbed and these cities can adapt, or whether an onslaught of disasters, refugees, and lost infrastructure makes the entire planet feel nowhere near comfortable. But, if I were you, I’d find a nice little cabin along the Pacific Northwest… just in case.