One of the clearest bells on the perils of global warming is being sounded from Honolulu.

Camilo Mora, an award-winning assistant professor in the University of Hawaii’s geography department, assembled a team of graduate students to pore over the data from 39 of the world’s best climate models and computer projections to track the changes in the Earth’s weather.

Grinding the numbers shows it will get hotter.

Mora gives the estimates for when it will become not just hotter, not just abnormally hotter, but hot enough that ecosystems will be destroyed and economies ruined in what he calls "climate departure."

Honolulu and Phoenix by 2043 will have unprecedented high temperatures. These record-breaking high temperatures within 30 years will be the normal temperatures in Honolulu.

Mora and his team published the finding in this week’s edition of Nature, and put much of the detail online at his UH website, http://www.soc.hawaii.edu/mora/.

Basically, he explains that the coldest year in the future will be warmer than the hottest year of the past.

"The results shocked us. Regardless of the scenario, changes will be coming soon," Mora said in a press release. "Within my generation, whatever climate we were used to will be a thing of the past."

The projections raised a new sense of alarm with scientists.

"This paper is unusually important. It builds on earlier work but brings the biological and human consequences into sharper focus," says Jane Lubchenco, former administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

She is now at Oregon State University and was not connected with the study. Lubchenco called the report "stunning … and it has sobering ramifications for species and people."

The caution accompanying the study warns that the data is from those computer models that are an attempt to predict climate change with unabated greenhouse gases. Specifically how that will happen is not known.

Still the data is daunting: The 39 studies measured data from 54,000 locations around the globe.

Asked if he could estimate new monthly temperatures for Honolulu 30 years ahead, Mora told me he is working with 3 terabytes of data and calculating the average of the 39 models for Honolulu. It will probably take more than a week of computer time.

Mora, 38, who was born in Colombia and earned his doctorate in biology at the University of Windsor in Canada, says the important takeaway from the study is that the tropics will feel the effects of global warming earlier.

Since most things live in the tropics, more living things will be hurt.

"Tropical species are unaccustomed to climate variability and are therefore more vulnerable to relatively small changes," he said in a press release.

"The tropics hold the world’s great diversity of marine and terrestrial species and will experience unprecedented climates some 10 years earlier than anywhere else on Earth," he added.

What about Honolulu, is there local action to take? Yes and no.

Mora says what we do here must be repeated around the world.

"Unfortunately, this is a global problem. We need to reach a global concerted action on this. Perhaps it could start in Hawaii, but whatever we do here could only have an impact if implemented globally.

"For us here in Honolulu, the new climate will arrive by 2043, if we do not do anything," Mora said in response to my query.

Enjoy your weekend.

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Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.