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There are a few tell-tale signs for when fall arrives in New England. The nights are cooler and children start bitterly preparing for another school year. The leaves begin changing color – vivid reds, oranges, and yellows. Along with the trees’ colorful transformation come the leaf-peepers: tourists who swarm from urban areas to gawk at the brilliant hues. They make day trips to upstate NY, Vermont, and New Hampshire. They buy moose-adorned tchotchkes and pump a few dollars into the local economies in that otherwise slow time before the skiing season gets underway. And above all – they drive slowly, fixated on the trees, completely oblivious. Usually drivers in the Northeast watch for deer. But when the trees change color, it’s all about keeping an eye out for out-of-state license plates and erratic behavior.

Whether the tourist bucks make up for the inattentive driving is debatable. But the days of brilliant fall foliage in New England are numbered, courtesy of changing weather conditions predicted over the next 100 years. Talk of global climate change usually revolves around the most serious repercussions – rising sea levels and flooding, rising temperatures and droughts, more extreme weather all over. But talk of sea levels in feet and temperatures in annual averages clouds the real effects of climate change.

The new position for detractors of global climate change is a blase disregard for what the future holds. Even a small change in temperature, however, has a lasting impact – New England being a prime local example.

According to the Northeast Climate Impacts Assessment (NCIA), the Northeast is expected to see an average temperature increase of between 5º F and 10º F by the year 2099. As is typical of such projections, the lower temperatures (winters, nights) are increasing at a faster rate than the higher temperatures (summers, days). Higher temperatures are unpleasant for humans living in the Northeast, but might spell disaster for the affected ecosystems.

The estimated change in the heat index (how hot it feels) over the next 100 years will turn upstate NY into Georgia or Virginia, currently. This is also a good way of visualizing how the ecology of New England might be affected. Two prime examples include two New England favorites: the fall foliage season, and springtime maple syrup production.

Both revolve around the trees of the Northeast. Currently, forests in the Northeast are mostly maple, beech, and birch (in Maine; coniferous spruce and fir). The sugar maples that dominant New England (particularly Vermont) are the source of both brilliant fall foliage and maple syrup. But as winters grow milder, the cold-weather maples are expected to migrate to the north, at an alarming pace. They’ll be replaced with oak, hickory, and pine – decidedly less interesting species to gawk at.

In the short term, even while the maples may last, fall foliage and maple syrup production will be affected. Increasingly rainy falls decrease the amount of time to view bright foliage. The best fall foliage is the result of crisp – but not freezing! – dry, relatively calm fall weather. For its part, syrup production requires very specific conditions: above 40º F during the daytime, below-freezing during the night. And these conditions will begin to occur less often and more sporadically as time proceeds.

When compared with flooding in Bangladesh and drought conditions in the Midwest, the fact that New England will lose fall foliage and maple syrup to Canada seems trivial. But the change will be felt by the people living in the Northeast, who produce or consume maple syrup, who leaf-peep or profit off of said peepers.

Neither is a particularly exorbitant industry. Maple syrup generates $20m in retail sales a year in Vermont (the dominant producer in the US). Leaf-peeping tourism creates a little more revenue: $83m in Maine, $337m in Vermont, and a whopping $1b in New Hampshire. But the loss is more of a way of life. Iroquois and Algonquin Indians originally used the sap, the latter creating cakes. And with the long life of the maple tree (on the scale of 400 years), some of the trees still standing were likely being tapped around the time Europeans began arriving in the area.

Today, Quebec produces the bulk of the world’s syrup. And within our lifetimes, it’s likely that we’ll need to drive clear into Canada to do our leaf-peeping and to buy our syrup. This by-product of global climate change won’t kill or leave anyone homeless, but it’s a sad fact nonetheless.