Over the past few years, the city of Buffalo, New York, has been all over the headlines. But instead of US media focusing only on the city's occasional epic snowstorm, Buffalo is making news for its (perhaps surprisingly) moderate year-round climate – at a time when other parts of the world are becoming uninhabitable because of climate change.

This conversation kicked off in 2019, when Buffalo's mayor Byron Brown declared, during a state of the city address, that Buffalo could be a "climate refuge city", a place where residents of the hurricane-prone Southeast or wildfire-ravaged West, for example, could move to escape climate-induced natural disasters.

A local economic development organisation, Invest Buffalo Niagara, picked up on the mayor's climate haven claim and ran with it. It was an attractive pitch: though the air and water temperatures of this post-industrial city on the shores of Lake Erie will rise as the climate warms, climate scientists don't anticipate an increase in natural disasters there in the coming decades.

On the "Be in Buffalo" campaign website, the city council claims that Buffalo is "better protected from" frequent drought, "unliveable heat" and more frequent and intense natural disasters. The campaign also mentions Buffalo's abundant fresh water supply due to its close proximity to the Great Lakes.

Some of these claims are backed by science. "I really could not find any type of extreme weather [that was increasing] in Buffalo and Western New York," Stephen Vermette, a professor of geography at Buffalo State University, tells BBC Future Planet.

"I'm not saying climate change is going to be good for Buffalo, or Buffalo is going to be an oasis," he says. "We’re not an oasis, we suck less.” In other words, the city might be slightly better off than other parts of the country because, while it will see increases in air and water temperatures, Vermette's research indicates it won't see an increase in the number of extreme weather events.

Buffalo's reputation for milder weather actually goes back more than a century; an early 1900s newspaper headline Vermette dug up reads, "Buffalo comfortable while other cities of the country swelter".

Vermette's conclusions soon took on a life of their own in the media, and he says they have sometimes been repeated without an accurate understanding of his underlying research.

Buffalo is not the only city embracing the idea of being a climate refuge. Across the upper Midwest and Northeast especially, cities like Duluth in Minnesota, Ann Arbor in Michigan, Madison in Wisconsin, and Burlington in Vermont have all jumped on the climate haven bandwagon.

But is any place really going to be spared from climate change? And does moving to one of these cities represent a sustainable solution to the crisis?

There's plenty of debate on both of those questions. Climate scientists and experts are sceptical about the........

© BBC