First things first: it’s going to get hot. While the planet has warmed 1.2 degrees since the 19th century, when humans first started burning fossil fuels at an industrial scale, Canada has warmed at twice that rate, and the Arctic at four times. In part, this is because wintertime snow and ice act like huge nation-sized solar reflectors, bouncing heat from the sun back out of the atmosphere. As winters grow shorter and warmer, snow and ice cover shrinks, and the land becomes darker, absorbing more heat. An Earth that’s two degrees hotter translates to a Canada at least four degrees hotter, on average. That may not sound so bad in a country where winter can flash-freeze your eyelashes. But we aren’t simply raising the national thermostat. “A hot, dry summer sounds wonderful,” says Robert McLeman, a geographer and environmental scientist at Wilfrid Laurier University. “But in the Canadian context that means forest fires, that means crop failures, that means urban drought.”
By the 2070s we will be living in a fundamentally different climate than the one our country was built for. Cities across the country will begin to reach “climate departure”: a symbolic rubicon, after which a climate falls completely outside historical norms. Even the coldest year, going forward, will be hotter than the hottest in the past. The concept was defined in 2013 by researchers at the University of Hawai’i, who crunched computer models of 39 different planetary futures to arrive at their predictions. In a scenario consistent with roughly two degrees warming by mid-century, Montreal is estimated to reach its departure point in 2072, Toronto in 2074 and Vancouver in 2083.
Of course, warming isn’t an on/off switch. Long before these departure points, unprecedented hot zones will emerge in the valleys of British Columbia between the Pacific and the Rockies, on the southern Prairies and in Ontario, from Lake Erie to the St. Lawrence River Valley and into Quebec. Montrealers will experience, on average, 37 days over 30 degrees every year, up from 13 today. Torontonians will get 39, up from 12, and Calgarians 20, up from five. The interior of B.C. and deep southwestern Ontario will experience more than 50 days every year with temperatures above 30 degrees—more akin to today’s Maryland and Missouri. But that’s not the worst of it: as averages go up, so do extremes, and it’s the outlier heat events that will pose the greatest danger.
The hotter it gets, the harder our hearts beat to circulate blood, resulting in more strokes and heart attacks. Eventually the body loses the ability to cool itself through perspiration, and the brain, heart, kidneys and other organs suffer permanent damage. It won’t just be the hotter days we need to worry about; it’s also the lack of respite at night. Nighttime temperatures rise faster than daytime ones, leading to more “tropical nights,” during which temperatures remain above 20 degrees. During Quebec’s 2018 heat wave, which claimed 86 lives, overnight lows stayed above 20 for a week. Nights like this will increase from a handful per year to roughly three weeks’ worth in Montreal, and nearly a full month in Toronto, by mid-century.
Higher temperatures will lower labour productivity, dull cognition and fuel upticks in aggression, mood disorders and crime. The potency of some medications, including insulin and aspirin, will be diminished, while the side effects of others may become more dangerous. In the very worst heat waves, planes will be grounded, their wings unable to generate lift in thinner, hotter air. Power outages will become more common as well, as rising temperatures reduce the capacity of electrical transmission lines—right when demand for AC is at its peak.
Our bodies, and the society we’ve built, evolved to thrive within a narrow and stable temperature range. As temperatures depart ever further from that comfort zone, every system we rely on—from our circulatory systems to the transportation networks feeding our supply chains—will be endangered.
And as summers become hotter, winters as we know them will begin to disappear altogether. Damon Matthews is a climate scientist at Concordia University and review editor for the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. Though heat will be the greatest threat to our well-being, he sees the decline of winter shaking our national self-identity the most. “Winter will be redefined,” he says. Backyard shinny games and pond hockey will fade into lore. In much of southern Ontario, the number of “viable rink-flooding days” may reach zero by mid-century—a staple of Canada’s sporting culture and childhood erased. (That future is already coming into shape; for the first time in its history, the 7.8-kilometre Rideau Canal Skateway in Ottawa didn’t open last winter.) Ski seasons will be shorter, and white Christmases rarer.
In 2005, Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht first coined the term solastalgia to describe the feeling of being homesick while still at home. It’s that feeling of loss and melancholia that kicks in as your home environment changes before your eyes, and it will come to define the deep emotional and psychological distress that more Canadians will confront as global warming drives their climate past recognition.
