Heat wave blamed for six deaths in Montreal
‘In Canada, things are going to be hotter, wetter and wilder,’ climate scientist says
MONTREAL — Montreal health officials are blaming the heavy heat and humidity for at least six deaths in recent days.
Dr. Mylène Drouin told a news conference Tuesday that the deaths have been investigated and are linked directly to the continuing heat wave.
Drouin said the victims fit the profile of people whom authorities describe as at risk: those with chronic illness or mental-health problems, people who live alone and people without air conditioning at home.
She said there has also been a rise in the number of calls to ambulance services in recent days and that the city wants to avoid what happened in 2010, when intense heat claimed 106 lives.
The oppressive weather has enveloped much of Central and Eastern Canada since the Canada Day long weekend.
Environment Canada said humidex readings were in the 40-degree range Tuesday from southwestern and northeastern Ontario through southern Quebec and into the Atlantic region.
The humidex is a temperature index used by Canadian meteorologists to describe how hot the weather feels to a person, by adding the effect of heat and humidity.
The weather agency said a “very warm and humid air mass” has settled over the Maritimes and above normal temperatures and humid conditions will stick around into Thursday. Maritime temperatures are expected to return to seasonal normals for the weekend.
Southern Quebec can also expect humidex readings through Thursday between 35 and 40 C, Environment Canada said.
Southern Quebec was rocked by violent storms on Monday, leaving thousands of homes and businesses without electricity — or air conditioning. Most of the outages were in the Outaouais region of western Quebec in addition to areas north and northeast of Montreal.
Environment Canada said much of southern Ontario, including Toronto, also remains under a heat warning. The extreme heat is expected to ease on Friday with the arrival of a cold front.
The record-setting heat wave can’t be directly attributed to climate change — but neither can the likelihood of a connection be ignored outright, a University of Waterloo climate scientist said.
Suggesting the two aren’t linked would be akin to arguing that no particular home run can be attributed to steroids when a baseball player on a hitting streak is caught doping, said Blair Feltmate, head of the Waterloobased Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation.
While a single isolated event might be normal, there’s little doubt that the world and Canada are together seeing more extreme weather events — patterns that can be attributed to climate change, Feltmate said.
“All the predictions illustrate that going forward in Canada, things are going to be hotter, wetter and wilder,” he said. “It’s not any particular year that matters. What matters is the overall, the long-term trend.”
Globally, the world’s average annual temperature is one degree Celsius warmer than it was a century ago, says Feltmate.
“You have to remember that the difference between the temperature we have on the planet today versus an ice age is only five or six degrees Celsius, so being up one degree Celsius over a period of 100 years is a really big deal,” Feltmate said.
The Paris climate-change agreement Canada signed in 2015 with the rest of the world aims to keep global warming at two degrees compared with preindustrial levels.
Canada’s current plans to cut emissions are nowhere near sufficient to reach that target. A 2017 study in the journal
Nature Climate Change found that about one-third of the world’s population already lives somewhere where the daily temperatures are considered lethal more than 20 days a year.
Parts of India, Africa and South America could hit lethal temperatures every day of the year, the study warned.
Canadians need to brace themselves for an influx of eco-migrants over the next century, Feltmate warned — people who are fleeing their homelands because they are simply too hot.
Environment Canada modelling suggests the average summer temperature across Ontario between 2041 and 2070 will be 3.5 degrees higher than it was between 1981 and 2010. The city of Toronto has modelling from 2011 that showed between 2000 and 2010, there were on average 20 days a year over with highs over 30. With climate change, that is expected to more than triple to 66 days by 2040.
Rolf Campbell, a weather historian behind the Twitter account “YOW Weather Records,” said Ottawa hit its highest-ever humidex measurement on Sunday: 47.2 C. Temperatures in Ottawa have gone above 32 for five days in a row, the longest heat wave since 2001. With the forecast set to hit 35 today, a six-day heat wave would be the longest in the city since 1944.
The temperature on Canada Day in Ottawa was 10 degrees higher than average, leaving paramedics to treat more than 100 people at various Canada Day events. At least 18 people were taken to hospital with heat-related illnesses.