How extreme heat changes us
On the past two early mornings I have stepped outside my house and finally taken a deep breath.
The Toronto air at last feels temperate — the way I have always previously loved summer mornings in the city, full of freshness and at least partially sunny promise.
What a welcome relief from what has greeted most of us, even early in the day, without a break seemingly for weeks, a searing and stultifying heat in which it’s hard to breathe and even harder to think.
Is extreme heat our future? Thanks to the effects of climate change and in some political circles, continuing ignorance if not outright indifference, it seems so.
According to Environment and Climate Change Canada, over the next 30 years, “the number of extremely hot days in a year is expected to more than double in some parts of Canada.”
We know so far that this past July has been the third hottest globally on record — surpassed only by 2016 and 2017. Most news media outlets have featured alarming graphs and charts on which slashes of red, orange and yellow predominate as they tell the story of our rising waters, soaring temperatures, extreme weather events like floods and fires, and ultimate discomfort.
On Monday in B.C., the air all over the province constituted, according to the CBC news channel, a “high or extremely high health hazard” due to still raging wildfires. This summer, all over the northern hemisphere, many locations — including Calgary — have, according to one chart in the Washington Post, “witnessed their hottest weather in recorded history.”
“Exceptionally hot weather every single day,” was one phrase I read describing our current climate. It felt claustrophobic and relentless.
In a recent review in the New York Times Book Review of Rising by Elizabeth Rush, a new book about the rising coastal waters in America, reviewer David Biello, the science curator for TED Talks, taking his cue from the book, wrote something profound: “The American language seems to lack the words to adequately capture this creeping calamity, the words that will help Americans comprehend the future.”
That is true for all of us. I’ve never heard so many complaints as I have this summer about the heat, but still most of us lack the language to describe what’s really going on.
What’s clear though, is that the more people observe the heat and feel its effects for themselves, the more the reality begins to sink in. We are a planet on fire.
The young man in a Danforth bakery, who while wrapping my loaf of still warm olive bread said wistfully, “I am so ready for fall.” A short time ago, a sunny mid-August day would have prompted him to bemoan how short our summer is.
Friends at a dinner wondered whether their very personalities are changing because of this heat.
“Yes!” I replied — “mine certainly is. I’m getting grumpier by the minute.”
Rising temperatures create a new have and have not society — those with the means to deal with the heat, and those who cannot escape it. The poor, the disabled, the disenfranchised, many have no way to remain “chill” in a warming climate.
We have air conditioning. I hate it. But how lucky to be able to hate the slightly stuffy but still nicely cooled air that allows me to work in my home (but not my office which is on the third floor and many times unbearable).
I cool the house down during the day so I can turn off the air and open a window most nights.
I made a list of some of the small ways extreme heat changes us. We all sweat the small ways while the macro predictions of 30-year trends and fights over carbon tax go on.
Extreme heat empties playgrounds. My favourite one had no kids in it on more than one day this past week.
Extreme heat changes fashion. Women of a certain age, if you’re think you’re esthetically beyond the sleeveless trend, think again. Invoke your right to bare arms. I am working my arms more in aquafit and otherwise saying screw it to any sense of shame that my upper arms are not as buff as they should be.
That “cold shoulder look” is also here to stay — you know those tops in which the shoulder is partially bared or cut away so that even a part of your arms can breathe. I saw a catty fashionista comment online about someone sporting this look: “Wow she’s clearly given up.” Forget it. Within reason wear what makes you comfortable, or at least doesn’t make you faint from heat prostration. But, no, you still can’t justify wearing flip flops to the office.
Extreme heat changes the rhythms of our work culture. If you’re working outside, especially so. But even inside, where it’s air conditioned, we experience far more workrelated lethargy in this heat.
Many of us don’t sleep as well at night so we’re tired and irritable to begin with.
Extreme heat changes our food consumption — what we eat and how we prepare it. I haven’t turned on my oven in weeks. I need more salad recipes and I already have a lot.
These are small things, but they comprise the daily texture of our lives while the heatrelated deaths and destruction goes on.
Henry James once wrote that the phrase “summer afternoon” were “the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
Perhaps “emission free lives” will attain a lasting beauty all of its own.