“If the climate was balanced, you’d have as many cold records as warm records,” he said.Nor is the heat restricted to the land. Phillips said waters off all three Canadian coasts have never been warmer.
There were also fires that spread smoke across the continent and into Europe, where “Canadian wildfires” made headlines from the New York Times to Germany’s nightly news. Over the years, cities such as Calgary and Edmonton have grown used to “smoke days.” This year, that unhappy club grew to include Ottawa , Montreal and Toronto, which, on June 30, had the second-worst air quality in the world.It’s not just a year of particularly wild natural variability, Blair said.
“But the frequency of it and the severity of it and the coinciding of it with enormous extremes of weather in the U.S. and across the world is suggesting to a lot of people that something’s changed.”