In that sense, the heat dome was a foreshock of the world to come, with impacts both immediate and long-lasting. Yet it occurred in a world that has only warmed, on average, about 1.2 degrees since 1850. We’re now racing to 1.5 degrees and are likely to cross that threshold by the mid-2030s. Even if carbon emissions peak soon, as projected, we’re probably headed for two degrees of warming by mid-century, unless that peak is followed by rapid reductions.
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 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.
And those fires will be fundamentally different—more beastly and less controllable—than the fires we were previously accustomed to. Pyrocumulonimbus can dispatch lightning strikes dozens of kilometres from the main burn, starting more fires. Larger, hotter fires also create more embers, vaulted aloft to drift long distances. These self-sustaining qualities can keep large fires burning indefinitely, until cooler weather and rainfall temper them.
as a future threat—a bill that will be collected as our children enter adulthood. But for increasing numbers of our kids, its destructive effects have already indelibly marked their growing and vulnerable bodies.A hotter North Atlantic will fuel stronger and more frequent hurricanes in the decades to come.Inuit Nunangat is the homeland of Inuit in Canada
“Some years we’re going to have to restrict water and essentially ration it. And there’ll be other years when we’ll perhaps be one of the few places in the world that can still produce food reliably.” These landscape changes will produce domino effects that will have tremendous consequences for animal life, including extinctions. A study last year by European and Australian researchers found that in a scenario roughly consistent with two degrees of warming by mid-century, one in 40 land animal species will go extinct by 2060; by 2100, that number of extinct Canadian species will rise to one in 16.