If there is a climate-change skeptic in your life, you might be looking forward to your next get-together, so you can present all the evidence this horrible summer is providing. This has been the worst wildfire season on record in many places, including British Columbia and Alberta.
Unprecedented heat waves and wildfires across North America, Europe and Asia have killed people, destroyed homes, and often made living conditions unbearable.
Perhaps you’ll be too weighed down by a justified existential crisis to gloat over cocktails with your naysaying friend. If not, you can still tell them the scientists have spoken: Human-caused climate change is heating up the planet. Paired with the return of El Nino this year, the results have been disastrous.
The fire season started early in Canada, devastating Nova Scotia, of all places, and so many other areas across the country since. There were nearly 900 wildfires burning across Canada this week. The Canadian Armed Forces arrived in B.C., joining international firefighters, as officials declared 2023 the worst wildfire season on record in terms of area burned.
The B.C. Coroners Service issued a health alert after a nine-year-old boy from the community of 100 Mile House died last week of a severe asthma attack. It was exacerbated by wildfire smoke, his family said. Two firefighters have died battling blazes in Canada this month in B.C. and the Northwest Territories, while a helicopter pilot died fighting fires in Alberta.
As my colleague Jane Skrypnek reported this week, fires have incinerated close to 110,000 square kilometres of land – the equivalent of three Vancouver Islands. The resulting smoke has prompted about 2,500 air quality bulletins since April 1, said Environment Canada.
Smoke from Canada’s wildfires invaded the U.S. for the second time this fire season (get used to that term, “fire season”) – reaching as far south as Georgia and North Carolina this time. “Canadian wildfire smoke puts around 70 million U.S. residents under air quality alerts,” read one CNN headline this week. Phoenix set a new U.S. record on Wednesday for most consecutive days at 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43.3 Celsius) or higher – 19 straight days – and the dangerously hot conditions are continuing. In Texas, more than two-thirds of its 130,000 inmates are housed in sweltering, unairconditioned prisons amid triple-digit temperatures. Inmates are dying as a result, according to family members and advocates. In Florida this week, the ocean water around Key Biscayne was so hot it felt “almost gooey” to swimmers.
This is very bad for the economy as well. According to Forbes, extreme heat could cost the U.S. economy US$100-billion annually – with impacts on not just health care, but also infrastructure and transportation.
In Europe, high temperatures and dry conditions have caused wildfires in Greece, where officials had to close the Acropolis for a time. There are heat warnings across Italy and Spain. In Basra, Iraq, government work was suspended on Thursday as temperatures hit 50 degrees. Record-setting temperatures above 50 have also been recorded this week in China.
Back home, the community of Lytton, B.C., is still talking about rebuilding more than two years after the town was razed by a wildfire amid a heat dome that ultimately killed more than 600 people in the province.
In so many places in the Northern Hemisphere this summer, high temperatures have made outdoor life impossible, from construction sites to playgrounds – where children should be able to go down the slide without the potential for sustaining thermal burns.
At no point should these stories become everyday. And yet in this summer of our discontent, we are hearing them every day. It is essential that we listen. This new normal is abnormal – and it is deadly.
And yet, we still have deniers, including people in positions of influence who would belittle those who are doing what they can to force change. “Environmental alarmism is the religion of children, a sandbox for narcissists,” Rex Murphy wrote of climate activists in the National Post this spring. I don’t think vandalizing artwork is a good idea either, but “environmental alarmism”? If you’re not alarmed, one has to wonder: are you awake?
We should be marching in the streets, as Arno Kopecky wrote this week in The Globe and Mail. “This summer, after 20 years of writing about climate change and seven years of being a father, the magnitude of events finally caught up to me,” wrote Mr. Kopecky, whose most recent book is The Environmentalist’s Dilemma: Promise and Peril in an Age of Climate Crisis. He is urging others to join him in September’s planned March to End Fossil Fuels.
It can feel futile – I get it. But despair alone is not an option. Accompany it with debate, protest, action. Invest and shop ethically (if you can), ride your bike to work (if it’s not too hot), eat more sustainably, argue with that climate-change denier at the family barbecue. The time to swelter in silence is over.