UN secretary general says ‘humanity is in the hot seat’ as we near the end of a month that is virtually certain to be the warmest on record for the planet

This article was written by Kate Allen and was published in the Toronto Star on July 28, 2023.

It was still dark out when Tamara Jewett awoke in Mont-Tremblant. But almost immediately, she could tell something was wrong.

Jewett had risen at 4 a.m. on a Sunday in June to do something exceptional that, for her, is fairly routine: swim for almost two kilometres, bike for 90 kilometres, then run a half-marathon. The Toronto native is a professional triathlete who specializes in longdistance races such as the Mont-Tremblant Ironman 70.3, held every summer in Quebec’s Laurentian Mountains.

Last year, in one of her first seasons after leaving corporate law to turn pro, Jewett, 33, won the women’s race. Jewett wanted to win again, and the buzz had her as the favourite..

But as the sun rose, Jewett couldn’t see the mountains through a thick haze. The air smelled like a campfire. The bikes arrayed at the ready were covered with a layer of ash, and thousands of dying moths had accumulated into eerie, fluttering drifts.

Soon the organizers called it: wildfire smoke blown in from forests burning in the north of the province had made the air quality too

unsafe. The race was cancelled.

From fires to floods to heat waves, this summer has suffered under a punishing barrage of environmental crises. On Friday, Toronto is expected to endure humidex values in the upper 30s, as we near the end of a month that scientists say is “virtually certain” to be the hottest on record for the planet.

“Humanity is in the hot seat,” UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said Thursday in New York. “Climate change is here, it is terrifying, and it is just the beginning. The era of global warming has ended, the era of global boiling has arrived.”

Climate change has been explicitly blamed for some of what we have seen in recent weeks. For other recent disasters it’s a likely contributor.

Either way, for many people in parts of the world that have until now been mostly insulated from the worst effects, climate change has gone from feeling like a real but remote threat to a specific, tangible reality.

The impacts “are beginning to be felt in a very visceral way,” says Faisal Moola, a professor of ecology and environmental policy at the University of Guelph. “Our day can actually be ruined by climate change.”

Canadians wait all winter for the brief, beautiful weeks of summer, magnifying the grief for what might otherwise be considered small losses: a day of camp, a weekend paddling, a backyard beer. Other losses from this summer’s disasters, including the deaths of wildland firefighters battling blazes across the country and the confirmed deaths of two children and an adult in the floods in Nova Scotia, are undeniably bigger.

In Mont-Tremblant, Jewett says her first reaction to the cancellation of the race was shock. The “almost apocalyptic feel of the environment” added to how jarring that moment was for the athletes.

It wasn’t until the next day that the emotion sank in, feelings that intensified driving home through Ottawa, where she couldn’t see the Parliament buildings through an orange-tinted haze.

“It just felt very extreme, and that felt quite different than if a race was cancelled because of a thunderstorm,” Jewett says.

“This felt like the race had been cancelled because of something that was really really, really wrong, and continuing.”

Aside from uneasy feelings, there are ways to objectively measure how extreme this summer has been. First, there’s the heat.

Records have been broken and then re-broken so quickly that it’s hard to keep track. Last month was the hottest June on record, and on Thursday, scientists with the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said that this July was virtually certain to be the hottest month overall by a wide margin, and warned that records would keep falling.

The constant patter of broken records can be numbing. But the Copernicus announcement contained a statistic that maybe still holds the power to shock: of the 30 warmest days on record globally, 21 of them occurred this month, and the month’s not over yet.

At the White House, President Joe Biden announced plans to protect workers and communities from extreme heat, including directing the Labor Department to boost inspections in high-risk workplaces.

It’s sometimes hard to link what’s happening in a given place on a given day to the incremental and diffuse phenomenon of global heating. But scientists have explicitly credited July’s boggling temperatures to climate change.

“The extreme weather which has affected many millions of people in July is unfortunately the harsh reality of climate change and a foretaste of the future,” the World Meteorological Organization’s secretary-general, Petteri Taalas, said.

This week, a group of researchers who work on what is known as attribution science concluded that the searing, deadly maximum temperatures in the U.S. and southern Europe this month would have been “virtually impossible” if humans had not warmed the planet by burning fossil fuels.

That’s the heat. Then, there’s the smoke.

By mid-July, Toronto had choked through 58 hours when the smoke was so thick it became impossible to see 9.7 kilometres in the distance — how Environment and Climate Change Canada, which collects this data, defines a “smoke hour.”

Last year, Toronto experienced zero smoke hours. Montreal, Halifax and Edmonton didn’t have any either. This year, each had anywhere from three to 194 smoke hours. Calgary logged 265.

Smoke hours don’t tell us anything about health — they measure visibility, when in fact the most dangerous component of wildfire smoke, very fine particulate matter a fraction of the width of a human hair, is invisible.

Smoke hours tells us what it looked like, which is maybe a better reflection of how it felt — which, even for those immersed in the reality of the climate crisis every day, has been distressing.

“It’s felt very different, and it’s felt very personal,” Moola says of this summer. His son has respiratory issues, and he has two elderly parents.

“I’m worried about my parents and their health. I’m worried about my children and their ability to cope with these effects.”

That personal worry has been compounded by Moola’s frustration with the country’s political leadership, or lack thereof.

“I’ve not seen any policymaker use this summer as an opportunity to have a frank and honest conversation with Canadians about the impacts of climate change and say, ‘You know what, You can’t adapt your way out of this. We have to decarbonize the country’s economy,’ ” and make some hard choices to achieve that.

Partly to escape the mental toll of all of this, Moola travelled to Newfoundland this summer to do field work that immersed him in nature every day — a prescription, he suggests, others can follow as a path out of climate-related fear and anxiety.

Canada’s vast expanses of healthy natural landscapes, from the Boreal forest in the North to southern Ontario’s Greenbelt, hold huge quantities of carbon that, if these ecosystems are destroyed or degraded, could make climate change much, much worse, Moola says.

Spending time in nature is “so critical. It’s so life-affirming,” Moola says. It’s also a pathway toward climate action.

“It’s actually a very simple formula. It is: Get out into nature to experience nature. You’re going to fall in love with nature, and once you fall in love with nature, you’re going to be much more motivated to actually fight to protect nature, to support the policies that will protect and restore ecosystems.

“You’re not going to do that if you’re watching nature on a David Attenborough documentary.”

If camping as climate action feels like cheating, other experts also agree the dialogue needs to be reframed in terms of what we gain rather than what we lose as we respond to the crisis, and that many people don’t realize what “climate action” encompasses.

“For example, as a transplant in Toronto, you guys are obsessed with public transportation, which I totally get,” says Jessica Green, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto who studies climate governance. “But it’s always about how crappy it is instead of how it could be better.”

Advocating for a bike lane is a form of climate action, Green says. So is getting a free tree from the city for your front yard. “Join a union,” she suggests — “we know that climate change is ultimately driven by wealth inequality.”

“People feel frozen,” agrees Dr. Samantha Green, president-elect of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment and a family doctor at Unity Health in Toronto.

Part of the reason why, Green suggests, is that the conversation around these weather-related crises and climate consequences — and the media coverage — doesn’t always link back to the root cause of the problem: burning fossil fuels.

As a result, people feel like there’s nothing they can do, when really there’s a lot they can do, and every small action matters.

“There’s this lack of agency around the problem. And then people start to feel hopeless and anxious, and that’s when they shove the problem to the back of their brains because you can’t be hopeless and anxious all the time,” Green says.

“Taking action really helps combat that anxiety and hopelessness — it really makes me feel less hopeless.”

When Jewett got back home, the emotions followed her, and so did the smoke, which lingered over the GTA for several days. “That sat very heavy,” she says.

She got advice from a knowledgeable friend about whether there was anything she could do as an individual and launched a fundraiser for a non-profit focused on reforestation, pledging to match her fans’ and followers’ donations this month up to the amount of her prize purse from winning the Mont-Tremblant race last year.

Tree planting “is obviously not a perfect solution to anything, but at least it’s some kind of positive action, and I did research to try to find what I thought was a really good organization involved in that in a thoughtful way.”

The Mont-Tremblant cancellation was a “strange experience,” Jewett says. As she has adapted her training schedule around the missed race, the days and weeks continued to feel unsettled.

“I’ve generally felt that the summer has been a strange one.”