Photo illustration: The Globe and Mail. Source: Getty Images
Ian Brown is a features writer for the Globe and Mail.
I can easily recall the hottest nights, those scorching nights when my skin felt like liquid and the world seemed to melt.
When I met the woman who would become my wife, she was renting an unair-conditioned, illegal, fourth-floor sublet on West End Avenue between 72nd and 73rd Streets in Manhattan for $450 a month., We had two roommates and the living room was spacious but, oddly, had no living room furniture. We spent a lot of time under the futon in her bedroom. I can still remember the scratchy feel of the fabric under the soaked sheets on those sweaty nights.
Her room overlooked a courtyard vent formed by the surrounding skyscrapers, and on nights when it was literally too hot to move, she endured insomnia (a known medical side effect of heat) while listening to the constant groans of an overheated Manhattan trying to calm itself down. People practicing scales, the occasional argument, the screeching, revving and dropping of engines, contrasted with the roar of sirens and planes flying overhead.
On a particularly muggy night, a long, shriek-like cry filled the air, then silence, followed by a tragic crash. The lights came on in the apartment and I saw a shadow in the window. A minute or two passed, and then through a hole in the vent, the building manager said in his Bronx accent, “Oh, a situation! He fell out of the window!” We laughed for a long time in the sweaty darkness, not realizing at the time that we were laughing at a perfect metaphor.
The meaning of a hot night has now changed. Human-induced climate change has ruined its enjoyment. The world is hotter than ever, with the past decade being the hottest since records began in 1850. Heatwaves are becoming more frequent, and Toronto is in the middle of one as I write this. Nights, when the planet typically cools, are now getting hotter.
As a result, temperatures this summer have risen above the stratosphere, reaching 49°C (120.2°F) in Delhi, 41.2°C (106.2°F) in Greece, and 54°C (129.3°F) in California last week. During a late June heatwave that stretched from Arizona to Maine, air-conditioned branches of the Cincinnati Public Library opened as cooling centers. In Quebec, officials are encouraging citizens to spend two hours a day in such spaces during a heatwave. Toronto’s air-conditioned underground PATH system, little used since the pandemic emptied the city center, is suddenly flooded again with people trying to escape the heat. As of this week, the federal government has rolled out a rapid extreme weather events attribution gauge that measures the likelihood that a particular heatwave can be attributed to human-induced climate change. This week’s heatwave would undoubtedly easily fall under this criterion.
Extreme heat is also bad for your health, especially if you are young, old, poor, or non-white, because you are less likely to have access to public pools, air conditioning, adequate housing, or other shelter from the heat. Extreme heat kills more people in the United States each year than hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes combined. In 2021, a heat wave in British Columbia, which brought the term “heat dome” to national conversation, killed 619 people. Most of those who died were indoors, in bed, elderly, alone, and without air conditioning.
A late-night swim in the heat at Christie Pits Park in TorontoDarren Calabrese/The Globe and Mail
The average human body temperature is around 37°C. Heat exhaustion sets in at a little higher, 39°C, and heat stroke at 40°C. Organ failure and death follow. But before that happens, heat (according to multiple studies) makes us stupider, angrier, more aggressive, more murderous, more violent at home, and more likely to honk in traffic, probably because trying to cool a hot body taxes the brain’s ability to communicate. Heat also makes students perform worse. Yet a recent study found that only 177 of 582 schools in Toronto have central air conditioning. Maybe this is what the hell is going on in this world. Paradise LostFire casts darkness, not light; the hotter it gets, the darker the view. Dante did not call it a masterpiece of regret. Inferno Without doing anything.
Hot nights, once romantic, are now scientifically dangerous. “Tropical” nighttime temperatures (above 20°C) are on the rise, and they’re rising faster than daytime temperatures. A typical nighttime temperature in Eastern Canada is 14°C, but 24°C temperatures are expected this summer. Cities are especially dangerous because concrete and architecture (like Toronto) retain heat for longer. These effects are exacerbated by climate change. Just as hot nights no longer cool us down during the day, hot bodies, whose hearts and lungs work harder, don’t recover during sleep in the same way that cooler bodies do. A recent study found that people around the world are losing an average of 44 hours of sleep per year (older adults are losing twice as much sleep as middle-aged people) due to rising nighttime temperatures. It’s no wonder that researchers predict a six-fold increase in heatstroke deaths by the end of the century.
I’ve been thinking about getting an air conditioner in our house so we can sleep better on hot nights, but it’s an old house with radiators so we’d need an exterior wall unit or a mini-split. Mini-splits were invented by Toshiba in the 1970s and require ducting on the side of the house. There’s been an ongoing debate about how desirable such ducting is in our sweltering home. Air conditioners have a long history with roots in many places, from Hamukal in ancient Mesopotamia to Florida in 1842 (the first ice machine) to the movie theaters of 1920s Los Angeles, where air conditioning was long touted as the best part of moviegoing.
Instead, we use electric fans. Electric fans are not the same as air conditioning. I say this with enthusiasm: an air-conditioned home is a dream. A nice coolness is the best.
A fan, on the other hand, will blow unevenly on you, friendly but sometimes overly familiar. Trying to sleep while the fan dries you out is like trying to flirt with a bad partner. The breeze wants to be your friend but can’t decide what to focus on or how close to get.
If the fan isn’t enough, I leave the house. On a recent walk, on a particularly hot night in a residential neighborhood in downtown Toronto, people stroll in the twilight after dinner. The yellow glow of the sky fading behind the white lights of the city’s high-rises is unexpectedly beautiful. The dog park is deserted. Everyone is sweaty and slightly glowing. Walkers, often in bedroom slippers or Birkenstocks, don’t seem to plan on staying outside in the heat for long. Even couples walking hand in hand keep their distance from each other. Do the right thing and Body temperature and Shelter SkyA handful of manga, such as “Senbetsu no Yaiba,” are famous for depicting hot (and sexy) human nature. But it’s rare to see people actually touching or getting sticky on the streets on a muggy night in the city. Until the 1970s, when air conditioning became more widely available in the United States, birth rates in spring were lower than in other seasons.
People outside on a hot night seem to feel safe staring at each other in public, probably because it’s too hot to actually interact. At night, with temperatures over 30 degrees and no breeze to remind us of the existence of the outside world, the heat stops everything. There is no possibility, and therefore no expectation, of effective action, which at least creates the illusion of no rules. We don’t want to move, but we feel free. The heat is present tense, spreading in all directions.
When it gets really hot, I give in and go to the local public pool. It’s open until 11 pm during the heatwaves, so I snuck in there the other evening before bed. Next to me in the pool, a trio of women in their 30s were neck-deep in shallow water, motionless and chatting about the world, their lives, their partners, their jobs. One of them is a social worker in the city’s poor northwest corner, where there was no pool, she said, and she didn’t know of any community centres, nor did she need air conditioning in her apartment. Sure, there were a few shopping malls.
“What are they going to do there to cool off tonight?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said.
Approximately 61% of Canadians own an air conditioner in their home. The percentage ranges from 32% in British Columbia to 85% in Ontario. Ownership is lower among older people and in poorer areas. Air conditioners have become much more energy-efficient as technology has become more efficient, but they still use a lot of energy. According to the International Energy Agency, in 2018, the electricity needed to cool 365 million people in North America was more than the energy consumption of 4.4 billion people in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia (excluding China). Greenhouse gas emissions from this cooling are expected to double between 2016 and 2050.
Here’s the inevitable irony of heat and light and cold and darkness: Civilization as we know it began with the discovery of fire 800,000 years ago. Until 150 years ago, fire was still the world’s primary source of illumination. Fire was light and heat, and together they made the world faster, more efficient, richer, and more comfortable. But when they began to make the world too hot, we invented ways to cool ourselves, which made our climate even hotter.
By 10:30 pm, there were 30 people at the pool, mostly teenagers, yelling and jumping in and out of the water. They looked happy, and sparks seemed to fly from the pool’s blue jewels and dance into the night sky all around us.
Playwright Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman, The CrusadeMiller (and many others) once wrote an essay about the “unusually hot September” of 1928 in New York City when he was a child. His family lived just south of Harlem on 110th Street, “a little too middle-class for sitting on a fire escape.” But just a few blocks away, the whole family would carry their mattresses up the iron stairs at night and lounge outside in their underwear. “The heat never let up at night,” Miller continued. “With a few other kids, we would cross 110th Street to the park and stroll among hundreds of single people and families who slept on the grass, beside the loud alarm clocks that made a gentle cacophony with each passing second.”
I wish we could still trust each other and sleep together in the park on a particularly hot night. Maybe the heat will draw us back together and we can find a better, shared solution to the fire. At this rate, that’s what’s going to happen.
