Photo Illustration: The Globe and Mail. Sources: Getty Images
Ian Brown is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail.
I have no trouble remembering the hottest nights, nights so abroil my skin felt liquid and the world seemed to be on the verge of melting.
When I was getting to know the woman who became my wife, she rented a room in Manhattan for $450 a month in a fourth-floor unair-conditioned illegal sublet on West End Avenue between 72nd and 73rd streets, a place with two roommates and a vast living room but, oddly, no living-room furniture. We spent a lot of time in her bedroom, on her futon; I can still feel its itchy cloth under the drenched sheets on those perspiring nights.
Her room overlooked the courtyard air shaft formed by the surrounding high-rises: On a night when it was literally too hot to move, you could endure the insomnia (a known medical downside of hot weather) by listening to the non-stop groan of overheated Manhattan trying to settle down: people practising scales, occasional arguments, shrieks, motors revving and falling, with a counterpoint of sirens and the rumble of planes overhead.
One especially steamy night, a long, wrenching shriek filled the air, followed by a silence, followed by a catastrophic crash. Lights in nearby apartments flicked on; silhouettes appeared at windows. A minute passed, maybe two. Then, from the pit of the air shaft, the building super’s Bronx drawl: “A aiyah conditionah! Has fawllen out! Of a window!” We laughed in the sweaty darkness for a long time. I didn’t realize at the time we were laughing at a perfect metaphor.
Hot nights mean something different now: Human-caused climate change has spoiled their pleasure. The world is hotter than ever: The past decade is the warmest since record-keeping began in 1850. Heat waves are more common – Toronto is in the middle of one as I write – and last longer. Nights, the Earth’s regular cooling-off period, are now getting hotter as well.
As a result temperatures have been stratospheric this summer: 49 C (120.2 F) in Delhi; 41.2 C (106.2 F) in Greece; 54 C (129.3 F) in California last week. During the late June heat wave that stretched from Arizona to Maine, branches of the air-conditioned Cincinnati Public Library were opened as cooling centres; in Quebec, authorities recommend citizens spend two hours a day in such spaces during a heat wave. Toronto’s air-conditioned underground PATH system, largely abandoned since the pandemic emptied out the city’s downtown, is suddenly awash again with people seeking refuge from the heat. As of this week, the federal government publishes a Rapid Extreme Weather Event Attribution gauge, which measures the likelihood that any particular heat wave is attributable to human-caused climate change. This week’s furnace will no doubt qualify easily.
Nor is extreme heat good for you, especially if you are young or older or poor or non-white, and therefore less likely to have access to a public swimming pool or air conditioning or adequate housing or any other refuge from the heat. Heat kills more people every year in the United States than any other weather event, more than hurricanes, floods and tornadoes combined. In B.C.’s 2021 heat wave – the one that baked the phrase “heat dome” into the national conversation – 619 people died. They were almost all indoors, most often in bed, older, alone and without air conditioning.
Late night swimming during a heat wave at Christie Pitts park in TorontoDarren Calabrese/The Globe and Mail
The average human body temperature hovers around 37 C. Heat exhaustion begins just north of that, at 39 C, heat stroke at 40 C. Organ failure and death ensue. But before that happens, heat (according to multiple studies) makes us stupider, angrier, more aggressive, more murderous, more domestically violent, and more prone to honking the horn in traffic, possibly because trying to cool a hot body taxes the brain’s ability to communicate. It makes students do less well at school – and yet a recent survey found that only 177 of 582 schools in Toronto have central air conditioning. Maybe this is why, in hell in Paradise Lost, the flames shed darkness instead of light. The hotter it gets, the dimmer the view. Dante didn’t call his masterpiece of regret The Inferno for nothing.
The hot nights that were occasionally romantic are now scientifically dangerous. “Tropical” night temperatures – anything above 20 C – are on the rise, and rising even faster than daytime ones. A typical night in Eastern Canada is 14 C; temperatures of 24 C are being forecast this summer. Cities are especially dangerous because concrete and construction (hello, Toronto!) hold heat longer. Those effects are exacerbated by climate change. In the same way that our hotter nights no longer cool the days, a hot body – whose heart and lungs work harder – doesn’t recover while sleeping the same way a cool one can. One recent study suggests people around the world are losing an average of 44 hours of sleep a year because of higher night temperatures (and the elderly lose twice as much sleep as the middle-aged). No wonder researchers have projected a sixfold increase in heat-related deaths by the end of the century.
We keep meaning to get air conditioning in our house so we can sleep better on hot nights, but it’s an old house with radiators, which would mean outside wall units and mini-splits, which were invented by Toshiba in the 1970s but require tubes running along the side of the house, and there is ongoing discussion in our sweltering domicile about how desirable such tubes are. The long history of air conditioning has roots in many places, including Hamoukar in ancient Mesopotamia, Florida in 1842 (first ice machine), and movie theatres in Los Angeles in the 1920s, where air conditioning was long advertised as a feature of the experience.
Instead, in our house, we use fans. A fan is not the same as air conditioning. I say this with some passion. An air-conditioned house is an immersive dream. Its soothing cold is total.
A fan, on the other hand, plays over you unevenly, friendly but also occasionally overfamiliar. Trying to sleep with a fan painting your body with dryness is like necking with an inept partner: The fan’s breeze wants to be your friend but can’t decide what to concentrate on or how close to get.
If the fans aren’t enough, I leave the house. Judging from my recent wanderings, on especially hot nights in Toronto’s downtown residential neighbourhoods, people walk after dinner, in the gloaming. The yellow glow of the dimming sky behind the white lights of the city’s skyscrapers is unexpectedly beautiful. The dog parks are abandoned. Everyone wears a sheen of perspiration, a slight glisten. The walkers often wear their bedroom slippers or Birkenstocks, which suggests they don’t plan to stay outside in the heat for long. Even couples who walk hand-in-hand keep their distance from one another. Movies such as Do the Right Thing and Body Heat and The Sheltering Sky, to name just a handful, are famous for their depictions of hot (and thus sexy) humanity. But on the street in the city in the actual swelter of a sweaty night, it’s rare to see anyone actually touching or necking. Until the 1970s, when air conditioning started to be more widely available in the United States, the spring birth rate was lower than every other season’s.
People outdoors on a hot night seem to feel safe to look at one another in a public setting, perhaps because it’s too hot to actually interact. At night, beyond 30 C, without a breeze to remind you of the presence of the rest of the world, the heat stops everything: There is no possibility of effective action, therefore no expectations, hence at least the illusion of no rules. You don’t want to move but you feel set free. Heat is the present tense extended in every direction.
When it gets really hot I give up and go to the local public pool. During heat waves it stays open until 11 p.m. I slipped in for a bedtime dip the other evening. Next to me in the pool, a trio of women in their 30s sat up to their necks, unmoving in the shallow water, chatting about the world and their lives and their partners and their careers. One of them was a social worker in the poor northwest corner of the city. There were no pools up there, she said, no community centres that she knew of, no requirements that the apartments be air-conditioned. Yes, there were a couple of malls.
“What will they do to cool down tonight up there?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said.
Roughly 61 per cent of Canadians have household air conditioning – the number ranges from 32 per cent in British Columbia to 85 per cent in Ontario. Older adults and poorer communities have less. All that A/C uses much less energy as the technology has become more efficient, but it still uses a lot: In 2018, according to the International Energy Agency, the power required to cool 365 million North Americans surpassed the energy consumption of 4.4 billion people in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia (excluding China). Greenhouse-gas emissions from that cooling are expected to double between 2016 and 2050.
This is the unavoidable irony about heat and light and cold and darkness. Civilization as we know it began with the discovery of fire, 800,000 years back. Until 150 years ago, it was still the world’s main source of illumination. Fire was light, and heat, and together they made the world faster and more efficient and richer and more comfortable – until they made the world too hot, whereupon we invented a way to cool ourselves that has made our climate hotter still.
By 10:30 p.m., there were 30 people in the pool. Most of them were teenagers and young adults, shouting and jumping into and jumping out of and jumping back into the water. They seemed happy. They looked like sparks coming off the blue jewel of the pool into the surrounding night.
The playwright Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, many others) once wrote an essay about an “extraordinarily hot September” in New York in 1928, when he was a kid. Miller’s family lived just south of Harlem on 110th Street, which was “a little too bourgeois to sit out on their fire escapes.” But only blocks away entire families hauled their mattresses out onto the slatted metal stairways as night fell, lounging outside in their underwear. “Even through the nights,” Miller continued, “the pall of heat never broke. With a couple of other kids, I would go across 110th to the Park and walk among the hundreds of people, singles and families, who slept on the grass, next to their big alarm clocks, which set up a mild cacophony of the seconds passing.”
I wish we still trusted one another enough to do that, to sleep together in our parks on especially hot nights. Maybe the heat will draw us together again, to find a better common solution to its fire. At the rate we’re going, it’ll have to.