Summers lost to fire and smoke. Biblical floods. Dying forests. Retreating coasts. Economic turmoil and political unrest. It’s going to be a weird century. Here’s what it will look like—and how Canada can get through it.
“We knew records were going to be broken,” says Castellan. “But that doesn’t give you the reality of what was about to happen.” Temperature records typically break by tenths of degrees, like speed records for the 100-metre dash. At its apex, the heat dome that engulfed B.C. that month eclipsed some records by more than five degrees, driving temperatures up to 25 degrees beyond seasonal averages.
Across the region, roads buckled, car windows cracked and power cables melted. The emerald fringes of conifers browned overnight, as if singed by flame. Entire cherry orchards were destroyed, the fruit stewed on the trees. More than 650,000 farm animals died of heat stress. Hundreds of thousands of honeybees perished, their organs exploding outside their bodies. Billions of shoreline creatures, especially shellfish, simply baked to death, strewing beaches with empty shells and a fetid stench that lingered for weeks. Birds and insects went unnervingly silent. All the while the skies were hazy but clear, the air preternaturally still, not a cloud in sight. The air pressure was so high they’d all dissipated.
Then came the fires.
At night, he set up a tent in his backyard so his three young children’s bodies could cool down. When Victoria set a record high of 39.8 degrees, he tried not to think too hard about what that meant for the future his kids would inherit.
“There’s an apocalyptic feel to something that different,” says Castellan. “It’s like when you witness an eclipse. There’s that very strange sensation: all of a sudden it gets dark in the middle of the day, and the birds go quiet, and everything is strange. It was like that, on a multi-day level. It’s like the sun just grew in size.”
