Half of the world has been feeling like a grease spot this summer.
Ventilators and air conditioners turned into 2021 gold. Fortunately, here in southeast Saskatchewan, most people already knew how hot the hot can be, so A/Cs were a common thing in almost every house way before this heatwave.
But until this summer, not everyone knew the real value of this luxury. This summer, even my two outdoor winter dogs learned that when it gets too hot, there is no better place than the house, which they didn't appreciate that much before.
Calgary sold out of all kinds of cooling appliances the first few days of the first heat spill they had this summer. Canada (Canada!) got as close to the insane 50 C mark as possible, and we might not yet be done for the season. Antarctica set a new record at 18.3 C this summer.
My family in St. Petersburg has been struggling with extreme heat too and it took them a lot of effort and time to get the only ventilator that was given to grandma. Most summers I remember there were a couple of weeks of really warm weather with temperatures rising to 25-30 C, but for the most part the thermometer wouldn't go much higher than 20 C with quite a bit of rain.
This year St. Petersburg experienced something they've never seen before – thermometers there have been sitting at above 30 C, with rare short breaks, for over two months now.
Other places all over the world also report extreme temperatures not usual for the regions. It seems that the entire planet is overheating. There are different reasons for that heat, but no matter what particular phenomenon is happening in each area, it seems that this year is just the first one of its kind, but it won't be the last.
The heat that's been melting Canada and the U.S. and painting the North America map red this summer is the result of a so-called heat dome – a concentration of hot air that formed over southern parts of Latin America and then migrated to North America.
A mass of warm air built up in still and dry conditions. Then the high pressure in the atmosphere pushed that mass down. Air compressed, getting denser and hotter. The sun, which shines longer during the summer months, also continues to heat it even further.
Experts add that this heat dome has been keeping us hot for so long because it is also strongly diverting the jet stream, a current of fast-moving air high in the atmosphere of the Earth, to the north and around itself, which in its turn holds the dome in place.
While heat domes are a well-known natural phenomenon, experts say that before they didn't travel as far from the origin of their formation as this year. They usually don't last that long either. However, with climate change, many things on our planet start working differently, and scientists warn about more frequent and intense heatwaves as well as other extreme weather events in the near future.
Even if we do almost instantly change our habits, meteorologists say that in the next 20-30 years the extreme weather activity will be our norm as the system is pretty inert and will take a lot of time to change.
While it doesn't sound overly positive, I believe that humans are the best-adopting creatures, and that's exactly what we'll need to do in the coming decades. Not only try to decrease the amount of carbon in the air but also find ways to get through new challenges the new conditions pose.
It seems that with such heat, air conditioners will soon become an integral part of any dwelling, public areas and transportation. It also will take some changes in the way we build things, as B.C. this summer was reporting windshields cracking and melting even when vehicles weren't parked in the sun. We'll probably have to have a closer look at how we grow our crops here and build our roads and houses.
The city infrastructure will probably change, and we'll see more focus put on green areas, as well as maintenance and development of water bodies.
As one scientist said, the climate at the time of global warming becomes more nervous, and we need to find ways to get used to it.
It will take a lot of adaptation, but the changes have already begun, and I'm sure we'll get through it.
The 37 C heat Estevan saw recently has already proven that we can handle way more than we assume and also taught my two hot dogs that besides the house escape, they also can use the cold pool on regular basis to cool down.
