Canada to gain nice (mild) days under climate change, study says
Canada — along with other mid-latitude areas such as Europe — is likely
to see gains of anywhere from five days to three weeks of ‘mild days.’
A man kayaks in Lake Ontario on a warm sunny day in Toronto in August
2016. Research suggests climate change could increase the number of nice
days Canadians enjoy
Research suggests climate change could increase the number of nice days Canadians enjoy.
Most
global warming studies have focused on extreme weather or broad-scale
averages of temperature and precipitation. But Karin van der Wiel, of
Princeton University, says that’s not how people will experience their
new circumstances.
“If you are a person
living in Canada, it’s never the average climate,” said van der Wiel,
whose paper is being published Wednesday in the journal Climatic Change.
Van
der Wiel and her colleagues thought a good way to demonstrate the daily
consequences of increased greenhouse gases in the air would be to
calculate how many ‘mild days’ different regions of the globe would
experience — days topping out between 18 C and 30 C, with less than one
millimetre of rainfall and not too much humidity.
“We
looked at the actual days that feel mild,” she said. “These are the
days that people can relate to — the day you had a really nice walk in
the park or went to a baseball game and it was really nice.”
It turns out Canada is one of the places to be.
The
globe, on average, is expected to lose four days of nice weather by
2035 and 10 days by 2081. Africa, Asia and Latin America could see 15 to
50 fewer days of mild weather a year by the end of the century. Parts
of the U.S. South Atlantic coast could lose a couple of weeks.
Map
depicting the climate change effects on patterns of mild weather. The
globe, on average, is expected to lose four days of nice weather by 2035
and 10 days by 2081. (Karin van der Wiel)
But
Canada — along with other mid-latitude areas such as Europe — is likely
to see gains of anywhere from five days to three weeks.
Scientists
have long surmised the impact of climate change could be most benign
for humans in those regions. Van der Wiel’s study is the first to frame
the issue in a way that non-climatologists can understand.
“It’s
really difficult to feel that what was a once-in-25-year event is now a
one-in-20-year event,” she said. “I think this ‘mild day’ that we came
up with is easier to relate to.”
Not that
there isn’t a downside. Van der Wiel’s paper doesn’t include a nasty-day
index and previous studies suggest we’ll have plenty of them.
Even
in Canada, expect more flooding downpours and winter rains that wash
away before they can nourish crops. Forest fires, already at record
levels, are likely to get bigger. Rocky Mountain glaciers, the water
source for many prairie cities, are on their way out. The southern
prairies will see more drought.
Forests
once harvested for timber are likely to turn into prairie. Pacific coast
fisheries are predicted to decline up to 10 per cent.
The
paper also points out that areas about to lose nice weather are much
more heavily populated than ones about to gain some, which has
implications for everything from weather-related disasters to the crops
people depend on.
Still, said van der Wiel,
the paper is an attempt to translate the grand abstractions of climate
models and global averages into a metric that makes sense.
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