summer bummer

A recent story from The Weather Network sets out how climate change turns summer into a real bummer for Canada's youth:

Canadian parents can remember the easy summers of the past. But for the younger generations, what used to be a time for socialization and sport is turning into a time of stress and screens due to extreme weather.
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Part of the article involves a young Scout in the Metro Vancouver area who woke up to smoky skies at summer camp and reacted:

“I thought the world was ending.... And it kind of was ending, in a way,”

A spokesperson for an organization called Children First Canada also told The Weather Network:

“Summer is an essential time of childhood. It is a time when they should be playing and engaged in recreation. It's really a time for young people to be out in their community and involved in recreational programs, [in] many different forms, and we're finding that children's very basic right to play is at risk because of the impacts of climate change,”

So, did yesterday’s children really enjoy a pristine environment back in those easy summers of the past? The author of The Weather Network piece is too young to have experienced that time, but a 2017 masters thesis titled Protesting Smoke sets out what it was like back in the 1950s:

A person transplanted to Vancouver in the early 1950s would probably describe the usual air quality as appallingly bad. Looking back a decade, the Vancouver Province newspaper in 1960 described the physical setting as a world where the “sun was lost behind a blanket of black smoke” blasting from the industrial stacks of sawmills ringing False Creek and from coal steam locomotives shunting cars at the Canadian Pacific marshalling yards …

… Huge particle clouds rose from bulk ship loading facilities around Burrard Inlet in Vancouver, North Vancouver and Port Moody. Smoke poured out of wood waste burners from many sawmills around the Lower Mainland. Oil refineries and metal foundries added their effluent to the mix. Visible emissions came from cars, trucks, buses, ships and trains. They also came from house chimneys in the winter, backyard rubbish fires, commercial incinerators and municipal garbage burning. In the fall, haze often covered Vancouver from the annual wood slash burning of forestry operations on the North Shore mountains and around Howe Sound.

Some of the changes that took place through the sixties and seventies include the end of residential incineration and leaf burning, fireplaces converted to natural gas, catalytic converters, no slash burning, phase-out of sawmills, etc.

Paradoxically, a Scout waking up in the easy summers of the past would have been reassured from the smoky skies that the world was continuing, not ending. Thankfully, by about 1980 Vancouver’s air quality had vastly improved.

But we are now exposed to more wildfire smoke, right? Wrong:

​But summers are getting too hot for kids to play, right? Wrong:
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Summer Days (25.0 C or higher)*

​     Year      25C+   30C+    Max
     1958       41         1         30.0
     2021       25         4         32.4
     1998       25         1         31.9
     1967       25         1         30.0
     2004       25         0         29.8
     2018       23         0         29.0
     2009       22         3         34.4
     1961       20         2         31.7
     1985       19         0         28.8
     2003       19         0         27.9
     1990       18         1         31.9
     1971       18         0         29.4
     1965       17         0         29.4
     1942       16         3         30.6
     1977       16         1         30.5
     2022       16         1         30.4
     1950       16         0         28.3
     1952       16         0         28.3
     1960       15         3         33.3
     1978       15         1         30.1

* This maximum temperature data from Environment Canada at Vancouver YVR airport lists the years where there were at least 15 warm summer days, the number of those days that were hot (30 C), and the highest temperature reached in those years.
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​As shown, 1958 far surpassed all other years for warm summer days. If this anomaly had just occurred, we would be told that it is a statistical impossibility without the influence of Climate Change.

In terms of intensity, 2021’s “heat dome” tops the list with 4 days at 30.0 C or above. 1942, 1960, and 2009 are close behind at three 30.0 C + days and both 1960 and 2009 recorded hotter maximums than 2021.

At least in the Vancouver area, summertime play isn’t a thing of the past. The only bummer here is The Weather Network itself, masquerading as science while perniciously stoking the youth anxiety they falsely attribute to an over-heated climate.
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