[PHOTO] Bright blue, last day of August

[PHOTO] Church Street, just after midnight, Sunday morning

[PHOTO] Fragment of an early summer evening sky of Derek Jarman blue

Even though summer is not quite here, its perfect blue skies have made it.

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[PHOTO] Blue sky, green leaves on Russett Avenue, Wallace Emerson

Yesterday in Toronto, like today, was hot with a cloudless blue sky.

[PHOTO] Rainstorm under early evening’s light, Yonge and Eglinton

The strength of this early evening’s rain in the ambient environment of bright light lent a weird hyperrealism to the scene as I left work today, a certain quality to the light that I have usually seen only in photoshopped images.

[URBAN NOTE] Five Montréal links: weather, coyotes, archeology, Mies van der Rohe, Doug Ford

• The scale of the heat wave in Montréal this weekend is not to be underestimated. CBC reports.

Montréal, like so many other cities and regions, now has coyotes. CBC reports</u.

• Archeologists working at Peel and Sherbourne, in downtown Montréal, are continuing to recover remains of what may be an Iroquois village. CTV reports.
• Jérome Delgado at Le Devoir takes a look at the Mies van der Rohe-designed service station on Ile-des-Soeurs.
• This Martin Patriquin column in the Montreal Gazette praising Rob Ford for his reduction in Toronto city council’s size, arguing this kind of reduction is needed on the island of Montreal, made me raise my eyebrows.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• D-Brief engages with the refusal of Elon Musk to acknowledge that there is not enough carbon dioxide on Mars, in any form, to make terraforming with indigenous resources viable.
• The Frailest Thing’s L.M. Sacasas thinks of one category of moments, of the last time one does something.
• Hornet Stories notes the role that trans hacker Emma Best played in leaking Wikileaks’ internal chats, and Julian Assange’s transphobia demonstrated in his response.
• JSTOR Daily shares some texts and photos linked with summertime available on their archive.
• Language Hat celebrates its 16th anniversary blogging. Congratulations!
• Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money imagines what might have happened had the United States not developed the Tomahawk missile.
• Lingua Franca interviews two Puerto Ricans who attended university in Spain, and what they took from their experiences studying in that country.
• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution shares what he thinks is a realistic worst-case scenario for the United States’ decline, of productivity never recovering and technology never producing its promised emancipatory potential.
• The NYR Daily reports on the latest regarding the investigations into Trump. What did he know, and when did he know it?
• Starts With A Bang’s Ethan Siegel talks about the steps one would need, as an aspiring iconoclast scientist, to disprove an established scientific theory.
• Van Waffle gives high praise to a book offering advice on creative lifestyles, Creating A Life Worth Living by Carol Lloyd.

[URBAN NOTE] “Toronto breaks a heat record for September 7”

CBC News’ Emmett Shane and Jay Scotland describe how yesterday, the 7th of September, set a heat record. Today has not been much different.

If you thought this was the hottest Sept. 7 you’ve ever experienced in Toronto, give yourself a pat on your undoubtedly sweaty back. You were right.

The city broke a temperature record Wednesday, with the daytime high of 34.5 C, breaking the previous record of 33.9 C, which was set in 1969.

And the city could break more records before the summer is out, according to CBC Toronto meteorologist Jay Scotland.

“Today was also the 38th time we’ve topped the 30 C mark this year, compared to only 14 times last year and seven the year before,” Scotland said.

“The record is 43 days at 30°C or higher set back in 1959.”

[URBAN NOTE] On the record-breaking heat in Toronto this August

blogTO had a brief note, linking to the CityNews report.

[I]t was the second-hottest summer on record in the GTA and the hottest August on record.

“So far we’ve had 36 days over 30 degrees,” 680 NEWS and CityNews meteorologist Natsaha Ramsahai said on Wednesday.

The record for the highest number of 30 C days or more was 44 days set in 1959.

August was the warmest one on record with a mean temperature of 24.4 C, beating the previous record of 23.8 C in 1959.

It also was the sixth-driest summer on record, as measured at Pearson, with 113 millimetres of rain for June, July and August.

John-Michael Schneider’s National Post article went into more detail.

For passengers riding on Toronto’s subways, the combination of unbearable heat and no air-conditioning on roughly one quarter of trains made travel sticky and uncomfortable. Toronto Mayor John Tory recently accepted a Twitter challenge to ride on one of the TTC’s trains sans air-conditioning. Sweltering commuters endured temperatures as high as 34C in some subway cars.

GO Transit had to slow down its trains throughout the summer, adding delay times to their schedules. The change was a safety precaution, as areas on train tracks can bend and buckle under the extreme heat, and increase the risk of derailment for fast-moving trains.

The record temperatures in Ontario can also have significant health costs. A Health Canada study of five large Canadian cities found that high temperatures during June, July and August are correlated with increased deaths. One large-scale U.S. study of over 850,000 people in California found that a roughly six-degree increase in average temperatures corresponded to a 3.5 per cent increase in strokes, a 2 percent increase in all respiratory diseases, a 3.7 per cent increase in pneumonia, and a 10.8 per cent increase in dehydration.

Heat impacts on health are worse when high temperatures continue throughout the day and night. For nearly one quarter of all people in Ontario who do not have an air-conditioning system, warm nights are a barrier to finding relief from daytime heat. Households making less than $20,000 a year are the least likely to have access to cool space.

On especially warm days, cities like Toronto can become “urban heat islands” — places where air temperatures are a few degrees higher than surrounding areas. Urbanized areas tend to be built from dark, non-reflective materials that absorb radiation from the sun and gradually release the additional heat.

[URBAN NOTE] “There is an end in sight to Toronto’s heat wave”

The Toronto Star reports on the impending end of this week’s heat wave. All I can say is that I’ve been glad to be able to take advantage of air conditioning.

Torontonians may be in for some relief from the heat as a cold front heads our way Friday evening.

According to Environment Canada, there is a 40 per cent chance of showers and thunderstorms tonight, increasing to 60 per cent early Friday evening. However, the heat warning is expected to persist throughout the day as temperatures soar to a high of 34 C, feeling closer to 43 C with the humidex.

Thankfully, a cold front is expected to push in Friday night that could end the heat wave and usher a cooler air mass into the weekend.

Temperatures should coast closer to the normal seasonal average, with a high of 29 C on Saturday and 28 C on Sunday.