I finally “gave in” in August of 2022.

The complaints had been building in our family for years. The summertime temperatures in the house were increasingly unbearable. We couldn’t sleep. The fans whirring away in each of our bedrooms were not cutting it anymore. Heatwaves are now coming earlier (like in May), more frequently, and lasting longer. Temperatures reaching above 30˚C no longer feel like an exception. They now feel like the norm.

As a kid, I grew up in a house that was anti-air-conditioning. My parents grew up in non-air-conditioned homes as did their parents. The wisdom I received was that air conditioning in homes was an indulgent luxury. After all, weren’t summers in Montreal all too brief and mild? When it was hot, we’d open the windows and let the breeze cool us. It never got that bad – and if it was bad, it only lasted a day or so.

But now the lobbying to install air conditioning in the house had reached a fevered pitch and I knew I could not continue to delay what had become inevitable.

Before committing to a purchase I did not want to make, I was curious to know, actually, how much hotter it is now than it used to be, say when I was a kid. The data was easy to find – and I found it alarming.

The Cooling Degree Day or CDD is a statistic tracked by Environment Canada, to estimate how much cooling is required to maintain a comfortable 18˚C temperature in buildings. For example, if the average temperature is 21 °C, the CDD value for that day is equal to 3 °C. If the daily average temperature is below 18 °C, the CDD value for that day is set to zero. Sum up all daily the CDDs and you have a good estimate of how much air-conditioning is required in a year.

The increase in Cooling Degree Days for Montreal dramatically confirms what we have all been feeling – it’s a lot hotter now than it used to be. In fact, is now about 80% hotter than it was in the 1970s when I was a child. That was a long time ago. For my university-aged kids, it is now about 34% hotter than when they were in grade school. That was not that long ago.

And as temperatures rise, more and more households in Canada are adapting to the changing climate.

According to Statistics Canada’s Household and Environment Survey, the national share of households with air conditioning is growing at a rate of 1% per year, from 55% in 2013 to 61% in 2019. In Montreal, the rate is higher than the national average with 69% percent of households reported as having some form of air conditioning in 2019.

The rapid adoption of air-conditioning is not just a matter of comfort. The increase in the frequency and intensity of heat waves has become a health and safety issue. In 2018, 66 people died in Montreal over the course of a 9-day heatwave. As the climate continues to warm, we can only expect an increase in these life-threatening events, even in cities typically thought of as temperate like Montreal.

Sweaty and under duress, I finally admitted that we could no longer live without air-conditioning and I made an appointment for a salesperson to come to our house to recommend what kind of unit we needed.

A few weeks later, the installers came. After a few hours and I was the proud owner of a new 18,000 btu/h single-zone ductless split cooling system.

On one level, it was a simple household purchase decision. In my case though, this episode filled me with a profound sense of unease. I did not want to buy an air conditioner and the process of turning over the reasons why I had to left me feeling anxious about what has already happened to the climate – and what may be coming if we don’t collectively get our act together.

I don’t live under a rock. I have been well aware of the issue of climate change for years. Until now though, the problem has seemed distant and academic. Climate change was something happening in other countries. It was the stuff of news reports, conferences, and speeches at the UN. It had not touched my life in a real sense, yet.

This small, somewhat banal episode made climate change real for me. The implications of a warming planet sprung suddenly into my mind with a clarity I had not realized before. Climate change is here. Unless we can pull together and fight it, we can only expect more intense heat, storms, fires, floods, and disease. Food will become scarce. Billions may be forced to flee their homes and countries for their survival. The very fabric of our society will be tested and it may not hold. There may be suffering and injustice on a scale we’ve never imagined. This is the world that my kids and their kids risk inheriting.

The problem is horrible and overwhelming and I wish I had no part of it. I wish I could just run and get away but there is no place to go – climate change threatens all of humanity. It is the issue of our time and the only option we all have is to turn, gather up our resolve, and fight.

Like many people, if I or someone I love is concerned about an issue that threatens their well-being, I take steps to learn everything I can about that subject. I google the crap out of these things. I put myself in a place to make good decisions and/or be a support to those I care about. Why haven’t I done that about the issue that threatens the well-being of my species, let alone my family?

I now realize that I should know a lot more about climate change than I do now – to get behind the headlines and really understand what is going on. I should be reading the IPCC reports myself. I should have an authoritative view on whether we are on the right track to curb emissions or not. I should know what policies I expect my government to enact. I should know what, if anything I can be doing to make a meaningful contribution to solving this problem.

I also feel embarrassed. Millions have already suffered from the effects of climate change. I’ve known about it, but it was not until I was reluctantly forced to buy a household appliance to keep myself cool – a privilege out of reach for most of humanity – that I felt motivated to engage with a problem that threatens our existence on this planet.

My challenge now is to figure out what I can do to join this fight and make a valuable contribution. I don’t yet know how I will make a difference, but I do know that the first step has to be focused on learning.

I’m going to try to become fully informed about climate change so that I can speak to others about it confidently and authoritatively. That’s going to mean a lot of reading. And as I learn, I plan to write. For me, writing things down, helps me really learn them.

Also, I figure that if I share my writing, there is a chance I might connect with others and encourage them to similarly engage in this fight. I think it’s one thing for the head of the UN to say climate change is terrible and we need to act. It’s another thing to hear that from someone you may know, like me.

That’s the idea behind this site. If I can help in a small way normalize the idea that we should all be mobilizing to act against climate change, then I may have helped. ■