How is a warming planet going to shape the life of a baby born in Toronto in December 2015? The Star asked 10 scientists from Canada and the U.S. to describe the ways climate change will redefine life in the 21st century. These stories are based on their educated guesses of best and worst case scenarios, based on the scientific consensus.
- Average global temperatures are 1-degree C higher than pre-industrial times for the first time in 2015
- Scientists warn at least 2 degrees C of warming is unavoidable
The baby was born in December 2015 on a 7-degree C day. No snow yet on the ground, so parents are less nervous driving home from the hospital. They drive a fuel-efficient SUV. They’re waiting for an affordable model that runs on gas for long distances and on electricity for city driving. Options are limited, which explains why plug-in vehicles are only .05 per cent of car sales.
The father grew concerned about climate change after he was bitten by a blacklegged tick on Toronto Island, unheard of a couple of years ago. He didn’t develop Lyme disease, but it was a wake-up call. The mother started worrying after the Toronto flood of 2013 left a foot of water in their basement and friends lost their home in Calgary’s record-breaking flood. Drought in California and unprecedented forest fires in western Canada left an impression. Something, she has felt, is “not quite right” with the seasons. A couple of friends think she’s being dramatic.
They have been following the Paris climate summit and learn that 2015 is expected to be the hottest year ever recorded and that average global temperatures are now for the first time 1-degree C higher compared with pre-industrial times. Now, with their first child, the climate problem has taken on a sense of urgency.
Yet they are optimistic even though they know that at least 2 degrees C of warming can’t be avoided. Ontario has phased out coal-fired electricity. Alberta is planning to do the same and newly elected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seems to take the issue seriously. They hope any agreement that comes out of Paris will prevent the worst.
Age 20, 2035
Best case (2C increase)
- Sea levels have risen by 15 cm
- Toronto’s summers and winters are 1-degree C warmer, a result of emissions from the 1990s
“Using gasoline will be increasingly viewed as anti-social behaviour.” — Deborah de Lange, Associate Professor of Global Management Studies, Ryerson University
Back in the T-Dot, it’s been a warm winter — again. Officials had been predicting for years that it would be an average of a degree warmer compared with 20 years ago. Global CO2 emissions began to fall in the early 2020s, and have continued to fall, but today’s warmer temperatures are the result of emissions from the 1990s. The good news is the climate beast is beginning to be tamed.
Career paths have changed. Whether choosing med school or engineering, there is a greater focus on climate adaptation. Everyone wants to design a better electric-car battery, even though progress there has been impressive. You can buy an electric sedan from Tesla Motors for $25,000 that can drive from Toronto to Montreal on a single charge. Half of all cars sold in Ontario now are fully or hybrid-electric.
- Formerly tropical diseases are endemic in Toronto
- Storms and high seas regularly batter costal cities
“Even in 20 years, it will be a different world, one that we will have trouble recognizing.” — John Smol, Canada Research Chair in Environmental Change, Queen’s University
Weather records are being broken every week. Halifax, where his favourite aunt lives, has been battered by hurricanes and fierce snowstorms every second year.
His favourite vacations have been in the Florida Keys — the islands are still there — and the Maldives, where the president has started buying land so his people can be relocated when rising waters take over.
He used to love to fish for trout, but with longer and more intense summers, the trout have all but disappeared. Algae blooms, on the other hand, are proliferating every summer, making swimming hard in the Great Lakes.
40 years old, 2055
Best case (2C increase)
- Aggressive action over the past 20 years has warming under control
- Maximum summer highs hit 44C in Toronto, up from 37C in 2015
He has worked for 10 years as a family doctor. Cases of heat exhaustion, not to mention anxiety and depression, have risen notably. Aggressive climate action over the past 20 years has global emissions under control, but latent CO2 in the atmosphere still makes every season warmer. The maximum daily summer temperature hits 44C, and there are four times as many heat waves in a typical year; crops and livestock suffer.
Average daily rainfall is twice what it was in 2015, but the city is mostly prepared for the occasional deluge. Home adaptation audits are mandatory and most properties have been retrofitted or built to flood-resistant standards. Over the past three decades, the city created green spaces to better absorb rainfall. Roads have been paved with a permeable asphalt made from recycled materials that allows water to seep into the ground more evenly.
Emission-free vehicles, mostly powered by battery but increasingly with fuel cells, represent nearly all new models sold. Owners of noisy gas-guzzlers pay an extra emissions tax and gas is $3 a litre.
- Meat is a luxury too expensive for most Canadians
- U.S. summers are too hot for children to safely play outside
He is a family physician in East York, lives in the neighbourhood, is married and has two daughters; the family owns one small electric car.
But there are food scarcities — even brawls at grocery stores, where security guards are common.
There are new careers: Ecologists to help slower-moving species escape a warming climate; social workers to help settle climate migrants — thousands from sinking island countries — adapt and integrate. Research into genetics and seed banks and vaults like the one in Svarlbard, in Norway, have become essential to preserve declining genetic variation.
Island nations such as Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Maldives are closer to being submerged. In low-lying countries like Bangladesh, frequent stories about evacuations from rising sea levels and ever-more powerful typhoons don’t shock people any more.
Selling what was once premium waterfront property in places like Vancouver is now nearly impossible. Resale values have plunged.
A large part of California is desert, and in many parts of the U.S., summers are too hot for children to play outside or for people to work outdoors.
60 years, 2075
Best Case (2C increase)
- Gas-fuelled cars are gone from Toronto’s streets
- Global emissions fall to 80 per cent of peak levels
He decided to retire early and purchased an electric SUV with power-collecting solar paint sprayed onto the body that charges the battery while parked. The car can also charge wirelessly at special stations. It has excellent range — can get to the cottage in Highlands East and back and still have a quarter charge left. Gas-fuelled vehicles haven’t been sold for years. Big trucks and planes still use “fuel,” but it’s synthetic, made from renewable hydrogen and CO2, captured and recycled from the air.
Both his cottage and home are “net-zero”: they produce as much energy as they consume. Any extra energy produced is sold back into the grid or stored as hydrogen fuel. Net-zero construction has been mandatory for a decade. The province’s building code requires it, but most developers began embracing it during the 2050s. Homes are super-efficient, and home heating is electrified using air- and ground-source heat pumps, dramatically reducing use of natural gas.
His granddaughter asked what Toronto was like “in the old days.” She was surprised that there were no backyard chickens or greenhouses on skyscrapers, and that downtown was filled with loud, pollution-spewing cars. Snow is now only something that “might” happen, so at least Toronto has saved on snow plowing and road repair. Global GHG emissions are at least 80 per cent below peak levels, and scientists say the climate is showing signs of stabilizing.
That said, Toronto recently reported its 100th case of malaria.
- Food and water shortages spark riots, even in the developed world
- Property values plummet due to the heat island effect
“There will be a lot of crime, gangsterism, and intergroup violence, and police forces will often be overwhelmed.” — Thomas Homer-Dixon, Global governance expert at Balsillie School of International Affairs, Waterloo.
He sometimes tells his grandchildren that hundred-year storms and heat waves occurred roughly once in a century when he was a boy. He likes to tell them that it wasn’t so hard getting insurance when he bought his first house in 2038.
In the city, the power grid fails often in the summer and the extreme heat caused by the urban island effect has depressed city property values. The rich have fled to the country.
Food availability is a constant concern, although his family never goes hungry, but they often see footage of other cities running out of water and food, resulting in riots and chaos.
While urban air pollution is better because of the large-scale shift to electric vehicles, forest fires often cover urban areas with thick haze.
80 years, 2095
- Canada shuts its doors to people fleeing wars of scarcity
- Tourists head to the North for its snowy scenery
“There’s a reason the Pentagon is worried about climate change. Shifts in climate may not cause wars, but they can destabilize regions already under stress.” — Simon Donner, associate professor of climatology, University of British Columbia
Canadians knew there would be a growing refugee crisis and have been accommodating, for the most part. Since retiring, he has spent much time volunteering for aid agencies.
Even with warming stabilized at 2 degrees C, resource wars continue in some countries. More developed countries, such as Canada, are shutting their doors over fears that stressed social systems will collapse if they take in too many. Canada has been forced to become more self-sufficient: it grows more of its food, makes more of its goods, supplies its own energy. The oil sands were shut down in 2040, and provinces have worked with Ottawa to build a trans-Canada electricity grid. Canada exports enough hydroelectricity to supply a quarter of U.S. power demand. Old pipelines are used as conduits for power transmission lines. The country has become a global hub for renewable hydrogen production, used to make synthetic fuels for trucks, planes and heavy machinery. Canada also perfected methods for capturing CO2 out of the air, and exports that know-how.
With greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere stabilized, and technology available to remove and reuse CO2 in the air on a large scale, the 22nd century could prove a period of unusual global stability.
The whole family decided this year to spend the holidays at Polar Bear Provincial Park on Hudson Bay. Northern tourism is big. More “old folks” are taking their grandchildren north to experience something they have never seen: snow.
- Rising temperatures render large parts of Africa, India, Middle East and Australia uninhabitable
- Canada’s borders strain to manage massive waves of refugees
“I worry that social cohesion will begin to fail. It is possible to imagine that civilization is unravelling, literally … not a world I’d wish on anyone.” — Jeremy Kerr, Biologist, University of Ottawa
He wants to take his grandchildren for a splendid vacation, but planning one isn’t straightforward. There are some places he just can’t go. Maldives and Kiribati are long gone — non-mythical versions of Atlantis, lost beneath the waves.
The barrier reef in Australia? Many reefs will be permanently gone and what will remain will be a shadow of what it was. In other countries, there is instability because of intense weather fluctuations and lack of food and water, making trips dangerous.
Average temperatures will often rise above what the human body can deal with, across the Persian Gulf, in the Indian subcontinent, huge parts of Australia.
Substantial parts of the world will be confronted with unreliable agricultural outcomes, dangerous pressure on freshwater supplies, and direct impacts from seasonally hot weather.
Raveena Aulakh is the Star’s Environment reporter. Tyler Hamilton’s reporting is produced in partnership by the Toronto Star and Tides Canada to address a range of pressing climate issues in Canada leading up to the ongoing United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris. Tides Canada is supporting this partnership to increase public awareness and dialogue around the impacts of climate change on Canada’s economy and communities. The Toronto Star has full editorial control and responsibility to ensure stories are rigorously edited in order to meet its editorial standards.