The scourge of sunlight
Posted by Dalton48 on 17 Jul 2008 at 09:48 pm | Tagged as: Toronto
I’m with Barry Hertz of the National Post — time for Toronto to calm the fuck down when it comes to heat alerts. He tracked the panic , visiting several cooling centres yesterday — as he puts it, “one of those perfect summer days we could only dream of last winter.”
Some highlights of his heat-crazed day:
3:00 CP24 anchor Teresa Kruze says “it is dangerously hot out there.” The temperature displayed in the weather box to her immediate right says it is 28C….
4:51 Inside Metro Hall, there is a sign directing visitors to the “emergency cooling centre,” with letters in an appropriately frost-tipped font. Get ready for some sweet, sweet cooling action. I get a paper cup filled with room-temperature water. Besides two people ready to hand out water, I am the only person at the three tables at the cooling centre.
Besides the fact that panicking over 25-degree weather is ludicrous, there’s the unfortunate corollary of overusage of power, as people who move from house to car to office have no idea whether they actually feel hot or cold nor any intention of dressing for the weather, but rather take their advice from CP24 and crank up the air conditioning unquestioningly, leading to:
Media Advisory – Ontario’s Electricity Demand Rises by 20 Per Cent in Three Days
TORONTO, July 17 /CNW/ – As Ontarians turn on their air conditioners to
deal with the heat and humidity, electricity use in the province increases
significantly. Electricity demand is almost 4,000 MW or 20 per cent higher
today than on Monday July 14. This increase in electricity use is equivalent
to adding the needs of a city twice the size of Mississauga to the provincial
power system.
… with home power prices, of course, capped to encourage as much usage as possible (at the expense of well, everyone, including the poor saps who conserve).
I noticed that a couple of weeks ago there was a heat alert on a perfectly pleasant 28C day. WTF? Reminds me of the 1986 Vancouver Sun front page above-the-fold headline I saw right after I moved: “Heat wave sweeps Lower Mainland! Temperatures top 25C!”
Power prices do encourage conservation a bit; in summer you only get 600 kwh at the low rate vs. something like 750 in the winter. Both cutoffs are pretty easy to meet, though; I think we have yet to go over the summer one even when we do run the a/c a bit in the evening.
It’s all relative. I remember a screaming July headline from a tabloid in the UK which read “ENGLAND SIZZLES IN THE 70S” — meaning that the temperature had topped a balmy 25C. Londoners did not know what to do with themselves.
Of course it’s all relative, which is why a headline in Britain or Vancouver, both dreary, drizzly, temperate climates, makes sense (ridiculous though it seems to a Great Lakes native). In Toronto, where temperatures top 30 degrees for part of *every single summer*, it’s an entirely different story. Warning about the heat at 28 degrees in July is like issuing a worried reminder that leaves will be falling off trees in October. Watch out below!
It’s a funny thing that when it’s snowing, people like nothing better than to be told by the media that it’s snowing.