Toronto tied a Halloween heat record on Thursday when temperatures soared to 22.8 C — nearly 14 degrees higher than what’s normally expected for the city during fall.
The record-tying heat came one day after Toronto smashed the Oct. 30 heat record, meaning the city narrowly avoided two straight days of record-breaking temperatures. On Wednesday, the highest temperature recorded at Toronto’s Pearson Airport reached 23.1 C, breaking a 70-year-old record set in 1950 and 1946.
Steven Flisfeder, a meteorologist at Environment Canada, said the “normal” fall temperature in Toronto is 9 C, based on the average of temperatures from 1991 to 2020. Except, there hasn’t been a single day this October when the high temperature dipped below 10 C, according to federal weather data.
Flisfeder told TorontoToday he can’t definitively say the warm fall weather is tied to climate change, but “there is going to be that tendency to have more warmth as time goes on,” due to human impacts on the environment.
Matthew Hoffman, a political science professor at the University of Toronto and the co-director of the Environmental Governance Lab, said he’s been feeling what he coined as “sun-xiety” due to the warm weather.
“Sun and anxiety put together,” he explained. “It's weird to be enjoying the unseasonably warm weather while simultaneously feeling existential dread about where that warm weather is coming from.”
Hoffman agreed it’s “difficult to attribute any particular weather event to climate change, but climate change makes what's happening more likely.”
He predicted Torontonians will see more unseasonably warm falls like this in the future.
Torontonians may remember that last winter was also much more mild than the frigid winters we’re used to. Months after that in July, intense flash flooding caused an estimated $940 million in damage in Toronto and southern Ontario, according to the Insurance Bureau of Canada.
For Hoffman, who has lived in Toronto for 18 years, the writing is on the wall that the climate crisis is already at our doorstep.
“I don't know that I've ever [seen] a 12 month [period], where we've gone from no winter, to some pretty serious flooding, to this kind of unseasonably warm, record-breaking heat in the fall,” he said.
Research shows climate change can lead to an elevated risk of flooding by contributing to heavier rainfall and storm surges, according to the Climate Institute of Canada. While the immediate economic damage wrought by the flooding may be one of the more obvious impacts of climate change, Hoffman said many more climate woes are on the horizon.
“Air quality is going to be a problem, especially with fires surrounding Toronto,” Hoffman said. “We’re already seeing heat island effects in the city, because the city is so covered in asphalt and concrete.”
On top of that, food prices could rise as climate change impacts agriculture, Hoffman warned.
The bright side is Toronto isn’t on an ocean coast, which makes the city more “climate safe” than others — “but that doesn’t make Toronto immune,” Hoffman said.
Meteorologist Flisfeder said this coming weekend will see a cold front move in, “dropping temperatures quite drastically, but bringing them to where they ought to be at this time of year,” around 10 C.
Come Monday and Tuesday, Toronto will be back to high temperatures “into the teens, possibly towards 20 C,” Flisfeder reported.
Tuesday has the potential to break another heat record this fall, Global News’ chief meteorologist Anthony Farnell told TorontoToday on Thursday.
