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Todd Whitcombe: A short story from the near future

How did this happen? And why is it the old, the young, and the poor who always seem to be the ones who suffered the bad decisions made by the few?
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City sunset in smog.

It is hot. Too damned hot.

Mrs. Adamson in 2B passed away last night. A lovely 82-year-old mother of three, grandmother of five. She would have been a great-grandmother in a few months – an event she was looking forward to.

Not anymore. No more home-made muffins on Sunday. I will miss her.

Yesterday, it was the Cheng’s baby. In the hottest part of the day. Only four months old! The heat and humidity were too much for her. A lot of grief in the building with her death. A life with so much promise. Too young to die.

It was too hot. The wet-bulb temperature was 35.6 degrees. As a nerd, I know that means trouble. The body can’t sweat away heat. There is no mechanism to shunt temperature. We die from hyperthermia. More and more people every day. It is too damned hot.

I had hoped our building’s HVAC would be adequate. It wasn’t. And when the grid gave up the ghost, everything shut down. No electricity. No internet. No phone service. No elevators. No electric fans. No air conditioning units. Nothing.

Climate change induced drought impacted the grid. Everything just kept getting hotter and hotter. No place to send the heat. Dams barely full because rivers no longer flowed. Wind turbines idled by the high-pressure dome. Oil, gas, and coal power inadequate for the demand. They caused the problem in the first place.

Who would have thought we would see a heat dome killing a city like Toronto? How did this happen? And why is it the old, the young, and the poor who always seem to be the ones who suffered the bad decisions made by the few?

I bring water to my elderly neighbours and check on families with small children. They know I am an engineering student and ask if there isn’t something engineers can do to help. We are too far past the tipping points, I say, but the dome can’t last forever.

All because the US Supreme Court wouldn’t let the EPA restrict greenhouse gas emissions. Can’t hurt the economy, they said. Can’t control industry. A cascade of countries followed their lead and so 20 years ago, the climate accords died. Now it appears to be our turn.

Todd Whitcombe is a chemistry professor at UNBC.