Journalists put heat sensors in 50 homes without air conditioning to find out how extreme heat affects people’s lives
As the weather gets hotter in the summer, many people stay inside to cool off. But people who don’t have air conditioning can’t get away from the heat, even when the sun goes down.
So, CBC teams from all over the country are working together to keep track of the heat and how it affects people when it goes from being hot to being sizzling to being very dangerous.
CBC News put temperature and humidity sensors in a lot of homes in five major cities to find out how hot it really gets. People are talking about how they are dealing with the heat and how worried they are about staying safe, especially those who live with children, the elderly, or people with health problems.
What are we tracking
The CBC News gave out 50 sensors in Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal, Windsor, Ontario, and Windsor, Ontario.
We reached out to people in each city who didn’t have air conditioning. We put the sensors in the homes of students, seniors, people who had just moved to Canada, people who had lived there for a long time, and people with chronic pain and other health problems.
Every 10 minutes, the devices measure the temperature and humidity in people’s homes. Then, local CBC News teams collect the data we’ll use to compare indoor and outdoor temperatures in each city, as shown in the graph above.The temperature in the home of a man in Windsor, Ontario,.
On really hot days, CBC News also asks people how the heat is making them feel and what they’ve been doing to stay cool.
WATCH | At night, the temperature in a Windsor home reaches 32 C:
During the summer, we’ll talk to locals, experts, activists, and politicians about how extreme heat affects people and what should be done to fix it.
At the end of the project, we will talk about what we’ve learned, including what our data shows, the risk of extreme heat staying inside for a long time, and what some people are doing to keep vulnerable groups safe.
Why does this matter
The World Health Organization says you shouldThat the temperature inside stays below 32 C during the day and below 24 C during the night. But many countries, including Canada, don’t have standardized laws that say what the highest temperature can be inside.
Canada, on the other hand, has already hit 1.5 C of warming over pre-industrial levels.From 1948 to 2021, the average temperature will rise by about 1.9 C,according to Canada’s Environment and Climate Change.
The increasing heat has already killed people. According to a report from the B.C. Coroners Service, 619 people died in 2021 because of the B.C. heat dome.Many were older people with bad health., and Those who died were twice as likely to be poor as those who lived.. More than two-thirds of the people who died did not have air conditioning.
“We don’t let people freeze to death in the winter,” said Jessica Bell, an Ontario MPP and the NDP’s housing critic for the province. “We shouldn’t let people die in the summer from heat stroke.”
The idea of making rules about the highest temperatures that can be allowed inside is gaining support, both at the city level and among advocacy groups. The Town ofThe city of Hamilton is working on a law that would require landlords to keep apartments below 26 C., Canada’s first of its kind. Grassroots groupClimate Justice Toronto started a petition to the City of Toronto just recently.To carry out a similar plan.
“Everyone should have the right to cool air. “It’s a must,” said Marcia Bryan, who runs the Peel branch of ACORN, a group for people with low and middle incomes.
Bryan said, “I’m really glad that this information is getting out there so that politicians, the government, and anyone else with power or authority can see it and do something.” “That way, it won’t just be tenants acting, nagging, or complaining. There is, in fact, a bigger picture going on.”