I study climate change. In this summer, it became very hot for me to do my area
This first person is written by column Catherine Macrur-Nicol, who lives in Montreal. For more information about the stories of the first person, see FAQ,
The sun was brutally beating on my back because I was bent on my work, making it impossible to ignore the cloying heat. I stood in a gapesi salt marsh in Eastern Quebec, rubber shoes and grougie clothes to conduct my Guru’s research. I left my measurements and slowly sat on my hump, put my arms in my elbow.
The water should have felt cold. But our phone showed that the air temperature was 32C, 43 humidity; Equal to the hottest temperature recorded in this regionI wiped sweat from my forehead with my palm, but there was no shady in the marsh to hide from the oppressive heat.
That day, my team planned to spend about six hours to transfer heavy equipment around the salt marsh. We planned to collect small air samples from different areas in the swamp with environmental data such as temperature and water salinity.
Salt teams have a lot of carbon in their plants and soil. When carbon is safely closed from the atmosphere, it does not contribute to global warming. We wanted to see if an aggressive plant, European common reed, was changing how much carbon the salt marsh could hold.
Simon Andrea, along with the Island Nature Trust, says Salt is extremely beneficial for Marsh Pei’s ecosystem. East of Stratford it is open to go through its risk for distinctive marsh nature lovers.
My advisor – who are in the 70s of her 70s – were also there to help me and two other graduate students from two local high school. After about 45 minutes, the oldest and youngest members were first weakened, dizzy and nausea. They were struggling blindly, so I asked them to leave the marsh and find shelter in an air -conditioned car, worried they would become seriously ill.
The irony was not lost on me: here I was researching how the salt marsh of Gaspie could potentially provide an opportunity for nature-based solutions to remove the effects of climate change, yet it was very hot for us to really measure.
The remaining three tried to make the soldier a soldier with a planned sample, but could work for about five minutes at a time, before the salty mute to sit in the silent. Sweating our forehead in a stable stream. We drank every liter of water and electrolytes that we brought with us, but I still felt dehydrated.
My brain felt sluggish and disorientation. I could hardly understand the words that we were saying to each other. I developed a blind migraine, which curls me in pain for the rest of the day.
My field crew was brought to the point of tiredness of heat. We were close to heatstroke within about 90 minutes of standing outside.
By this summer, I only felt very little heat, as I did that day. I live in Montreal, a city that is not known for its tropical season. And until this summer, my daily life was not directly and clearly affected by climate change.
Certainly, Montreal can experience summer waves, but my office and home are well equipped with fans and air conditioning, so I have always been able to handle it, as a healthy woman in my 20s.
This is not to say that I do not know that climate change is affecting Canadian people.
I was planting trees in northern Ontario during the summer of 2023 – when smoke Historical wildfire It was burnt in that country that in summer I found a vicious form of bronchitis. This left me with a hacking, bloody cough for six months. At the same time, around 19,000 people were extracted from Yelonife and a large part of NWT caught fire.
I knew that we were in an unprecedented wildfire season, but it is a human nature to take personal, discomfort in discrepancies, and in fact it happened to me.
I have a bachelor’s degree in sea and freshwater biology and will soon have a master’s degree in physical geography. I can talk about what the approximate effects of climate crisis will be on the aquatic, terrestrial and coastal ecosystems.
However, I subconsciously refrained from considering what will be its effect on humans, especially on myself, my loved ones and communities in which I live.
Climate crisis is an existential threat to such magnitude that I freeze mentally. I have finally got the privilege to see climate change from far away till this summer.
Salt Marsh is breathtaking to the ecosystem and many are focal points of compelling questions. But my research has started feeling fiercely futile in front of the active freefall towards the crisis of the ecosystem. I believed that natural science was the answer to every problem, but I have come to see its boundaries.
In fact, I am incredibly scared for our safety. Important questions for me so now salt marshes or climate change is no longer related to preventing (which I now see as a naive desire), but how we can disable environmental change.
This is the place where as a person I collide with me as a scientist. In my region, research reliability comes from strict neutrality and quiet language. Even by writing this article I am considered as risky and biased, possibly for the rest of my career.
But after this summer, I think it is the moral duty of scientists like me to see their terror about climate change by the public. I do not understand that hoping to ignore the fact that I can become a busy researcher for a human body to conduct my fieldwork in unsafe temperature.
I think there is a deep need to translate your work into relevant information, which tangible on how to process canadian climate crisis. As soon as we go into the cooler fall, I will not forget the heat of this heat.
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