That's an exaggeration. Extreme heat (including heat waves that exceed this threshold) happen semi-regularly, and the death rate when they occur is nowhere near 100%. More like 0.1% or less.
Electrically-powered air conditioning is not the only way to cool a human body.
Simply escaping to an underground or substantially enclosed area is sufficient for periods of up to a few days, or even weeks depending on the thickness of the walls. Car parks, cellars, caves, etc... all retain a relatively constant temperature irrespective of temporary swings of the air temperature outside.
Similarly, immersing oneself in a body of water below about 36 C is also sufficient, and that's typically available even if the local air temperature and humidity exceeds safe levels. E.g.: Rivers "carry" the cold down from mountains, and are safe havens during temperature extremes. Even the local pool is sufficient, because water has such a massive thermal capacity that it won't heat up anywhere near as fast as the air around it.
At times like this you see people filling up their bathtubs and just hanging out in there until things blow over.
More worrying is what happens to wildlife. Some animals simply can't escape like humans and most animals can. For example in Australia a recent heatwave killed something like half of all flying foxes!
The threshold is wet bulb 35 for 7 hours. That is when fit young humans can't survive. Older people die well before that of course.
And no, it doesn't happen regularly. I wasn't aware it had happened at all, although others here say it has. But it has come close. From https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/climate-and-people... :
> Jacobabad crossed the 35C wet bulb threshold in July 1987, then again in June 2005, June 2010 and July 2012. Each time the boundary may have been breached for only a few hours, but a three-day average maximum temperature has been recorded hovering around 34C in June 2010, June 2001 and July 2012.
These people don't have the escapes you mentioned. They are in a city with no running water and no cars, let alone car parks. There is no river, but there are a couple of small lakes.
https://www.wunderground.com/blog/weatherhistorian/record-de...
The most dangerous / frequent occurrences seem to be measured in the middle east near shallow gulf coasts. Appleton Wisconsin holds the continental US record, apparently?
This is from 2011.
This looks more updated: https://www.weather.gov/jetstream/hi
and says:
> The highest dew points, and therefore the highest heat indices are usually found near warm bodies of water.
> In the world, the warmest water is found in the Persian Gulf where the water temperature typically reaches up to 90°F (32°C) in summer. Therefore dew points will be that high as well.
> The highest dew point ever recorded, 95°F (35°C), was recorded at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, on July 8, 2003. With an air temperature of 108°F (42°C) the heat index was 178°F (81°C).
> In the United States, the highest dew point ever recorded, 90°F (32°C), was recorded at the New Orleans Naval Air Station, on July 30, 1987, Melbourne, Florida on July 12, 1987. Heat indices were in the 130's°F (50's°C).
> Appleton, Wisconsin also had a 90°F (32°C) dew point on July 13, 1995 with a heat index of 149°F (65°C)."
So, it happened once, in Saudi Arabia?
Jeez what a hot place... Any idea what geographic features make it so dang hot? It's not too far from water (just looking at a map).
Sibi is in a hollow formed by some mountain ranges to the north. Perhaps hot winds from the south get trapped there. Not sure about Jacobabad though…could never find any reason why it was so hot.
Another time I was in a car with no AC right after a rainstorm, and it was so hot in the backseat that every time the car stopped the heat became unbearable. When the car was moving we had some wind and it helped.
In Canada I’ve always noticed the temperature can be 5-10 degrees cooler under trees in a forest. Not sure if it’ll be so cool with high humidity but certainly trees will block the sun and trap air cooled by the ground, so they are the best defence against global warming.
It means some people simply have no means to escape such heat and will likely die.
In the US, they sometimes open cooling centers during heat waves so homeless people and poor people have a place to go. I never went to such but they did that in Fresno and bus rides were free if you said you were going to a cooling center.
And there may often be only one tap per 100 people in densely populated slums.
These events are usually short (for TW >35, majority only last an hour, see Sup fig 2), which is perhaps why we are not seeing many deaths associated with them.
With regards to immersing oneself in water, a bathtub is good so long as groundwater is available; if everyone starts filling their tubs for every heat wave it might start becoming more scarce. I would have thought natural bodies of water like the sea would have been a good choice, but the authors point out that in one region where wet bulb temps >35 were happening they also observed frequent sea surface temps >35 too (sup fig 16).
There are ways to survive and you have provided good ones, but they won’t be available to all who experience these events if they continue to increase in number. And excellent point about wildlife! That’s a whole additional side of it that will probably get lost in the mitigation effort…
And there are psychological issues that people just don't know what to do till it's too late. I was living an apartment with only 1 southern window, the heat was hard to vent. Once during a heatwave I found myself in a weird lethargy then I started going sick and then I found out the thermometer shows 40°C inside. I went outside immediately. Were not a healthy young man, that could have ended up badly. Since that I never underestimate the heat.
That does not mean 100% fatality rate is possible but it definitely might be more than 0.1%.
This is something that has puzzled me every time I park in the underground garage under City Hall in Palo Alto. It is always so hot down there compared to the outside air.
I was about to ask if anyone knows why that is, and then realized I could search for the answer:
https://www.google.com/search?q=why+do+underground+garages+g...
Lots of interesting opinions there, including a previous HN thread.
One discussion I liked showed up when I'm signed into Google but was missing from an incognito search:
https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2013/07/05/stupid-geophysi...
There's also all the body heat, and the resistive braking of the trains which is being phased out.
If this starts to happen semi-regularly, you can bet my garden will turn into a little hobbit hill/cellar.
That said, I agree that if it happens suddenly to that extend, we would likely be looking at more than 0.1%.
People don't have trashcans, storage bins, etc?
"And seems you probably never bathed in 35°C water, it's definitely not refreshing."
Where is this 35C water coming from?
Also, if it's a humid heat, there are likely to be natural or artificial bodies of water around. Hopefully the people have been taking care of them and they aren't a cesspool.
Sure, some people may die, but it should be very low.
Edit: why downvote? All the excuses the previous person gave seem petty to me, so I'm wondering how that person came to their conclusion. Especially for where that hot water is coming from.
I’m inclined to say that this is not very survivable, regardless of your precautions, if your air conditioning has died.
A wet bulb of 35C means that there is a thermometer covered with a wet cloth reading that temperature. That could be 35C with 100% humidity, or it could be a higher temperature with a lower humidity.
Can you explain how your air conditioner keeps you cool? Do you think this machine is the only thing that can perform a similar function? It's all about removing excess heat from your body. An air conditioner does this by cooling air and removing humidity. This can be from the cool air on your skin and the ability for your sweat to evaporate. When your sweat can't evaporate you need another way to transfer heat. Water is very efficient for this due to its specific heat (anything at a cooler temperature with sufficient thermal mass can work). Some people can even become hypothermic in 27C water if left in it long enough.
Edit: I guess people just downvote things they don't like or find to be inconvenient.
How is that fully accurate? It seems to me that "not very survivable" is not accurate and is an over exaggeration. I don't expect a 50% death rate, even 10% would be extremely generous. It would be like me saying linux desktops are very common.
I would not leave my house. My house has insulation and thermal mass, which would delay the tempature from reaching that level until later. I could use water to cool myself, whether in the bath tub or a trashcan. I could use a fan if there's power (depends on the temperature and humidity to reach that wet bulb). I could use frozen objects (even without power, the freezer will stay cold for at least a day). I also have a generator to power these things if there's a short to medium term outage.
Their statement was not about changing one's circumstance. It was that even with precautions, it's not very survivable. This is neither accurate nor precise. It is very survivable with precautions.
I was specifically questioning things like where is the hot water coming from, people without tubs can't figure out how to save water, etc. Those claims sound overly pessimistic and simplistic to me.
Still, that factoid is troubling. These are conditions that exceed humans' operating conditions. We're used to that on the cold side. Plenty of people thrive (miserably) in places that get cold.
But, there are actually far fewer good cooling options. Air conditioning is more complicated than heating. You can heat with fire, warm clothes. Even exercise, though this is not sustainable. A sauna is nice, but people don't live in their saunas until temperatures get tolerable.
Also, the heat cutoff is more of a universal. A lot of organisms seem to start failing at temperatures like this.
That would definitely change cultures and economies, but if you can't get out of those places, it might be your only option.
"There is a clear connection between heat and drowning. That's when people want to go in or near the water, and the risks of drowning increase," FSL's Executive Director Kristiina Heinonen told Yle in July:
https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/drowning_deaths_reach_10-...
Sounds to me like a mostly not seen before thing
> Is there a name
"False analogy" is what comes to my mind, maybe there's something better
I guess it depends on where you are, I live on the Mediterranean, where, if you panic in the water, you're just standing in calm water. I imagine the ocean is much scarier.
> maybe there's something better
I think we do need something better, I see it too often for it to not have an exact name.
Yes, in my case I was imagining a wide river close to a many millions people city, and people from the slums (no AC) go there to cool down, and more and more people arrive all the time to the river, pushing those already there outwards, deeper water, people cannot swim
At rock concerts 10 000 people can create dangerous pressure, I wonder if a deadly heat wave and the chance to cool down at a specific place can do that too
Or maybe people would spread out along the water, but at the same time, it might be hard for an individual person with occluded vision to know what makes sense to do
Sometimes people rush out from a building in panic, everyone gets stuck in the door opening
A higher frequency of extreme cold in winter in areas that are not accustomed to it, like what recently happened in Texas, may also occur with similar consequences.
I don't think climate change will be a catastrophe movie directed by JJ Abrams. I think it will be a gradual process in which we pay back the "loan" of fossil fuel use with interest.
We put our civilization on a credit card without knowing the interest rate.
We could have really slowed down our running up the balance in the 1970s and 1980s with nuclear power, but we didn't. We could still be doing that plus deploying a lot of renewable and storage tech that was not mature back then, but we're doing far too little of that. We are still adding to the card balance and we still don't know the interest or the repayment terms.
If there are feedback loops in the climate system that we trigger, the loan could be an ARM with unscheduled interest rate increases and balloon payments.
Our children get to inherit most of this bill.
The municipalities in the relevant places ought to advice people to prepare well in advance (and how)
People can jump into fountains, or other bodies of water, hide at home, airconned buildings.
In the end, people can try to brave it, and wait for the relatively cool evening.
I don't know what exactly environment reaching 35C/95F web bulb means, but considering 1) it indicates temperature of a thermometer cooled by evaporation, and 2) body temperature of a human is ~40C/100F, I think it means evaporative cooling aka sweating is becoming useless. It won't be a huge stretch to consider that unsurvivable.
One issue that people who haven't experienced extreme heat might not realize is a lot of people just pass out really quickly. While it takes a while to go past the point of no return and they theoretically could be egressed to somewhere they can cool off and recover, if they're alone, they're not going to.
This assumes there are no alternatives to evaporative cooling via sweat.
My legitimate comments get downvoted and crap like this does not...
Of note: that’s literal, even doing nothing and sitting in front of a fan you can’t cool down.
And do one of the issues 35 WBT “hides” is that any activity lowers the heat stress threshold. Sugarcane workers are already dying due to heat stress today, and have been for a while. There’s been an “epidemic” of “kidney disease” in central american sugarcane fields for a decade now, with young men showing rates of kidney diseases 15x the norm.
"Even heat-adapted people cannot carry out normal outdoor activities past a wet-bulb temperature of 32°C (90°F), equivalent to a heat index of 55°C (130°F). The theoretical limit to human survival for more than a few hours in the shade, even with unlimited water, is 35°C (95°F) – theoretically equivalent to a heat index of 70°C (160°F), though the heat index does not go that high."
So the practical limit is indeed much lower than 35°C; that's the limit at which you're basically going to fall over and die.
I'm not sure that phrase means what you think it means... Yes, there were ~600 tragic deaths in BC from the heat dome, but en masse means 'as a whole' or 'as a group', and a .012% death rate does not really qualify there.
as long as power is running, it's actually fine in this country, but that's because we've designed our living space around the heat. it is entirely possible to never be exposed to the sun in a normal day in the life of a working resident here if you stay in the right neighbourhood, and this includes the daily commute, hobbies, physical activity, going out for drinks etc.
more and more of the country is being built underground and more and more of our air is becoming conditioned. this is the arcology of the future and it is somewhat pleasant.
edit: actually i think our infrastructure was built around protecting us from the harsh and unpredictable tropical thunderstorms and the protection from heat turned out to be a nice bonus.
Once you acclimate to it though - it's fine - I used to do a 5 mile run every day from Anson Road/GardensByTheBay/MBS - wasn't an issue.
I worked in Dubai for about 6 months, and there were days there that I honestly thought I might die if I didn't get somewhere cool. And it wasn't the days that were 115 degrees Fahrenheit (46 Celsius) (though those were intense) - but the 100-105 degrees at super high humidity that would knock you on your back. Your entire body would be instantly bathed in sweat and it wouldn't help.
I was fine without Air Conditioning in Singapore - would sometimes turn mine off and just open the windows, but I can imagine anyone doing that in Dubai during the hot season.
Singapore is almost exactly on the equator. UV readings get up to 11 each day (extreme), whereas the most I ever saw in say SF was 5.
Your experience is one experience, mine is that it's a sauna every day of the year. I've experienced extremely hot days in terms of subjective experience of WBT as explained in article. My gf, a local here, also decries the heat. I personally cannot go running before 5:30pm. I got a major sunburn on my back at 5:30pm the time I tried running shirtless at east coast park. Granted, I am pale.
Really? London is 6 today, was 7 last week and 8 earlier this year.
I do also concur with the GP that Singapore is relatively mild as far as equatorial/tropical climates go. India, the Middle East, the Philippines and even Australia are sometimes much more oppressive.
The hottest day ever recorded in Singapore was 37c, whereas London is 38c and SF is apparently 41c. Of course, Singapore is more humid (and thus higher WBT) - but it's also much more consistent. In theory that would make it easier to acclimate..... but then Singaporeans seem to run their AC set to freezing.
https://images.app.goo.gl/P4YtYRLvT5XVcn168
Look at this map of max temperatures and note that the equator runs through a band of relatively low max temperatures: Indonesia, northern South America, and the more southern part of Africa show bands of conspicuous coolness. The hottest max temperatures are in places like southern North America, India, Northern Africa, and Australia; locations that are in fact very far away from the equator.
The max temperatures of a place is caused by many things, such as proximity to water and local wind currents, but one driving reason is relatively simple: because of the tilt of the earth, every day on the equator is 12 hours. North or south of the equator, on the summer solstice, you can get 15 hour days, depending on latitude. The summer is a period of continuously intense solar heating. Again, there are other factors, but the sun is the driving force.
I once visited Kuwait in August, and it was 52 degrees in the shade with near-100% humidity. I genuinely do not understand how some people survive there today without aircon, much less how they will do so if temps go up a few more degrees.
In the time I spent in Dubai (about six months) in comparison, I had to seek shelter from the heat/sun a half-dozen times, and came close to heat-stroking a bunch of times. That was after 4+ years in Singapore.
I drank a lot of water in Singapore - but never, in a million years would I have gone on a trek like MacRitchie reservoir in Dubai - and in Singapore I took my 65 year old mother through the entire loop.
Just completely different environments - Singapore is not the type of environment being discussed in the original article.
Living in both San Diego and now Denver, they hit 11 quite regularly.
The Changi airport weather station does not have any recordings of a 35C wet bulb temperature. And this paper suggests that it is a very uncommon occurrence as yet. What source are you using?
See: https://www.instrumentchoice.com.au/news/wet-bulb-temperatur...
Unfortunately a large percentage of folks in HDB flats don't have AC, so I do fear for many citizens in Singapore. With global warming trends it should simply be a free or heavily subsidized utility here.
One of the locals finally told me I couldnt just walk out of airconditioned low humidity offices into the street and roam around, without giving my body 10-15 minutes to recalibrate. So before setting out from air conditioned buildings, I would stand outside in the shade for a bit and then head out. And that made a big difference. I started sweating less and didnt feel humidity as much.
It's just an anecdote, of course, but there are notable examples of people i think should be from genetic backgrounds that could handle the heat that can't, and vice versa.
If you work outside all day you adapt very quickly to it. During the adjustment period you are chugging water all the time but you eventually adjust. It's a circulation adaptation that's been observed with special forces recruits.
Sort of yes, sort of no. In some industries, those who do hard labour in heat have a terrible death rate from kidney disease. There is a lot in the news about this in relation to sugarcane workers. Eg: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/14/kidney-disease...
We've literally be talking to Norwegian family about their nice 22 degree day at the beach while I was loading the fire place, they asked me the temperature, checked and was 22 also, though would have dropped later at night.
I find over 35 gets tough to do ongoing outdoor work. An hour or 2 then you need an hour or 2 to cool down. Hitting, 40c this is getting too hot.
Unfortunately it looks like someone who didn't get it downvoted you. Welcome to HN!
I'm not saying it resulted in quality sleep (as a Canadian - I set the thermostat to 13 degrees in the winter when sleeping, and my ideal temperature in the summer is about 18 degrees) - but you get used to the outdoor climate reasonably quickly (in my case, about 4-6 months).
This is mostly a meditation on the fact that I used to be able to sleep in temperatures of 26-27 in Singapore. The human body (at least this one) can definitely acclimate to local environments given some time and exposure.
Of course - no acclimating whatsoever will help you if the wetbulb temperature gets up to 35. You are just dead unless you can find some active cooling at that point fairly quickly.
And before anyone brings up skin cancer, there is no reliable evidence that brief daily sun exposure increases all cause mortality.
I've never heard of such a claim, and that seems unintuitive. Why would that be? Do you have a source you could direct me to to learn more about this?
...sometimes I secretly wonder if sunscreen (over-)use in America would one day be found to be the cause of rise in depression and other things like that over the last few decades, kinda like lead pipes of old. I don't think it's likely but it would be kinda funny.
Some more reading specifically on vitimin D:
https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/VitaminD-health%20Professi...
I am not claiming this and don't have a reliable source to point to.
Inferior how?
It's like fast acting insulin versus insulin produced by a functioning pancreas - it's going to keep someone alive but it's not ideal for the body long term.
I only know from owning a swamp cooler.
A lot of ways we measure and describe the human experience of humidity and temperature are not standardized from location to location, so the non-local methods and terminology can be arcane for anyone who isn't a meteorologist.
The two are the same only if relative humidity is 100 %: 100 % relative humidity means that if the air cools at all, it will condensate; so the air temperature is the dew point. 100 % relative humidity also means that water cannot evaporate, as the air is already saturated with water, so the wet bulb temperature is also the same as the air temperature.
I spent much of my life living in that temperature range without A/C, working outside during the day in the sun.
It's hot but not going to kill you. In fact, there are massive homeless encampments outside my window right now in extremely humid, hot, Texas weather (it is 95-97 all week and very human). The homeless have endured many summers like this.
It is a massive stretch to say these temperatures are not survivable. They are not healthy in the long run - but neither is sun exposure.
It's an incredible exaggeration to say Chicago (where 600 people died in the heat wave) is not survivable at all when millions actually did survive the heat wave without AC.
If a major city has such a heatwave, it will almost certainly be a mass casualty event, mitigated only by the duration of the wave and how many people have A/C (or how long the blackouts last).
A fan won't work because your sweat will not evaporate: in fact it just heats you up faster (like breathing on your skin in a sauna).
Such temperatures have only been measured a few times on earth, so no, you have not experienced them.
At quick check, humidity in Houston is like 55%, so the wet-bulb temperature is only ~80f. Uncomfortably hot, but not close to the threshold discussed in TFA.
https://www.iflscience.com/environment/why-is-everybody-talk...
In a recent Seattle heatwave, when it was 107 outside my much poorer insulated semi-basement with direct sun shining into its large-ish windows, stayed under 85 without AC.
Couldn't people just build better / underground housing using relatively primitive technology?
http://www.rynekinstalacyjny.pl/images/photos/24/3877/__b_An...
The rate of temperature increase depends on physical properties of the basement walls: using the first equation here[0] as an approximation, set x to 0, set q"_o to 100W*(# people)/(basement surface area). α is the thermal diffusivity of the wall material [1].
[0] https://slideplayer.com/slide/1676039/7/images/9/Semi-Infini... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_diffusivity
There are certain types of roofs being installed called cool roofs that reflect heat and don’t absorb it that keeps the inside of building a little cooler.
That’s the climate changed world.
The prediction of how people react to the changes - from individuals to institutions to governments is spot on.
Highly recommended.
I mean ground and buildings have thermal inertia, if the heatwave is relatively short you can survive in basements or underground parking. Also water in the pipes will still be colder than the air most likely.
What happens when people from India, the middle east, ... are forced to relocate? I expect some kind of conflict/war of expansion and probably famine since a lot of the land will be abandoned and hence become unproductive.
And let's be real, no wall (or frontex and the like) will ever keep out billions of people. If the world doesn't get its shit together and respond globally and collaboratively now, this will get ugly beyond imagination and no one, no matter the edgy coldness of their x-first attitude, will come out of this recognizable. People won't just die politely, much less when informed about who's to blame for all this hell.
I think there may be even possible consequences beyond everyone's worst nightmares when we see massive ecosystem collapses. What is it gonna be like, if you have unimaginable fields of mold and bacterial overgrowth? The winds bring Sahara's heavy mineral dust to Europe now, I am sure spores and toxic particles fly much better tomorrow...
On a "we're talking about human beings here" basis what do you do about all the people who feel that the selection and admission process was corrupt and that they've been robbed of their chance at safety? Do you expect them to meekly acquiesce?
Study: Cold kills 20 times more people than heat https://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2015/05/20/cold-weath...
"What we see is that in the early-to-mid 20th century, the annual death toll from disasters was high, often reaching over one million per year. In recent decades we have seen a substantial decline in deaths. In most years fewer than 20,000 die (and in the most recent decade, this has often been less than 10,000). Even in peak years with high-impact events, the death toll has not exceeded 500,000 since the mid-1960s.
This decline is even more impressive when we consider the rate of population growth over this period. When we correct for population – showing this data in terms of death rates (measured per 100,000 people) – we see an even greater decline over the past century. This chart can be viewed here."
The reductions you discuss are attributable to the first of those two effects. Climate change drives the second. If we mitigate climate change then we can spare ourselves the increases attributable to the second effect.
You may reply that the first effect can always outpace the second, but I hope with some thought you can recognise that there is no evidence to support that claim, and it is essentially just an article of faith.
Or are they so much better adapted that it won’t be a problem (I don’t think so)
Especially in terms of climate change. I try to live as green as I can and I vote for a climate focused party, other than that there's not much I can do as an individual. Reading about how bad things may become doesn't help me one bit.
Ask a layman and most of them will tel you a fridge just “creates cold” or something and don’t understand why leaving the fridge door open is not a way to cool your room.
Having people understand these concepts is critical so they can better reason about climate change, climate policies, make better and greener decisions etc.
It’s called wet bulb, not “web bulb”.
Like California? They already can’t keep the lights on with rolling blackouts happening every year. If one of those blackouts happens during a severe heatwave, it could be serious. Not to mention the serious economic cost of having a third-world quality grid in what should be one of the union’s most prosperous states.
A few cities around the world do reach 35 or higher regularly during summer. And in a some of those people have lived for thousands of years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_average_temp...
Wet bulb temperature is a combination of humidity and temperature.
Wet bulb temperature of 35C means your body physically cannot get rid of heat and you WILL die, rather quickly, even in shade. There is no escape unless you have ability to control humidity (ie. remove some humidity from the air).
Up until recently we did not have situations on earth where wet bulb temperature would reach 35C. Even in the most hot places the air would be dry enough to bring wet bulb temperature down under 35C meaning, things can cool below human body temperature.
The issue is that a lot of people in hot places simply do not have the means to control their climate in their houses, assuming they have any.
Most modern ACs in fact dehumidify and cool in one step with a compressor and then use the collected water to help carry heat away from the compressor by letting the water evaporate into the exhaust to save power (it's why you rarely have to empty water from modern dehumidifying ACs).
Someone could make a “Einstein dehumidifier” using 19th century technology and roll it out across the world. If embedded in buildings it could cool them constantly with no electricity required.
Anyway, the best way to learn more about this is to search for resources describing the "psychrometrics of evaporative cooling". Psychrometrics is the study of the thermodynamics of air and water vapor mixtures. Learning about the psychrometric chart, in particular, is helpful since it is a very clear, expressive tool that will illustrates how adiabitic (no change in thermal energy transfer) cooling can occur by adding humidity to dry air.
I think this entry from engineering toolbox provides a good start: https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/evaporative-cooling-d_698...
Ultimately all that really works in our modern world at scale in such a heat wave is powered air conditioning, so ensuring that electrical power is not interrupted during such an event is of paramount importance if we are to avoid this new sort of natural disaster.
Human societies have been historically very bad at handling large scale migrations, but it's about to become necessary.
Not saying you’re wrong, though..
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/08/pacific-nort...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/08/heat-dom...
Migration is not going to cut it. Climate change is making weather more chaotic and unpredictable. Escape is impossible. The only place you can go where the planetary weather system’s disintegration does not pose a danger is space, where the absence of that same disintegrating weather system makes survival even harder.
Reversal is the only option.
Reversal is not really an option either; the best scientific evidence I've seen is that we've already past several tipping points that will accelerate warming regardless of what we do, and even if we haven't, we've had about zero decrease in worldwide CO2 emissions and a terrible track record in getting humanity to work together for common good.
Instead you build and live in highrise/towers - that gives cheap ventilation which is a half the solution.
And I liked the siesta and the following it very active life till deep night in Spain - another natural adaptation to hot climate. It makes for much calmer and steady life rhythm and feeling.
I mean, I'm sure this is valid in some places but having lived in high rises relatively far north in Canada let me tell you it is very possible (and in my experience very common) to build high rises that retain heat so well they basically bake the occupants in high heat/humidity.
I doubt most of North America's high rise apartment buildings above some latitude are particularly well equipped for this, so there's almost certainly a shift required in how you build them.
It turns out, in those temperatures, even young and healthy people can't survive. Combined with power outages, as happens in the book, everyone living under such a heat wave will likely die.
It's looking increasingly likely that such heatwaves are possible in the future, and possibly quite deadly. This could result in the mass deaths of many people, especially in poor tropical countries that don't have a stable infrastructure to cool most people during such a heatwave. I hope a mass death event from a "web bulb" 35C heatwave never happens, but I'm losing hope, especially with the increasing global temperatures, and the very lackluster progress being made on carbon output.