this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2024
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So you're trying to say most of North America is uninhabitable? I'm in North Carolina, the temperature and relative humidity were in the 90's yesterday. It's July.
I mean it's thanks to modern technology not uninhabitable, but we're "wasting" a lot of energy to make it habitable, and this is getting worse in the future, because of climate change. I couldn't imagine living somewhere where, I can't get out (of AC cooled buildings) because it's too hot.
25º during summer nights either already was or is going to become normal around gigantic areas of the world. Getting all Indians to just live anywhere else is never going to be plausible.
I didn't say it's realistic to move that much people around the globe, it did grow like that historically, but I do think, that migration because of this is becoming a sociodemographic and political problem in somewhere near the future. And is already somewhat in areas that are less wealthy and instable politically (e.g. northern Africa).
People live there for many thousand years now and most of the time without ACs. It is defintly inhabitable. We "waste" the energy to make it comfortable.
Considering the energy we "waste" to make most of Europe inhabitable on the other hand... And here it really is about "inhabitable", because without heating we couldn't live in e.g. Germany.
If we only lived in areas where it would be comfortable without heating and ACs we'd have to kill of 90% of humanity.
True, there's a lot of heating necessary to make life comfortable in Europe (but also in USA btw. probably even more, because I'd say the standards for insulation are better in Europe, and temperatures are more extreme more in the center of the continent).
But it's absolutely possible to live without (most of) the heating, by:
Though as you correctly notice, the combination of high temperature and humidity is what potentially creates a dangerous climate for life, even with things such as cooling wests in "low" high temperatures (within 30-40C), because evaporation chill stops working, so there are times and places, and these times and places will get more frequent where humans can't survive outside (without some serious technological counter-measures) while with cold temperatures you can always wear (somewhat specialized) clothing.
Evaporation chill does work even with quite high temperatures, but at some point (and I do think there are places that reach that point), the quite effective human cooling system is not able to catch up anymore (I think somewhere around 50+C IIRC).
I would still insist that heating is the only way to make much of Europe permanently inhabitable. Yes, houses get more efficient and the energy necessary gets less (same is true for cooling a house though). Still, we had a week of permanent -10°C 1,5a ago. Without heating we'd probably have to count the deaths in the millions for that week alone.
Yeah, certainly it would increase the risk of deaths, humans aren't made for these extremes. (Btw. I think you mean "habitable" instead of "inhabitable").
But getting above some temperatures on average really makes these places deadly. Interesting article dealing with this topic, and more approachable article (which is based on that study)