There will be a lot of climatic migrants, I guess many more than the ones caused by the Syrian civil war or the invasion of Ukraine. Just imagine people fleeing the heat.
I live in the south of france, and I already want to move out to a colder place. Summers are too long.
Maybe there is a taboo about heat, because heatwaves are just not bearable, at least for me.
Increasing frequency and severity of heat waves are definitely a noticeable thing. My parents actually lived in the South of France for a few years after their retirement. They were there in the last few weeks for a brief vacation and temperatures went well over 40 degrees in June. That used to be unusual even in the hottest month (July) and is now a yearly recurring thing. Luckily, humidity tends to be quite low in that particular area. But still, 40-45 degrees is a lot to deal with for people.
I think migration will be more an indirect consequence of local economies collapsing when e.g. agriculture becomes hard/impossible due to rising temperatures. People tend to move for economic reasons. Any mass casualties in a wet bulb heat event might of course cause people to panic. But richer countries would be able to compensate with technology by e.g. desalinating water and having buildings with AC. It's poor countries that lack the means for this that are going to suffer most.
Neal Stephenson has some nice perspective on this in his latest novel Termination Shock where people in e.g. Texas are dealing with temperatures that are basically not survivable without a so-called earth suit, which is a battery powered cooling solution people wear to be able to be outside in 50 degree+ Celsius heat. Those might become an actual thing people would need to own pretty soon in some places.
Where I live, in the southern US, it'll be a while before wet bulb temperatures top 35C in the hottest weeks of the summer. But they already hit those lower temperatures in the article (31C) quite often (e.g., 35C with 70% humidity), and last week a couple days were over 38C (wet bulb temperature of 33C assuming 70% humidity, though luckily so far it's usually less humid when it's that hot - around 55%).
Wet bulb calculator: https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/wet-bulb
Whenever I'll buy, I have to consider that in 30 years it's going to be hotter and I'll be 65 years old.
I used to live in Italy, it's going to be up to 39C in Rome the next two weeks.
I'll miss the sea and the food by staying north, though we'll be planting cantaloupes and prickly pears here in England in 3 decades.
A lot people like it but I would miss actual summer.
Ironically, you may want to move to a hotter place where AC is pervasive. I was suffering from the hot French summer too, but doing fine in NYC or Singapore.
French summer is too short so people haven't been using AC traditionally. Conversely, some warmer countries like Greece or Taiwan don't always have heaters and live in coldish houses in winter.
Are you saying we should literally wait for billions of people to die?
I know it's trite but, don't look up
We literally try to build models to make predictions, that claim is nonsense
Of course, the whole point of science is to make predictions. Kind of like “global warming will increase the probability of heat waves significantly in the near future” they were saying 10 years ago.
Are you a flat earther too? Might as well be if you're trying to maximize the volume of evidence you're ignoring
It seems to me that you don't take these variables into consideration and just assume they would remain constant or follow their historical trend into the future which needless to say is shortsighted to say the least.
Like what does population growth have to do with people dying from heat? Okay so the population is growing, that didn't stop the extra deaths from happening.
Why does life expectancy matter? Obviously that's going to change rapidly in these circumstances, but again, still not changing the number of deaths
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/jul/17/bread-f...
Edit: possibly a better source describing some of the correlations between extreme climate events and recent global food shortages, and its adverse impact on Middle East and Northern Africa.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-arab-spring-and...
It's a major dispute. Turkey basically took advantage of the wars to reneg on previous agreements to allow water flow.
I can imagine it has big impact on productivity of anybody not under 24h AC, but there is still construction, roadwork, maintenance etc. work done. I guess a mix of adaptation from birth plus suffering through work thats just harder than elsewhere, but still possible.
As things get hotter places like Iran and Pakistan can adapt with more AC. The problems will be worse for places without electricity grids and a population that is too poor for alternative means like running AC from solar.
The entire point is that it will be.
I believe it's been demonstrated and accepted by the science community that there is "concrete evidence of temperatures" (short of waiting for it to happen) that this level of change can happen and is now likely unavoidable.
This world is full of hyperbole but this looming change is not an obvious exaggeration. We've seen it in action already and we know where its going.
"Extreme temperatures in major Latin American cities could be linked to nearly 1 million deaths / An increase of 1°C could mean thousands of additional deaths on very hot days, according to a new study" - https://www.science.org/content/article/extreme-temperatures...
"The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance" - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw1838 : "The southern Persian Gulf shoreline and northern South Asia are home to millions of people, situating them on the front lines of exposure to TW extremes at the edge of and outside the range of natural variability in which our physiology evolved (36)."
"Increases of extreme heat-humidity days endanger future populations living in China" - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac69fc/... : "Many urban population centers in eastern China are expected to frequently experience the extreme heat-humidity events featured by the TWmax well beyond the survivability threshold of 35 °C by the end of this century under SSP5-8.5 scenario"
Don’t take for granted the status quo. It’s already yesterday, and the systems we’ve been depending on to tolerate and supply us with viral services haven’t been respected. What happens when the next famine hits India? What happens when South Africa has no water left? It might not be the spark on another regional conflict, but it certainly adds lots of potential for another conflict.
That will almost always be long the weather in that specific area really shocks everyone, because the food and energy come from a different place where there was a weather shock.
With climate change the risk is that we will increasingly experience such temperatures.
That's 80 million people. That's more than 10 times the number of Syrian refugees.
That's at least part of why professional basketball is so black--there is a tiny difference in average height between white and black, small enough that on average you won't notice it at all. At the very end of the tail, though, it has a big effect.
So... north of almost the entire continental United States?
I mean obviously you cannot seriously doubt this right??
EDIT: I should clarify, climate change definitely is real, it has huge scientific consensus, and not believing in it is pure conspiracy
Am I wrong in believing that people can find some low tech inexpensive solutions to the problem of overheating?
That’s a very mild summer, I’m located in Southern California where my nights are warmer than your peak day temperatures. During daytime it can be over 45 degrees Celsius. But ACs are everywhere so it makes it livable. I’m guessing most homes in Europe don’t have that.
Edit: Never mind, seems to be very humid North, and fairly average South.
Also because the water off the coast is cold, it never gets very hot and humid at the same time anywhere in the western US. For that you need to be near a large body of very warm water.
Specifically, in all of the west coast of the US except the bottom quarter of CA (where the ocean is a little warmer) the weather is cool and humid when the wind is blowing from the west (which it is most of the time) and dry and potentially very hot when it is blowing from the east.
Well, it is a little more complicated than that because every morning the sun heats the land, but not the ocean, which causes wind to flow from ocean to land, then every evening that flow is reversed, so my previous statement refers to the general flow of air masses in the absence of this diurnal coastal wind.
Except for outside. Also what do you hope to achieve with playing misery poker over this.
It is not a competition, you know? There’s nothing to win if you have the worst climate.
> I’m guessing most homes in Europe don’t have that
No, and that is a good thing because AC for whole cities in arid regions is a big part of why we are in this situation in the first place. California is pretty much the illustration of how not to build a country.