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Comment by Eumenes | Hacker News Reader

People are way more tolerant of extreme heat compared to cold

Which is an artifact of a past age and foolish to bank on. Cold can be dangerous but we basically have what we need to survive at any low temperature in North America.

However, heat can't be combatted when you're outside in it with the same effectiveness. It reaches a point where the air temperature is simply lethal. It reaches a point where the paved ground burns whatever touches it. It degrades our medicines and damages our tools. We've already begun to experience these effects and it will only ever get worse. People should be moving away from hot areas, but instead they're running their AC 24/7 so they can keep pretending they made a good choice a little longer.

Until you get to wet bulb saturation extremes, you can survive heat as long as you have a supply of water. Cold temperatures, on the other hand, will kill you straight up.

Also, AC uses way less carbon than heat.

Heat pumps can work both ways.

We could reverse this statement, but replace "water" with "warm clothing". It's not like we haven't been ameliorating the effects of cold for ages.

> you can survive heat as long as you have a supply of water

Above ~55C (131F) that water will burn your tongue and throat. Even at 45C water will be uncomfortably warm.

What are you talking about?

A majority of the world's population is into drinking tea and other beverages significantly hotter than 55C

No, you're saying that like those extreme highs are distant specters. They already happen and are part of our immediate future. At which point, the human body cannot survive by evaporating water. Drinking cold water is an active measure which frankly is not available to all people, especially many of those most vulnerable to these fatal temperatures. When the WBT passes a certain level it will kill you straight up. Cold, not so much. People live in Antarctica. And although we will get storms and more extreme weather, the planet is getting hotter.

>> we basically have what we need to survive at any low temperature in North America

Senior citizens don't have what they need to survive shoveling snow at any temperature in North America.

Really cold seasons are cold around the clock... in the neotropical summer many people do go out running between 5AM and 7AM because it's fine to be outside when it's 75°-85°F outside.

At subtropical latitudes a low elevation desert climate with high temperatures overnight is very much the exception, not the rule. Likewise, it's unusual to have cold bright sunny seasons because few of us live in the Andes:

The hot subtropics are often bright even when it's muggy. This 24/7 makes one (even without going out jogging) feel less cooped up inside than the double whammy of low annual insolation gloom in so many cold latitudes when it's cold (even without having to walk in nor shovel snow).

Yes...up to a point. And there's the similar/related issue of extreme drought. If the wells and pipes run dry, the local population density tends to plummet.

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