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Comment by drewcon | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know where you (or your nephew are) but you’re tremendously underplaying the human races ability to simply adapt.

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Most people couldn't even handle masking and staying indoors during a plague. At a time when hospitals were rationing oxygen they were folks acting like not being able to go to Applebee's was a human rights violation.

The most likely adaptation is some form of eco-fascism.

How do you simply adapt to temperatures which are literally unlivable such as wet bulb temperatures hitting 33C+ in areas such as the Middle East and South Asia? Humans literally cannot survive at such temperatures. Mass migration or mass investment in redoing the building stock and electrical grid to make indoors habitable are the only options, and neither are really viable (tens of millions migrating will cause severe issues up to and including wars, meanwhile most of the countries likely to be impacted simply do not have the money nor governance needed to rebuild everything with AC).

Living in AZ it’s not uncommon to have runs of 43ºC for weeks on end. Oh, and there’s not much water. The Hohokam people brought water in by digging canals by hand 600 years ago. Now >5 million people live in the Phoenix area and put up with this heat every summer - lots of retirees to, not just healthy young people.

Does construction, sports, or other outdoor activity stop during the summer? No. More might move to early in the morning or later at night, but last summer I regularly ran 5K twice a week when it was between 35-38ºC.

California is taking the bulk of the water we naturally have by river, and Saudi Arabia is taking a significant amount of our groundwater (by alfalfa farming), and we’ve not started wars with either.

On the other hand we have a lot of sun and we’re able to offset >100% of our cooling cost with solar energy (amortized over the year, but also at any point in time if our installer hadn’t undersized our inverter). None of that would have been possible 40 years ago, but buildings are being retrofit every day here.

All that to say, people will adapt. Some will migrate. Some area may become more habitable, some less.

How do you simply adapt to temperatures which are literally unlivable such as wet bulb temperatures hitting 33C+ in areas such as the Middle East and South Asia?

Seek shelter during those hours, such as underground.

> How do you simply adapt to temperatures which are literally unlivable such as wet bulb temperatures hitting 33C+ in areas such as the Middle East and South Asia?

You move.

Climate change of the magnitude you are talking about does not happen overnight. That change happens over a few hundred years, not over a weekend.

At the (usual) risk of being down voted to oblivion. There is plenty of space in more northern areas. Most European countries are approaching negative population growth. Huge swaths of Siberia and Canada are underpopulated. Still there are people that choose to live in places where one can barely survive with no AC (Dubai in summer, certain hot parts of the US, and many others). How are people "simply adapting" to these temperatures now?

That's the "mass migration" OP mentioned, eh?

Do you imagine a billion people moving from India to Siberia?

(Edit to add: that would be so epic that the entire Mahābhārata could be seen as it's prelude.)

being a refugee is an adaptation to climate change, you and the OP are not in disagreement.

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