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Comment by sandspar | Hacker News Reader

Austin is just a bit too hot for the average person. Their summers are fine if you grew up in the desert. But people who move from WhereEversville America to Austin - they're gonna have a rough time in Austin in August. If you've been to Las Vegas in the summer then imagine that temperature.

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Austin has a high amount of humidity and is nowhere near being a nice arid desert like say El Paso. I lived in Austin during the summer of 2001, and my dashboard melted. I didn’t know you needed those sun thingies to block the sun. I got one quick after that. Not sure how bad it is now.

Tucson is also hot, but I love dry heat. Wear a hat and hydrate, you’ll be fine. Austin had some really cool swimming holes though, it wasn’t a bad place nature wise.

> summers are fine if you grew up in the desert

Deserts are low precipitation, not necessarily hot. Austin is not arid. It's not West Texas.

> If you've been to Las Vegas in the summer then imagine that temperature

In the midwest we say "it's not the heat; it's the humidity." Vegas is hotter and dryer than Austin. They might "feel" similar, but how people stay hydrated and how they stay cool will be noticeably different.

There are very few deserts that are arid without being hot because the primary factor limiting temperature in most habitable parts of the globe is the heat capacity of water in the area vs solar energy. That's why most of the counterexamples are polar deserts.

People will point to a lot of things about Austin to explain this but this is the biggest one in my opinion. I have lived here for 12 years, and the summers are still fucking brutal. I was born and grew up in Ohio, and I just can't get used to it. I like a lot of other things about Texas and the Austin area but the summer heat is not one of them.

Only going to get worse as CO2 levels rise.

Can we be reasonably certain about this? I was aware climate models were showing overall global averages being higher (say 2C) but do we know with any clarity where a specific place, like Austin TX, will fall on that increase? 0C? 1C? 2C? 3C?

Houston, you are a problem (existing at 36ft, being next to the gulf, building in your flood plains. Where are the Houstonians moving to?

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