Reminds me of the opening to "Ministry for the Future" by Kim Stanley Robinson.

In that book, a wet bulb event (high humidity and high temp) in India pushes infrastructure past the breaking point, the grid goes down, AC systems still running on generators are overloaded and overcrowded and fail, the water temp goes over body temp, and millions die.

The positive cultural/societal reaction to the disaster strained my suspension of disbelief pretty hard, as is typical of KSR novels in my experience, but the idea of a heat wave causing a massive catastrophe (and the poignant description of attempting to live through it) stuck with me.

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ant6n 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I was also going to mention wet bulb temperatures as well. As horrible as the conditions described in the article is, it describes a very dry heat. Which means sweating and water can still help.

The really scary thing will be when the wet bulb temperature goes above 35 degrees, and humans can only survive with AC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature

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Bender 2 hours ago | parent [-]

For what it's worth they can live under ground [1][2], even build cities but they would have had to start that project some time ago. Before someone says it, yeah not everywhere and its not for everyone but in enough places and for enough people that we can adapt to heat and at least survive as a civilization.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coober_Pedy

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsYmw6FtSIA Wyoming Trona mines

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Avicebron an hour ago | parent [-]

Someone wrote a book about this, they called the people who went underground the Morlocks. It was a cautionary tale...

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Bender an hour ago | parent [-]

There are cautionary tails about everything humans do. Good leadership and the desire to survive can keep some of us around. If we have to stay down there for thousands of generations, well, it won't affect me or anyone I know. We can jump off the evolutionary bridge when we get to it. Ideally our automatons would be geoengineering the planet to make the surface hospitable once again prior to our becoming Trogs.

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Avicebron an hour ago | parent [-]

> Good leadership and the desire to survive can keep some of us around.

I would posit that good leadership and desire to survive could prevent humanity from retreating to the earth like naked mole rats.

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Bender an hour ago | parent [-]

I would posit that good leadership and desire to survive could prevent humanity from retreating to the earth like naked mole rats.

It very well could. I like having contingency plans and not letting my survival and the survival of our civilization solely depend on the promises of congress critters. I also want to learn earth bending from the giant badgermoles so I am biased.

	▲	Avicebron an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I hadn't considered the badgermole angle..fair enough. Have this webcomic that I spent more trying to find than I should because I get flashbacks whenever I hear people throw out the "we'll live underground" angle https://badspacecomics.com/rivers-end-copy