[deceptionatd]

The novel "Ministry For The Future" by Kim Stanley Robinson starts out in a similar fashion, with 12 million people dying in a heat wave. It's a great read, albeit disturbingly plausible at times.

I suspect most of the worst climate impacts in the coming years will be from issues much like this, with an interplay of factors. We've built a society with many complex systems, and the assumptions those systems were built on (e.g intensity and duration of heat waves) will no longer be valid. I'm skeptical we'll be able to adapt such large-scale systems to the increasingly rapid changes induced by climate change.

P.S: At 100% humidity in shade with unlimited drinking water, a human will die in about 2 hours at 35°C (95°F). The combination of heat and humidity is called the heat index, and those temperatures had already been seen in Iran 3 years ago, when this paper was written: https://phys.org/news/2020-05-potentially-fatal-combinations...

[flangola7]

How does air remain humid at the temperature? I've seen over 100° where I live but that pushes humidity to <15% levels.

[deceptionatd]

You're right, a temperature rise without a corresponding increase in water vapor content does reduce RH (relative humidity). It does not, however, remove any water from the air in terms of mass (absolute humidity). So if water vapor going into the system increases RH faster than temperature rises can decrease it, RH will continue to increase. In your case, water isn't being added to the system fast enough to outpace the changes from temperature.

According to the article I linked:

> Not surprisingly, incidents tended to cluster on coastlines along confined seas, gulfs and straits, where evaporating seawater provides abundant moisture to be sucked up by hot air. In some areas further inland, moisture-laden monsoon winds or wide areas of crop irrigation appear to play the same role.

In other words, this problem is worst where a lot of water vapor is being added to the system.

[candiodari]

This is not the result of Climate change. Yes, it's definitely not helping. This is the result of communities growing in places where it is just not realistic for them to do so. It's not like there's any shortage of places where these people could live without the situation getting this precarious ... just not right there.

But if global warming hadn't happened at all, there would only be a very small change in the conclusion of this study.

It seems to be extremely unpalatable for people to consider that there are some limits to scale, imposed by our environment.