[wongarsu]

Heating is much easier, but in the right conditions you can still do a lot without power.

- The simplest is just having thermal mass to average day and night temperature. As long as the night is cold enough you can just stay in a brick or clay building with thick walls, preferably painted white.

- If you want to get a bit more advanced, you can use evaporative cooling, like Persian Yakhchāls [1].

- If you go high-tech, certain paints can cool surfaces down by a couple degrees (by radiating heat at frequencies that don't get absorbed by the atmosphere, thus breaking the equilibrium between heat absorption and heat emission).

Of course there is a point where those fail. Evaporative cooling is dependent on a low wet-bulb temperature and fails quickly in humid climate. Thermal mass needs temperature differences. Paints only buy you a couple degrees. In contrast an AC can be scaled to much higher temperatures.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakhch%C4%81l

[goerz]

Right, but we're talking about being extremely close to the point where these will fail due to unsurvivable wet bulb temperatures

[frumper]

Your comment is 5 parents deep and not one mentions wet bulb until you just now. The wet bulb temp of Death Valley is in the 70s or 80s. Hardly unsurvivable wet bulb temperatures.

[falcolas]

Death Valley is also a bit of an outlier in it's dryness. Of course, that's what also makes it a desert.

It wouldn't take much humidity to turn those temperatures into wet-bulb of 100+ - fatal to humans. Expanding the area of this level of heat a couple of hundred miles in any direction would probably be enough.

[ttfkam]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/...

[frumper]

> Right, but we're talking about being extremely close to the point where these will fail due to unsurvivable wet bulb temperatures

I'm not sure who we is, and it wasn't clear anyone was talking about wet bulb temperatures. It's a comment on an article about Death Valley. At this point, you're just responding with things completely unrelated(behind paywalls).

[ttfkam]

Because Death Valley is our local bellwether for where heat extremes are headed. The issues of soaring temperatures will affect far more than Death Valley, especially where the humidity is much higher.

[frumper]

You're using the word soaring with Death Valley that has a long history of 50C+ temperatures. It may be more frequent, but hardly soaring. I'm not sure what local is in this context either, but Death Valley has a particular geography that helps it reach such high temperatures that aren't present in the surrounding areas. If you're worried about people living in this region, then looking at Death Valley isn't a good indicator. There is a long history of farming less than 100 miles away and that really isn't threatened.