With that sort of thinking, much of the planet should be uninhabited.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, just pointing out that since the first human put an animal skin over their shoulders we've been developing technology to live in places that we'd otherwise not be able to exist in.
I think there is a big difference between the passive warming / cooling of clothing vs the huge energy requirement, spent resources and emissions required to basically run your entire home / office / factory / hotel as a giant fridge.
It’s easier and more efficient to wrap yourself up with blankets and covers and use minimal heating (with decent home insulation) to warm yourself up than it is to cool down when you are too hot.
Edit: Many older houses don’t have AC in Vegas. They use evaporative cooling mostly.
So they waste more water but less energy.
Colder climates have their challenges, but tend to have more energy-efficient solutions than hot ones. Then there ae the wonderful places with brutally cold winters and boiling summers, so you get the worst of both worlds.
I grew up in Vegas. I'd hang out outside with friends all night in the summer. The nights used to be a break from the heat, now it's just always hot. Plus the removal of almost all grass contributes to the heat island effect. The grass needed to go, but it wasn't without consequences.
Yeah it's crazy. It's almost like plopping down a big ass city in the middle of the fucking desert was a terrible idea. And then continuing to run it even while the climate dials up that latitude from char to incinerate.
It was a necessity. Example: All the towns across the plains were spaced apart almost equidistant 5-7 miles as that was far each train could go before the locomotive needed water refills. Can't imagine how annoying it would be to ride those early trains.
It also begs the question, are all those towns, as they ghost away, necessary? They served a purpose once in the 1800s. People bemoan the loss of small town America, but a lot of it was literally to fuel the primitive railroads. Maybe some of them no longer have a purpose.
Beside the point, but this data visualization is misleadingly bad.
Eyes first draw to the heading, which primes us to think temperature. Then we see the graph, where the unlabeled Y axis is assumed to be average night temperature. Finally, we read the subheading and it says that the Y axis is not temperature, but counts of days over a certain temperature.
I think that this metric is more useful than “avg. overnight temp.”, but please label axes.
Also, it would help to rephrase the subheading to use “80” since that’s obviously the cutoff. I spent a moment wondering what was special about 79F.
And now I see that this was made by the NYT. I guess they’re pumping out charts (maybe automatically) and thinking more about making them pretty than legible.
Are you looking at the same article as me? On both the NYT app and the website using this link, I see a heading that exactly matches the data displayed. It's a dynamic page that adjusts the figure as you scroll and the heading clearly matches the data. It says "abnormally hot nights" in every bar chart, and temperature for all of the line graphs. NYT has some really nice visualizations, with the notable exception of the potato graphic the other week with your states electric production sources - that was hot dog shit. There's a different baseline temp for the hot night graphs depending on the city - this clearly responds to a low level baseline pre-warming.
I showed this to my partner who isn't an engineer and she thought it made perfect sense too. Not that my anecdotes are special, but I truly don't understand the confusion.