As climate change continues to worsen, experts agree that heat waves and wildfires will become much more common. Eventually vast regions of the planet will become uninhabitable, at least during heat waves, because the wet bulb temperature (a measurement of when the weather becomes deadly) will reach 95 °F (35 °C), which kills healthy humans within a few hours. Even recently Europeans have been fighting historic wildfires while Americans grapple with a massive heat wave, including unprecedented temperatures in the Northwest.
This raises an obvious question: What kind of future lies in store for ordinary people as the heat waves get worse and worse? For an answer, it is instructive to look to one of the worst heat waves in modern history: the North American heat wave of 1936.
