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Access to AC is also not guaranteed, Horton notes. Migrant and farm laborers and those living in energy poverty will have a harder time withstanding these conditions by cooling off indoors, he says.
Matthew Lewis, director of communications at housing advocacy group California YIMBY, noted in a recent Twitter thread that wet bulb temperatures could soon be a factor at the helm of climate migration.
“Many of the places humans currently live on the planet are on their way to being functionally uninhabitable by humans,” he said. “They will have to move.”
Lewis urges states and municipalities to prepare for this eventuality: “Depose the NIMBYs in your city government. Defeat the car-stans who deny that all of this is happening,” Lewis wrote.
He also urges weather broadcasts to include wet bulb indices in temperature announcements “as a matter of public service,” the way some do air quality and humidity metrics. Horton says “feels like” measurements are the closest many forecasts come to this—but units aren’t standardized across weather stations, and this can create confusion.
“The very fact that there isn't one standard that everyone uses, and that most people couldn't explain exactly what these mean suggests that we could do more,” he said.
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