Lately I've been thinking about heat. Particularly heat waves, because I think we're going to be seeing lots more of them - and much hotter ones - in the years to come. At the same time it's widely predicted that the power grid will be failing far more frequently, so air conditioning will not be an option for those who aren't rich enough to own and fuel their own generators. That will be the vast majority of the human race.
In the short term, I personally have water stored in the basement. We can spray ourselves with water and lie on the concrete. That should be enough to get us through a few days of intolerable heat, I hope. But longer term, I believe that our species is going to have to become at least partially subterranean. Just as in the Midwest every home has a tornado cellar, every home in the future will need a heat cellar. The rich will probably have their whole homes underground, or duplicated both above and below ground.
The one concern is food production. I'm really not sure what could be done about that. Maybe large-scale subterranean farming of edible mushrooms and fungi? I don't know enough about underground animals to know what species might be adopted into successful sources of protein.
In any case, I expect to see tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of deaths from extreme heat within the next ten to fifteen years. And I should note for the record that predictions such as those almost always turn out to be extreme underestimates.
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