[Image: From FBI surveillance video in Baltimore].
One interesting side-effect of ever-intensifying heatwaves in an era of global climate change might be that infrared imaging technology used by the police is no longer quite as effective. Human bodies will be cooler than the surrounding landscape, meaning that they could simply disappear from view.
It’s like that scene in The Thomas Crown Affair where a portable heater, hidden inside a briefcase, incapacitates an infrared surveillance camera at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—only, here, it’s been scaled up to an entire metropolis. Heat the city; disappear.
This is, of course, a solved problem—forward-looking infrared (FLIR) cameras can be adjusted to accommodate different temperature ranges. Nonetheless, it’s intriguing to imagine a fictional future crime wave timed specifically and deliberately for a night of excruciatingly hot temperatures in a city somewhere, the bodies of criminals mischievously blending in with the buildings around them as they only rob buildings close to their own thermal range. Criminals armed with precision thermometers, casing the city.
That, or they can simply wear graphene.
(Thanks to @raihan_ for the heads up; also, I wrote fairly extensively about police FLIR use in A Burglar’s Guide to the City.)
I wonder if overheated reptiles would then be visible instead. Hordes of geckos mistaken for burglars.
In an extension of the Nakatomi Space/Nablus Paradigm https://bldgblog.com/2010/01/nakatomi-space/, instead of walking through walls, police would then develop tiny sticky swarms of SWAT drones crawling on walls and ceilings, to try and chase the intruders away.