As a former Texan currently living in Chicago, I assure you that summers in Houston are far, FAR worse than anything Chicago can dish out. Highs in the 100's are comparatively rare in Chicago, but are a daily fact of life in Houston from June well into September.
You are right about winter though.

There's a reason why we have door-to-door (house, car, office) air conditioning in Houston. The hard part about dressing for summer here isn't dressing for the 100-degree temperature outside; it's dressing for that and for the fact that interior rooms in large buildings may be absolutely frigid from excessive cooling.

It's worth noting that these extremes of temperature, separation, and drought REQUIRE inhabitants of the region to employ vast amounts of energy for HVAC, transportation, and pumping
water.

The fact that "The U.S. has 6% of the world's
population but consumes 30% of the world energy" -- or whatever the current statistic is -- is often quoted with the implication that the U.S. is profligate, wasteful, and careless of that consumption. There is very little consideration of the costs of "terraforming" a hostile continent. I suspect that may arise from the fact that many of the media-maven statistic-quoters live in the ideal climate of California
(and vacation in Las Vegas, where terraforming costs are extreme AND gratuitous/profligate energy waste is hard to ignore...)

To consider the expense of making Minnesota of Kansas or Utah habitable as a "waste" is a luxurious value judgement mostly reserved to those in softer gentler places and climes like, (let's not pick on California again, maybe) France.

A smarter person, with more time on his hands, than me might be able to estimate the energy consumption cost to electrify, hydrate, populate and make productive the interior of Australia, or the northern regions of Africa. Then, (in context of earlier discussions here) translate that into the number of small diesel engine/generators to be installed in a like number of villages... I expect that would be a finite and producable number.

Just a quibble, but the combination of 97F temperatures and 95% relative humidity doesn't actually happen anywhere on the earth's surface, though there are places on the shores of the Persian Gulf which come reasonably close.

Sure, terraforming costs a lot. I concede sometimes it's worth it; my hometown in Indiana on the Ohio featured summers of 90+ degrees and 90%+ humidity.

But when we move from "climate-forming" (ie, air conditioning) to real terra-forming (ie, Phoenix) I think the costs exceed the benefits.

"Just a quibble, but the combination of 97F temperatures and 95% relative humidity doesn't actually happen anywhere on the earth's surface, though there are places on the shores of the Persian Gulf which come reasonably close."
- Paul Zrimsek

Are you sure? Isn't that quite achievable in the American southeast?

97 degrees and 95% works out to a dewpoint of 95. The world record is 93 (at Dubai, UAE). I couldn't find the US record but I believe it's in the mid-80s. Current dewpoints across the country are plotted here.

Thanks.

>>To consider the expense of making Minnesota of Kansas or Utah habitable as a "waste" is a luxurious value judgement mostly reserved to those in softer gentler places and climes like, (let's not pick on California again, maybe) France. <<

But to ignore the fact that allowing Americans to live with much lower population density than other First World countries has a cost in terms of resource use is surely an error.