I’ve been barricated in my room with the Air Conditioning for as long as it is possible over the last few days.
And while it brings me some relief, it also burdens my conscience to know this relief is also contributing to the problem that makes seeking this relief necessary.
Just shoot me already.
Tips from the US southwest for anyone not used to the heat, if you’d like them:
- Drink a stupid amount of water and eat salty stuff, as long as you don’t have a kidney condition
- If it’s a dry heat (<50% humidity) you can rapidly cool yourself with a wet washcloth or spray bottle and a fan. You’ll have to keep wetting it as it evaporates, but it works
- If it’s not a dry heat or you’re too hot for the washcloth thing, squeeze a cold pack under your arms or between your legs, the blood flow there will help you drop heat faster
- If you’re so hot that’s not helping, take a cool shower
- At night when it cools down, turn your AC as low as it will go/as low as finances allow. Every object in your house can ‘hold on’ to the cold and help cool your house during the day, the same way a full fridge maintains temperature better than an empty one
- Go to public places with AC if there are any near you (libraries and malls usually have AC here)
- Being unable to cool down no matter what you do is a MEDICAL EMERGENCY and you should treat it that way! Heat exhaustion and heat stroke are serious and have lifelong consequences
If you already know all this and are still suffering, I feel you. Our turn is coming 😩
Thank you for being so considerate.
I live in the south of Portugal. In the Algarve to be more precise (lots of Americans started moving here since covid by the way). It’s hot and humid because of the proximity with the ocean. Nights don’t cool off when it’s this bad and that is the shitty part.
I can’t say that I’m not used to it. It happens every year. But I can’t say that I’ve ever gotten used to it either.
It has gotten worse over the years, though. I’m entering my middle age now and when I was a kid the temperatures here would go up to maximum of 33 °C (91,4 °F), and now we get 40 °C (104 °F) and people think “it’s just another one of those days”. My girlfriend caught 43°C (109.4 °F) in the thermometer in her car this weekend.
Anyway, I use most of your suggestions every year, and they’re all helpful to anyone who’s not used to this kind of heat.
I would say my most unusual ones is to remain covered when I go outside, not only a hat, but long sleave overshirts and pants, both so that the sun doesn’t directly hit my skin, which both dehidrates us faster and raises our core temperature as well. Then when I get to the shade or indoors, I remove the shirt and the hat and let the cooling begin. It’s essentially the same idea that people did and still do traversing deserts. They’re all wrapped up to preserve humidity and keep their bodies from heating in shade. This works much better in dry climate than humid, but still does work. It’s not the most pleasant feeling though that’s for sure. The other one that everybody thinks I’m nuts is to never shock my temperature with too much cooling. That means no cold beverages or ice-creams. Or cold showers. Why? While they provide relief, I find that my body then doesn’t stop the craving effect, and it gets harder to sustain the periods in-between those “shock reliefs” as I call them.
But yeah, salty snacks and drinking water continuously rather than too much at once would be my top suggestions.
And keeping an eye on the elderly of our family and community too.
And run around the house with gap filler, plugging small holes in walls, skirting, ceilings, etc that are letting air enter and exit
Definitely. Good isolation is paramount for both harsh winters or summers.
as some one who lived and worked outdoors in tropical north Austalia for 45 years, before moving much closer to the south pole, i left when i needed AC as it was getting too hot and humad.
I used to visit social centres like the library and use their AC and WiFi or just read a book on the real killer, hot days. or go swimming :)
Good home insulation makes a difference but can only hold the worst of it off.
As to making it worse, the same thing with cars, plane flights etc and not voting Greens to eneact policy change. Just have to look around to see most people are making it worse with enthusiasm every day, they just feel no guilt :)
The 2003 European heatwave has been estimated to have killed more than 70,000 people.
A lot of heat deaths are not obvious, people might die days later because of circulatory problems or many other symptoms (I remember that heat can cause kidney failure, for example).
These deaths can only later be identified as excess deaths from mortality statistics. Germany had a “small” heat wave in summer 2020, and it killed more people than Corona in this summer (not to be confounded with the following years).
The heat stress also makes CVD worse, for similar reasons.
We’ll probably learn about it from the Excess Death stats, but that also needs to be disentangled from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
A physiological approach for assessing human survivability and liveability to heat in a changing climate https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-43121-5
BTW it is a question of time not if, but when the electric grid in an Eastern European or Mediterranean country fails and this can cause far more deaths - I speak of hundreds of thousands - if it hits people depending on air conditioning. A big power failure in Italy or Greece and people would be fried alive.
This is also why we need solar power, it is far better matched to that peak demand. (Plus it kills fossil electricity by undercutting it in cost, which is a nice-to-have since we are at war with fossil power now - either we kill it, or it will kill us).
The UK estimate alone was that 600 people would likely die[0], so 8 is probably a very big underestimation.
It’s like with earthquakes. At first, when nobody knows jack s**t, they tell you 10 people died.
When the statistics come home, often enough, an initial 10 turns into 10 000.
With a heat wave spanning half a continent and breaking records, the typical mortality to expect (basing on experience) is at least 1000 people (some of them old and about to go anyway, but pushed over the edge by heat).
Yea but what about the profits of the various European automotive industries and the various European oil and gas companies?
my mother’s house is a natural wind tunnel sitting at the bottom of the road facing north.
The winters suck, but goddamn do we win in summer. It gets hot, but nothing a smooth window draught cannot fix
