Humans can't endure temperatures and humidities as high as previously thought
psu.edu
psu.edu
Meanwhile, life at cold temperatures goes on. A lot of animals can adapt to a temperate 0C-20C conditions, and colder. Humans adapted and thrived, like many/most megafauna to pretty cold conditions. The far north has been inhabited by people for half a million years. You can get a lot further from comfort and still make it in the cold.
Heat is deadly.
That's a fundamental asymmetry.
Maybe it's also the reason why body core temperature is close to environment maximum temperature - since you can't really decrease your temperature you might as well learn to live at the upper extreme.
I wonder how much of the species' worldwide dominance can be attributed to the evolutionary diceroll that placed our ancestors in subsaharan Africa? Could we have survived in Egypt, Mesopotamia, or India without sweat?
Sweating works well in dry climates, not as well in humid ones. In high enough humidity, the sweat doesn't evaporate, doesn't cool you, and the whole system becomes a moist, messy loop.
In dry, hot climates sweating works well, but increases our water consumption... these are the habitats where water is often scarce.
Tradeoffs.
I know sweating isn't perfect, for the reasons you mentioned, but do we see nature evolving any better solutions at a mammalian level?
My armchair understanding is sweating is a natural marvel with nothing else like it seen in creatures as large as us. That it truly is a differentiator between humans and other animals (or mammals at least). Sweating is the foundation of humans ability to engage in long-distance endurance running which is one of our unique features, also called persistence hunting[0]. You can easily draw a line between this sweating and our ability to travel large distances and hunt the way we did, which in turn can be connected to humanity's success as a species on earth.
African wild dogs, dingos and other canines can persistent hunt in similar hot conditions. They're much faster than us, so it's not as extreme a strategy as human "track and spook" methods... but arguably better.
Elephants manage to carry those huge, heat retaining bodies. Our Savannah nurseries are full of megafauna like us that live in these conditions effectively.
Some argue sweating, others that we outsourced digestion (fire cooked food), others that we are bipedal, ... not to mention later stuff like language/intelligence.
Also, cats and dogs do sweat a little, mostly through their paws.
I don't know about the other part (temperature/pressure).
There is a MinuteEarth video about this YouTube if I remember correctly and the reason is well.. more reasonable. Our body works better at higher temperature, but of course if it gets too high everything breaks down. So the optimum temp is somewhere closer to the upper limit.
You can adjust the gradient so as to change the rate of heat loss, you can grow fur, shunt blood flow away from outer surfaces - or the reverse. Humans have clothes and even buildings to do this even more. Say you're losing 10K per hour and producing 5K per hour, if you cut the gradient to 50% you break even and your temperature remains viable indefinitely.
But that only works when you're losing heat. If you can't lose heat, this doesn't help. You will die.
Heat naturally flows from hot to cold at a rate proportional to the difference in temperature. If we're fully passively cooled at an environmental temperature 25°C at a rate of 2°C/day, then at 1°C, we'd be passively cooled at 6°C/day. However, we can also modulate heat flow by introducing some thermally nonconductive layers--or, in layman's terms, put on a sweater. When it's cold, all you have to do is slow down the rate of heat flow.
But hotter temps are more difficult. We can't take off thermal insulators or modulate the main thermal barrier between core body temperature and the outside world (i.e., skin). At 31°C, passive cooling is down to 1°C/day, and we need to turn to active cooling. Sweating is the main mechanism for humans: it takes heat for liquid water to become water vapor, and this heat is drawn from your skin surface, cooling it (this kind of allows heat to move from a colder to a hotter environment, unlike passive cooling). At 37°C, there's no longer any passive cooling, and active cooling needs to handle 2°C/day.
But hotter than that, and things get worse: the environment is now passively warming you up. By 43°C, that's now 3°C/day of heat that needs to shed, and 49°C ups it to 4°C/day. At some point, you're going to overwhelm the ability of active cooling to cool you down, and the passive heating is still going to warm you up even if you shut down metabolism. Even worse is if sweating isn't effective at cooling down--at high humidities, the sweat won't evaporate and the cooling effect won't happen. (This also illustrates why heat-and-humidity can be deadly even at below-body-temperature environments.)
This analysis was purely done for humans, but it's pretty similar for most organisms, just with different set points for core body temperature and active cooling mechanisms. Fundamentally, extreme cold is "easy" to handle--just slow down heat loss; extreme heat requires developing ways of pumping heat from a hot reservoir to a cold reservoir, which thermodynamics does not look kindly on.
But you can't take off your skin to sleep on a very hot night.
All in all I would say the temperature tolerance is the same in both directions.
https://www.ancientpages.com/2016/09/19/mystery-yaghan-peopl...
It might also be necessary for many people to migrate to cooler areas than where they currently live.
There will be a lot of climatic migrants, I guess many more than the ones caused by the Syrian civil war or the invasion of Ukraine. Just imagine people fleeing the heat.
I live in the south of france, and I already want to move out to a colder place. Summers are too long.
Maybe there is a taboo about heat, because heatwaves are just not bearable, at least for me.
Increasing frequency and severity of heat waves are definitely a noticeable thing. My parents actually lived in the South of France for a few years after their retirement. They were there in the last few weeks for a brief vacation and temperatures went well over 40 degrees in June. That used to be unusual even in the hottest month (July) and is now a yearly recurring thing. Luckily, humidity tends to be quite low in that particular area. But still, 40-45 degrees is a lot to deal with for people.
I think migration will be more an indirect consequence of local economies collapsing when e.g. agriculture becomes hard/impossible due to rising temperatures. People tend to move for economic reasons. Any mass casualties in a wet bulb heat event might of course cause people to panic. But richer countries would be able to compensate with technology by e.g. desalinating water and having buildings with AC. It's poor countries that lack the means for this that are going to suffer most.
Neal Stephenson has some nice perspective on this in his latest novel Termination Shock where people in e.g. Texas are dealing with temperatures that are basically not survivable without a so-called earth suit, which is a battery powered cooling solution people wear to be able to be outside in 50 degree+ Celsius heat. Those might become an actual thing people would need to own pretty soon in some places.
Where I live, in the southern US, it'll be a while before wet bulb temperatures top 35C in the hottest weeks of the summer. But they already hit those lower temperatures in the article (31C) quite often (e.g., 35C with 70% humidity), and last week a couple days were over 38C (wet bulb temperature of 33C assuming 70% humidity, though luckily so far it's usually less humid when it's that hot - around 55%).
Wet bulb calculator: https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/wet-bulb
Whenever I'll buy, I have to consider that in 30 years it's going to be hotter and I'll be 65 years old.
I used to live in Italy, it's going to be up to 39C in Rome the next two weeks.
I'll miss the sea and the food by staying north, though we'll be planting cantaloupes and prickly pears here in England in 3 decades.
A lot people like it but I would miss actual summer.
Ironically, you may want to move to a hotter place where AC is pervasive. I was suffering from the hot French summer too, but doing fine in NYC or Singapore.
French summer is too short so people haven't been using AC traditionally. Conversely, some warmer countries like Greece or Taiwan don't always have heaters and live in coldish houses in winter.
I can imagine it has big impact on productivity of anybody not under 24h AC, but there is still construction, roadwork, maintenance etc. work done. I guess a mix of adaptation from birth plus suffering through work thats just harder than elsewhere, but still possible.
As things get hotter places like Iran and Pakistan can adapt with more AC. The problems will be worse for places without electricity grids and a population that is too poor for alternative means like running AC from solar.
The entire point is that it will be.
I believe it's been demonstrated and accepted by the science community that there is "concrete evidence of temperatures" (short of waiting for it to happen) that this level of change can happen and is now likely unavoidable.
This world is full of hyperbole but this looming change is not an obvious exaggeration. We've seen it in action already and we know where its going.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/jul/17/bread-f...
Edit: possibly a better source describing some of the correlations between extreme climate events and recent global food shortages, and its adverse impact on Middle East and Northern Africa.
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-arab-spring-and...
It's a major dispute. Turkey basically took advantage of the wars to reneg on previous agreements to allow water flow.
Don’t take for granted the status quo. It’s already yesterday, and the systems we’ve been depending on to tolerate and supply us with viral services haven’t been respected. What happens when the next famine hits India? What happens when South Africa has no water left? It might not be the spark on another regional conflict, but it certainly adds lots of potential for another conflict.
With climate change the risk is that we will increasingly experience such temperatures.
"Extreme temperatures in major Latin American cities could be linked to nearly 1 million deaths / An increase of 1°C could mean thousands of additional deaths on very hot days, according to a new study" - https://www.science.org/content/article/extreme-temperatures...
"The emergence of heat and humidity too severe for human tolerance" - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aaw1838 : "The southern Persian Gulf shoreline and northern South Asia are home to millions of people, situating them on the front lines of exposure to TW extremes at the edge of and outside the range of natural variability in which our physiology evolved (36)."
"Increases of extreme heat-humidity days endanger future populations living in China" - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac69fc/... : "Many urban population centers in eastern China are expected to frequently experience the extreme heat-humidity events featured by the TWmax well beyond the survivability threshold of 35 °C by the end of this century under SSP5-8.5 scenario"
That will almost always be long the weather in that specific area really shocks everyone, because the food and energy come from a different place where there was a weather shock.
That's at least part of why professional basketball is so black--there is a tiny difference in average height between white and black, small enough that on average you won't notice it at all. At the very end of the tail, though, it has a big effect.
Are you saying we should literally wait for billions of people to die?
Are you a flat earther too? Might as well be if you're trying to maximize the volume of evidence you're ignoring
It seems to me that you don't take these variables into consideration and just assume they would remain constant or follow their historical trend into the future which needless to say is shortsighted to say the least.
Like what does population growth have to do with people dying from heat? Okay so the population is growing, that didn't stop the extra deaths from happening.
Why does life expectancy matter? Obviously that's going to change rapidly in these circumstances, but again, still not changing the number of deaths
I know it's trite but, don't look up
We literally try to build models to make predictions, that claim is nonsense
Of course, the whole point of science is to make predictions. Kind of like “global warming will increase the probability of heat waves significantly in the near future” they were saying 10 years ago.
That's 80 million people. That's more than 10 times the number of Syrian refugees.
So... north of almost the entire continental United States?
I mean obviously you cannot seriously doubt this right??
EDIT: I should clarify, climate change definitely is real, it has huge scientific consensus, and not believing in it is pure conspiracy
Am I wrong in believing that people can find some low tech inexpensive solutions to the problem of overheating?
That’s a very mild summer, I’m located in Southern California where my nights are warmer than your peak day temperatures. During daytime it can be over 45 degrees Celsius. But ACs are everywhere so it makes it livable. I’m guessing most homes in Europe don’t have that.
Except for outside. Also what do you hope to achieve with playing misery poker over this.
Edit: Never mind, seems to be very humid North, and fairly average South.
Also because the water off the coast is cold, it never gets very hot and humid at the same time anywhere in the western US. For that you need to be near a large body of very warm water.
Specifically, in all of the west coast of the US except the bottom quarter of CA (where the ocean is a little warmer) the weather is cool and humid when the wind is blowing from the west (which it is most of the time) and dry and potentially very hot when it is blowing from the east.
Well, it is a little more complicated than that because every morning the sun heats the land, but not the ocean, which causes wind to flow from ocean to land, then every evening that flow is reversed, so my previous statement refers to the general flow of air masses in the absence of this diurnal coastal wind.
It is not a competition, you know? There’s nothing to win if you have the worst climate.
> I’m guessing most homes in Europe don’t have that
No, and that is a good thing because AC for whole cities in arid regions is a big part of why we are in this situation in the first place. California is pretty much the illustration of how not to build a country.
To exemplify the range:
[...] Meteorologists measure the heat/humidity effect on the so-called "wet bulb" Centigrade scale; in the United States, these readings are often translated into "heat index" or "real-feel" Fahrenheit readings. Prior studies suggest that even the strongest, best-adapted people cannot carry out normal outdoor activities when the wet bulb hits 32 C, equivalent to a heat index of 132 F [~56 C]. Most others would crumble well before that. A reading of 35—the peak briefly reached in the Persian Gulf cities—is considered the theoretical survivability limit. That translates roughly to a heat index of 160 F [~71C]. (The heat index actually ends at 127 F, so these readings are literally off the charts.)[...] [0]
A 3 centigrade difference at the end of the wet bulb spectrum (from 32 to 35) could be translated roughly to an estimated 15 centigrade difference from 56C to 71C (or a delta of 28F from 132F to 160F, respectively) in the heat index where it not to end at 127F. That's quite a divergence resulting from the differernt formulas (from the quick look on it: polynomial vs exponential function). At even 95% humidity one fares far better than at 100% (literally no thermodynamical possibility to "sweat", that's why the theoretical limit is probably at 35, 2 centigrade away from the core body temperature of 37).
Here an easy to grasp article [1] describing the much commonly used WBGT ("Wet Bulb Globe Temperature") in professional settings (marathons, army ...).
[0]https://phys.org/news/2020-05-potentially-fatal-combinations...
[1]https://www.dtn.com/forget-heat-index-wet-bulb-globe-tempera...
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31894308
If only you can knock some sense into this guy.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/World_fo...
They'll be ok because they're sitting in air conditioned offices telling the peasants to turn off their lights and air conditioners. If people don't comply they can send out the law enforcement, maybe one day will be robots. Already started happening [1]
[1] https://japantoday.com/category/national/japan's-june-heatwa...
This article should be more to your liking.
I can't track it down in English but there are guidelines people need to follow, turning lights off during certain times and having air conditioners set to > 28c and not at unless required.
Japanese follow rules unlike many other cultures, they won't take these requests lightly and will be pretty uncomfortable doing what they're told.
You only need to propagandize about 40% of the electorate to completely sink the chances of making real political action on an issue.
Add to that the fact that elected leaders don’t really represent the majority of their “constituents,” they represent the interests of whichever corporations fund them. Democracy has been bought and sold and is controlled by an unaccountable minority, at least in America.
The point is that Western politicians don't care about the climate catastrophe. For a data point, my own government (Germany) magically conjured up a €100bn emergency defense budget for the Russian war in Ukraine in addition to a promise to boost its defense budget to the NATO recommendation of 2% of GDP (over €70bn in 2020[0]). In contrast, total government budget for "ecological protection" in 2019 was €79bn[1], but more than 2/3rds of that is just waste and water management -- less than €2bn ended up in research and development. The federal budget in 2021 only allocated €2.7bn[2] to the "Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection" either. Even the "The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action" only had a budget of €10.4bn (it was called "... and Energy" at the time).
If German politicans took the climate catastrophe as the world-ending threat serious that it is according to researchers, how come they haven't assigned a similar 2% of GDP or a similar "emergency budget" to preventing it? Instead solar subsidies have been cut, subsidies for sustainable private building development have been slashed and a conservative-led (not even the Greens!) coalition decided to shut down nuclear power in favour of coal and (Russian) gas.
There's no will to address the climate catastrophe among Western governments and there never has been. The only climate action you see are concessions to voter demographics that maintain minimal impact to the economy. Your mistake is to believe that the effects you're seeing are the consequence of politicans in power actually cracking down on something.
FWIW the effect of sanctions, since you mention them, are always delayed and always affect the weakest members of society first. We've already seen moderate capital flight in Russia (e.g. foreign companies extracting their local talent or simply shutting down their Russia offices with mass layoffs). The problem is that much like trickle down economics, "trickle up sanctions" have never been shown to work. Individual seizures of oligarch properties have been vastly more effective than blanket bans that mostly hit the middle and lower classes.
Plus, of course, the sanctions are ridiculous when the same countries enacting those sanctions still pay Russia billions of dollars for resources like gas that they depend on and can't just give up. And of course other countries like China take this opportunity to offer loans and cheap buyouts with zero competition.
[0]: https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/gdp
[1]: https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/daten/umwelt-wirtschaft/ausga...
[2]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundeshaushaltsplan_(Deutschla...
30C in dry Arizona will not have the same effects on one’s body that 30C will in a humid Florida.
This is exactly what I had figured from first principles.
Our skin temp is about 86°F (an interesting corrolary to this is that it is the temperature that we set a waterbed thermostat, and +/- tenths of a degree make a huge difference in comfort regardless of blankets).
By sweating we can use evaporation to cool. However, that cooling effect is eliminated in 100% humidity, when evaporation will not happen (or is equaled by condensation).
It just seems obvious that when one cannot cool, and the surrounding temp is higher than the body's external temp, the body will inevitably gain heat. With no relief, there is no other consequence than overheating.
Am I missing something here?
Why are they having people do "light physical activity"? The 35C number they're comparing to is for someone generating as little heat as possible (resting).
Short answer: Next time you get DoorDash or Uber Eats, ask the delivery guy about this.
Sweaty buttcrack almost ended my run with Lyft & Uber prematurely. My passengers were fine with the a/c on max, but I was getting more sun & moving around more. What saved my ass was a fan-infused car seat cushion powered off a standard car outlet. It's most effective once you've already started sweating, but it changed the game for me. I now consider it essential equipment.
That said, most people in the world cannot afford to sit on their couches to wait out the heat. Agricultural workers will start dropping dead once we see 30 WBT on a regular basis. If things get bad enough, we'll see a collapse in food productivity that will utterly destroy the global system, and while the downfall of corporate capitalism is something all people of conscience want, I don't think any of us want it to happen in that precise way, because it'll be replaced by something worse (widespread war and slavery).
https://journals.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1152/japplphysiol...
Perhaps when the study claims that young people can only survive at 87 degrees they are averaging healthy and unhealty/obese people together to get that number? Anyway, they are certainly incorrect as it is just a fact that people work just fine in much higher temperatures than this study says is possible, for long periods and with no negative consequences.
Are you sure about those temperatures/humidities? 100 F with 99 % humidity equates to a wet bulb of 37.75 C [2], well above the commonly accepted theoretically survivable limit of 35 C.
[0] https://www.weatherwx.com/hazardoutlook/sc/fort+jackson.html
[1] https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/wet-bulb?advanced=1&c...
[2] https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/wet-bulb?advanced=1&c...
I think what it means to survive those temperatures may be the issue here, because obviously you don't just drop dead if you are a healthy 18 year old. An obese 65 year old will be long dead in an environment that a healthy 18 year old can run wind sprints in.
> A black flag weather condition is in effect when the temperature reaches 90 degrees or higher, according to the Safety Office's heat stress card. In this category, only 10 minutes out of each hour should be spent engaging in strenuous activities, only 20 minutes should be spent performing moderate work and 50 minutes could be spent doing easy work. Strenuous work includes intense jogging and walking on hard surfaces at 3.5 mph with loads of 40 pounds or more. Moderate work includes performing calisthenics and easy work includes marksmanship training and light walking with no load. Community members should drink one quart of water per hour while performing any type of work while a black flag is raised.
I am in Germany and like every summer I am currently annoyed that ACs are so rare in residential houses here, especially in rental houses which are the majority in Germany. Germans somehow accept and rationalize this while still believing that they live in one of the most advanced and properous nations on earth.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/cities/delhi-news/at-40-c-cap...
Cites 32 °C wet bulb as the peak measured in Delhi so far.
Is there any characterization of genetic adaptions to temperature ? I live in Spain, but I have a pretty bad heat intolerance and an equally good cold tolerance. Same for 2 of the 6 brothers and 1 of my 2 sons.
The coaches were always trying to push us to our literal physical limits (nobody ever got hurt, btw). It's interesting to me that the temp they experimentally arrived at is ~32 C wet bulb.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ministry_for_the_Future ( has plot spoilers)
[0] https://www.reuters.com/markets/funds/australian-billionaire...
Wet bulb is what for those 35C? There appears to be a consensus that it's not the actual temperature that matters most. Even discounting this study on only 24 people.
Only 24 people. Do we also know the geographic breakdown of the participants? I would be interested in seeing how African, Indian, and other groups who live in high heat regions adapt.
From where? How much previous exposure did they have to high-temp high-humidity environments?
I also grew up in a place that routinely saw triple-digit Fahrenheit temps, but the RH was < 20%. RH has a huge impact on the evaporative cooling capacity of the human body.
They are talking about enduring as surviving, not "putting up with". Wow, talk about willful blindness.,..
Obviously, physical work becomes harder and correspondingly less productive during heat. But I also notice a considerable degradation of mental work. Personally, I notice the first symptoms at around 25 degrees. From there on my overall mental performance decreases with every degree.
I have never quantified this. So this is pure anecdotal evidence. But I am pretty sure, that more heat correlates with less overall performance and thus leads to a reduction of the GDP.
Lee Kuan Yew considered air conditioning to be one of the most important inventions in history (and the most important invention for Singapore) for this reason.
Stable temperatures make it much, much easier for people to work consistently. The gains from being able to work from the morning into the mid-late afternoon are under-appreciated and accumulate relatively quickly.
What works for a 5 something million populated island won’t work for 1.4 billion strong India. Cars and air conditioners are luxuries of sparsely populated states and can’t be globally adopted.
We are measuring quality of life with wealth and not living conditions. The tragedy of india is that they are adopting first world criteria as a benchmark. Yet, Singapore’s birth replacement rate is most dire of all the countries in the world.
I feel there is something to unpack here but I am not sure I was able to articulate my point correctly. Did I make any sense or should I try again by rephrasing? Thoughts?
"We provide the first evidence that cumulative heat exposure inhibits cognitive skill development and that school air conditioning can mitigate this effect. Student fixed effects models using 10 million PSAT-takers show that hotter school days in the year prior to the test reduce learning, with extreme heat being particularly damaging and larger effects for low income and minority students. (...) Without air conditioning, each 1°F increase in school year temperature reduces the amount learned that year by one percent. "
[0]: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/joshuagoodman/files/w24639...
That's a suspiciously tidy and headline-friendly ratio.
In many places, due humidity, architectures, trees, dressing culture etc... 27-30 degrees is super comfortable.
Anecdotally, I'm completely unprepared for anything lower than 22 degrees, it makes my life absolutely miserable.
As expected per your hypothesis, my productivity drops like a rock during summer.
well if someone is cutting your leg while you are typing, you are less productive due to being uncomfortable, not due to missing a leg as you dont need a leg to type.
since evntually the heat kills you, it stands to reason that the condition is not only 'dead' and 'alive', but also includes 'barely surviving', and that condition is not productive.
If the heat makes me feel uncomfortable, thus making me less productive, it is still the heat that causes the decline of productivity.
During winter it will heaten the place and during summer I can use the same pipes to pipe cool water around the house. Therefore, I will have a warm place during winter and a fresh place during summer.
Western Europeans at least either have decent tolerance to high temperature, or have low tolerance due to the weather itself being colder
Sauce: spent the first 25 years of my life in a tropical country, then moved to north-ish of England. My tolerance to high temperatures got way, way lower and the only place I've been with AC were a couple of car rides
Air conditioning was far more common back home
You're aware that barely anyone in Europe even own AC-units?
It's a studied thing, and people write papers anticipating how far it can go before it shuts down any daytime activiy.
eg: About the weather in the Kimberley (readable overview) https://kimberley-australia.com/about-the-kimberley/weather-...
Heat, health, and humidity in Australia's monsoon tropics: a critical review of the problematization of ‘heat’ in a changing climate https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wcc.4...
Assuming brain is an organ that consumes so much energy, maybe it's about that. Even if it's not that I'm sure that there's a correlation.
Austria's Federal Statistical Office reported this week[0] that there is a significant increase in the number of road traffic accidents in Austria on days with a top temperature of 30°C or above. They report a corresponding increase of the proportion of road accidents caused by "distraction" or "carelessness" on these hot days.
[0] https://www.diepresse.com/6157876/ein-viertel-mehr-verkehrsu...
I was like this for probably 20 years. I had resigned myself to the notion that this was an immutable fact. During COVID, I stayed for 6 months somewhere with a gym and sauna. I began doing cardio for 1 - 1.5 hours per day and 45 minutes in the sauna. I am shocked at how this year, with already intense heat, how little the temperatures affect me.
100% anecdata, and I don’t know if it is the cardio or the sauna, but it has totally changed my enjoyment of this season.
I'm typing this with the a/c set to 26 degrees. But I'm in my home office and definitely not wearing a suit and tie. I feel just fine(tm).
Your mileage is obviously different.
Edit: there's also the cultural thing of setting the a/c in offices to 18 C because that's where a man in a 3 piece suit would feel comfortable. Just drop the 3 piece suit if you're still wearing it :)
I can manage being hot while awake, as long as I can sleep in the cold. If I'm hot while sleeping it's almost like I never slept at all.
The tropics don't usually get as hot as the worst days in the midlatitude zones; what defines the tropical zone is temperature consistency. This means that many species won't adapt to serious climate change if it happens so rapidly, but it also means we can expect labor productivity to drop by 50% or more, because if tropical locations start posting 31-32 WBTs, they won't be doing it once per year (as you see on the hottest days in the midlatitudes) but hundreds of days per year.
If corporate workers become 50% less productive, that just means fewer passive-aggressive emails get sent; but if global farm labor becomes 50% less productive, we're in a shitload of trouble.
This is an angle I've taken with people who don't believe human activity increases temperatures. A small intelligence hit applied to literally every single human is a big thing. And it's hard for people to deny we're increasing CO2 levels.
With the exact same preconditions (clothing, etc.) you'll find it's a 10 degree window, if not less.
The Impact of Different Environmental Conditions on Cognitive Function: A Focused Review
Lee Taylor, Samuel L. Watkins, Hannah Marshall, Ben J. Dascombe, and Josh Foster
Front Physiol. 2015; 6: 372.
Published online 2016 Jan 6. doi: 10.3389/fphys.2015.00372
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4701920/
Abstract:
Cognitive function defines performance in objective tasks that require conscious mental effort. Extreme environments, namely heat, hypoxia, and cold can all alter human cognitive function due to a variety of psychological and/or biological processes. The aims of this Focused Review were to discuss; (1) the current state of knowledge on the effects of heat, hypoxic and cold stress on cognitive function, (2) the potential mechanisms underpinning these alterations, and (3) plausible interventions that may maintain cognitive function upon exposure to each of these environmental stressors. The available evidence suggests that the effects of heat, hypoxia, and cold stress on cognitive function are both task and severity dependent. Complex tasks are particularly vulnerable to extreme heat stress, whereas both simple and complex task performance appear to be vulnerable at even at moderate altitudes. Cold stress also appears to negatively impact both simple and complex task performance, however, the research in this area is sparse in comparison to heat and hypoxia. In summary, this focused review provides updated knowledge regarding the effects of extreme environmental stressors on cognitive function and their biological underpinnings. Tyrosine supplementation may help individuals maintain cognitive function in very hot, hypoxic, and/or cold conditions. However, more research is needed to clarify these and other postulated interventions.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Search: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ambient+temperature+effects+cognit... A Google Scholar search of the same terms produces over 283,000 results and might be worth exploring as well: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=ambient%20temperature%2...
Same as someone else in this thread: I get very unproductive when it's too cold. If my fingers feel cold, it just becomes much less pleasant to use they keyboard. It's one of the reasons why I emigrated from a Northern European country to Thailand.
Long story short: we can't survive anyway if nature can't with us.
Below 18 degrees my hands start to get too cold to type, above 22 and I cannot think any more (thoughts slow down until my brain is muddy).
I feel kind of fine, but I’m unable to do anything that requires creative or technical thought.
(with around 50-60% humidity)
Not to mention the extra heat.
This just seems too close to racist theories about why the north hemisphere is richer than the south.
A lot of people confirming with anecdotes in the comments. Consider that any drastic temperature changes affect humans. Until they adapt. So I bet all this confirming anecdotes are from people used to lower temperatures facing, occasionally, higher temperatures. The opposite happens as well. When you live in places where the winter is almost never lower than 20 degree Celsius, when you get to 10 degrees, people only worry are about supporting the new low temperature. Their focus on surviving the new temperature is more important than any other thing. I am certain get a lot of anecdotes that low temperatures diminish their cognitive skills and productivity.
First, you can’t deny that different counties have different economy structure. And before you put a racist label on me, remember, that correlation is not causation.
Second, I bet that office workers in Vietnam have a decent air conditioning. Their northern hemisphere counterparts might not. Germany is a prime example. I have flashbacks of working in a hot sauna of an office in Berlin.
Not sure if this is satire, but I'll bite.
Rascist is saying "these people are worse because of their intrinsic properties". Saying "these people are worse because of the circumstances they happen to be born into" is the opposite of racist, surely?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-022-01405-3
My lived experience of growing up in a 95+ percent humid city that had 85-100 degrees day time temperatures in summer remembers that the saving grace of the coastal city was the sea breeze setting in at 5.30ish without fail everyday.
During my time in this southern city(I hear that it isn’t so anymore), there was an aggressive tree planting agenda so much so that if they laid down a road, it would go around the older trees.
And when I first came to America and landed in Southern California, I experienced the zero humidity dry desert heat that made every inhale so piercingly painful with bloody crusts blocking my nostrils.
I still have trouble maintaining/regulating core body temperature because I am primed to sweat but there is no humidity. My blood is also thicker which made higher altitude sports more challenging for me because this genetic factor designs your heart and lungs to work differently.
Wet bulb temperatures will wipe out millions of people overnight if we don’t bring down global temperature. Yes, we haven’t understood climate science properly. But there is no denying that one can’t go wrong with planting more trees.
India, for example is more green precisely because of global warming but that’s because trees thrive in the tropics, soaks in the carbon and there is an almost fanatical reverence for trees(iirc). But not everywhere. Wet bulb temperatures will kill Indians in a narrow northern swath precisely because it’s land locked and parched that trees can’t thrive.
So there will always be hostile and unhabitable land in our world where it takes more resources than it would be worth to make it human friendly. Where net net, it contributes more to global warming that we are only hastening our eventual demise.
This is one of the reasons for two of my very deeply held core beliefs: 1. We are past carrying capacity. 2. Not all land is viable and no amount of ‘high density housing’ hacks will solve the resource allocations/scarcity equations.
That’s why I feel so helpless when in California there is so much misguided illiterate enthusiasm for high density housing projects at government level. And that magically rearranging world population distribution through migration is somehow feasible. These politicians and policy makers have never travelled outside the USA or lived anywhere else. They don’t understand that just because India or China has 1+ billion people, we can replicate those numbers and enjoy a better quality of life just because California is richer.
Even between India and China, there are so many variables and that’s why India is the largest producer of wheat and is largely food sufficient while China has depleted aquifers and relies on the rest of the world for its calorie needs. Latitude, longitude matters.
One needs a long perspective. We need to curb population growth stat and maintain a healthy breeding population. This is for 120-150 years ahead. In that time, we need to rebuild resources and learn to use resources effectively.
The world was 500 million in 1600 and 3.5 billion in 1975. We will be 9-10 billion by 2050 and we are burning through planetary resources. We are setting ablaze our only home. Time to hit the brakes and reset.
The solution is two fold: 1. Bring population a little below carrying capacity. This can be anywhere between 1-3 billion. We will live longer. We should live healthier. 2. Rebuild resources and find alternative renewable energy for our way of life. This is a true emergency.
In the short term, healthy procreation done responsibly starting with removing social/religious/cultural pressure to have more babies. Secondly, trees. One can’t go wrong with planting more trees. It could be the only solution. This means for long periods of time, a lot of land mass has to be given up and back to nature for rewilding and recreating habitat. After adopting something like E.O.Wilson’s Half Earth strategy, we can implement currently unsuccessful ideas like high density housing projects. At this point, they will start to make sense and deliver expected results of sustainability.
It’s a long road and require global cooperation. I am not encouraged by current events and can’t see how any of the above can be globally incorporated. Again..to start with..separation of church and state .. as in religion and state.. is the first step. Private faith influencing public policy was our first pitfall in the timeline of our civilization. Faith is powerful and it was meant for the soul. It has become corrupted as it is being used for power plays and has in turn poisoned the wells that feed the flock in the commons.
I am not optimistic about our species’ survival, but if I were to try this would be my two-step starting point.