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Comment by petesergeant | Hacker News Reader

I’m always colder in my mother’s house in Scotland (-5°C on cold days) than I am at my MIL’s house in the frozen Canadian wastelands (-40°C/F on cold days), because my mother will play games with thermostat to save money, where my MIL would simply die of exposure if the heating wasn’t on consistently for 6 months of the year.

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There's also a very different type of cold close to the water. -40C will dry out your skin and make it feel like it's burning, but -5C in Scotland or on one of the Gulf Islands near Vancouver will make your bones feel frozen without good insulation.

You know those Christmas cards that show a frosty twinkly white treescape? That climate will kill you even at -5C.

People die on Ben Nevis every few years because they think its not that cold. But Scottish cold in that part of the world is brutal, there's so much moisture in the air that freezes if you get wet and cant quickly get dry you will die fast.

Still, it's a beautiful part of the country.

If the relative humidity is 100%, then being wet won't make you colder: the water has to evaporate in order to cool you, and it can't do that at 100% relative humidity. The problem that high humidity cold causes is increased convection, and the problem being wet causes is the dramatic near-complete loss of the insulation value of many garments.

There is a _lot_ of folk science about cold weather that is just plain wrong.

> The problem that high humidity cold causes is increased convection

Can you help me understand? How does higher relative humidity increase convection?

Humid air has higher heat capacity and higher heat conductivity than dry air which both increase convective heat loss.

All of that is true, but how does that relate to convection? That is the part I find puzzling.

I think he was talking about the weather conditions. Cold weather fronts with high humidity means strong winds.

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