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Comment by dyauspitr | Hacker News Reader

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Walking outside with 40°C is not "enjoying the beautiful weather", it is miserable. Air conditioning only solves part of the problem.

Walking outside in 40° weather is enjoyable

Are you aware how different 40° weather can feel based on humidity? Because it doesn't take much humidity to make a walk at 40° deadly. You might be used to very dry heat.

I’m in the southern United States and I go for a 5-10 mile run every day in 35 to 40C weather. It’s pretty humid but the heat makes me feel alive. I love it. I do sweat readily and profusely though at the slightest increase in temperature so maybe that has something to do with it.

I was also in Southern Germany and Croatia for a whole month last month and I thought the weather was fantastic the whole time. Given access to water and some shade, it was beyond me how these many people were dying from it.

Good for you. It looks like you're very much an outlier though!

I'm sorry, but unless you put a number to "pretty humid", you seem like you're just trolling.

In August usually 65-85%

Then you've probably experienced times when your body physically can't cool down enough through sweating, right? Because at 40°C and 85% relative humidity, various calculators agree that the wet bulb temperature is ~37.5°C.

It's very well possible that you have a larger tolerance for these temperatures than average, my not-very-thorough literature search indicates[1] that people's tolerance seems to vary a lot (apparently correlating with mean skin temperature), but we all share the same upper bound due to physics: environments with a wet-bulb temp. >= 35°C will kill humans after ~6h, since our bodies simply overheat.

So it's very well possible that it takes you longer to get to this dangerous point. But surely you can still empathize with others who aren't so lucky, who instead begin to literally feel that they're overheating after j́ust a few minutes of walking outside in the same heat and humidity?

If you still can't, then maybe it helps to imagine a comparable situation: some freak event makes it so every few minutes, everyone outside has to hold their breath for 60 seconds, or they start to drown. Now, most people can hold their breath for 30-90s, while some can go much longer (apparently over 20min, wow!). Now imagine you're one of the 30s people. Would you enjoy going for a walk? Some people are having the time of their lives, many can deal with it.

[1]: https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/japplphysio...?

Air conditioning the indoors doesn’t do anything to prevent the harm and damage to animals, agricultural land, infrastructure, and so many other things. It also, of course, can’t protect those who have to work or commute in the heat.

40°C with high humidity from 5am to 10am every day is not ‘beautiful weather’.

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