I live in a pretty hot climate, but it’s only really unbearable at times due to shoddy building and bad urban planning. Even then, summer can be difficult.
I can’t imagine what it’s like on the equator, especially in dense urban centres. What’s Mumbai, Bangkok, or Singapore like at the height of the wet season?! How do millions of people function day to day?
Have a look at the map here, and also at the satellite view. Zoom in: 37,0593067, 15,2976834
It is a >2000 year old town, still alive and inhabited (mostly by tourists nowadays). People had no air condition back then.
The buildings are made of natural stone. The walls are as heavy as possible. The streets are as narrow as possible (some can be used with a car, some cannot).
I have been there on vacation for two weeks and the effect of this way of building a city is huge! The sun barely reaches the ground in these narrow streets. The heavy walls do not heat up much in the lower floors. They keep some the ground’s coolness - and today, some of the air condition’s coolness as well, but the local people told me that they use their air condition only in the 3-4 hottest month’s of the year.
I was born and raised in Las Vegas. It’s a dry heat so water helps. I soak my shirt or hat and I can be outdoors for a while. Loose fitting light colored clothes and a wide brimmed hat go a long way. Stay in the shade or go out at night. Drink plenty of water, this is the biggest thing.
Indoors, a fan can help. An evaporative cooler is very effective in the dry heat. We’re spoiled so most places are air conditioned, so I try to go places that are free to be in like the mall, library, grocery store.
I live at the equator and it’s always ~28 degrees celsius where I live. You can get almost any temperature at the equator so that really isn’t a test of heat. Here in Colombia if you go down the mountains towards the coast or jungle it gets hotter. There the houses are built with lots of natural wind tunnel effects to keep them passively cool. When you’re outside in the heat you just get used to it. When I was in Iraq it took us a few weeks to really get used to it but even at 50 degrees celsius you eventually build a tolerance.
Grew up in death valley (50+°C in summer)
Moved to northern Canada (-45°C in winter)
Sometimes humanity is just stubborn. You just a acclimate over time
I wonder the same thing about people who live in cold environments. I’ve never seen snow, and I know I won’t handle it, because I can’t handle single digit (Celsius) temperatures, let alone below 0…
With cold, you can layer appropriate clothing. And you can find much better appropriate clothing for purchase in the places that require it than you can find in your shops, along with advice from people who live there. Just don’t follow the example of the cargo shorts at -40° boys.
I’d rather be blistering hot than wrapped up in layers and living inside stuffy heated buildings
I live in central Europe, fuck the cold, fuck all the layers have to put on, i’d be rather drenched in my ballsweat than this shit.
My mood/mental health/general will to live noticeably nosedives as the cold temperatures come around.
I avoid both by living in LA. We have our disasters natural and human, but our temperature is usually pleasant and always bearable.
I’m from hot and have visited cold, and there are not enough clothes in the world to keep me warm if it’s cold enough. I just don’t seem to generate enough heat to warm them. I think we are just built differently - my husband is from colder area and when he works out he has to wait to cool down before showering, I have to wrap up so I don’t cool down too fast.
Cold is easy, wear more, burn stuff for heat.
Hot is hard. When I’m already fully naked and still sweating, what then? Lightly fan myself with something?
Currently in Canada. Tomorrow will be like, 5F (-15C). Layers are king.
That said- normally I’m pretty good with cold temperatures, but these are the temps at which it hurts to breathe. And somehow there’s still people walking around in basically nothing
Colds not too hard to deal with at all. As the other poster mentioned, when outside, the trick is layers.
Inside, it’s actually very easy to trap heat. Knowing where and how it dissipates in a house makes a huge difference, but it’s generally much easier to heat a place than cool it.
Layers are the thing I hate about the cold
Where I live (West Central Florida) we get (weather -wise) a winter and a summer, summer is longer and hot and wet.
The hot I grew up in, so am adapted I suppose, didn’t have air conditioning till I was 23. So I can be still in the shade and pretty comfortable. If I have to exercise or work in the yard I do it in the morning, early, because afternoon is the rainy time, and if it doesn’t rain it is too hot to be safe. All swim lessons and summer weddings are in the morning, nobody tries to schedule outdoor stuff in the afternoons if they live here. Stupid government refused to give workers heat protection protection. Kids have to do heat safety training for sports in school, learn what heat exhaustion looks like and how to hydrate safely.
I LOVE our rainy summers though. It is beautiful in its own way, the morning getting hotter then the storms, all the lightning and rain to cool it off, then the most beautiful heat lightning in the nights, whole sky flashing far away, and the bolts as well.
And I guess I’d ask how do people survive in places where it freezes for months on end? You can’t grow anything in the winter, and don’t the pipes freeze and burst? Is it bad for the roads and bridges? Do the homeless freeze to death? The squirrels? What about reptiles, snakes and lizards?
NW Florida here. Lived in Chicago for two years. I’ll take the heat thank you very much. I won’t die if left outside.
Ironically, I’m Canadian and am more likely to die in the humid heat than the brutal cold 😂 granted, wet cold like you’ll find in Chicago and Toronto are special kinds of hell, no thank you
Summer storms are the best! That feeling of anticipation as the pressure builds up, then the way the temperature drops, before the rain hits and it just washes the heat away (sometimes!)
That’s the neat part, you don’t
If not for clocks and all that industrial-corporate time management shit, people in the hotter parts of the world would probably be starting work ~5am, stopping around 12-15 (hottest time of the day) for lunch + a nap, then returning to their stuff and probably going to sleep at 23
So like Spain and Italy?
I actually read an article yesterday that stated apparently siestas are are dying thing, as they result in more work and less sleep.
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/spain-late-night-culture-end/index.html
Not surprising, having a nice fixed sleep schedule is important
By pretending it isn’t happening by being distracted by video games
Water, inside and out. Dune (the book) had a great quote about the best place for water is inside you.
Humans evolved to deal with heat, and yes, later cold, but our roots are in Africa. So many ways to cool with water, you find strategies that work. Misting is a great example. Low power and water use, works outdoors, they use it in the NFL.
I use gaiters year round, dry for cold, wet for heat. They can make a dramatic difference. Wrap an ice cube in one, put it at the base of your neck, fool your brain stem into thinking you’re cooler.
Staying small is huge (heh). The square cube law is a thing. If you took my skinny hide and spread it out on top of a tall fat man, it would be fairly close. But our volume would be drastically different.
Being fat in hot climates is miserable. Had to take a shower after going to get the mail in the summer. In the mid 40s(5-8C?) and I’d be going around in a long sleeve shirt. By the time I should start to get cold, my body’s warmed up or I’m in a conditioned place.
I just suffer through any mandatory outdoor events (mostly in silence, but sometimes wailing and profanities are included) and limit myself to activities after sunset, I always keep a bottle of water with me, and I have an hourly reminder to drink when I’m on the computer.
It’s actually not that bad on the equator. Here in Malaysia out temperatures fluctuate between 26-34C during the year. The bits slightly off center are the dangerous ones, with temps in the middle east reaching 50C sometimes.
There’s two feet of snow out here, so I don’t know the answer, but I’m willing to try to figure it out.
Slowly. With loose clothing. And we ain’t even tropical.
