I live along the coastal plain of Southern California where the temperature is typically in the 70’s during the summer months. Today it is close to 90 and it feels very uncomfortable. My questions are:
Why does easily survivable heat/humidity make us feel so miserable?
Why arent animals with fur feeling worse?
Could we adapt to temperatures that would be in the 120’s-130’sf?
Your body needs a way to get rid of excess heat that it is constantly producing through basic metabolism, even if not through physical activity. If you trapped all that heat inside, you’d be dead in short order.
People lose heat in two ways. One is directly to the air, but the rate of heat loss there is proportional to the difference in temperature. You lose heat faster to air at 80 F than at 90 F. High temperatures can mean too little heat transfer to keep you safe. The other, more important mechanism, for losing heat is by evaporation of sweat. The rate of heat loss there is proportional to the humidity; at 100% humidity, no sweat evaporates at all. At 80%, it evaporates more slowly than at 40%. So high humidity can also mean too little heat transfer.
As long as you have evaporative cooling available, it is possible to survive at higher temperatures, which is why people say that dry heat is not as bad as humid heat. And, of course, you can also survive for short times at much higher temperatures. A sauna would kill you eventually, but you might find a short span there enjoyable.
As for animals with fur… are you sure they aren’t feeling worse? Pets die all the time in high summer heat.
Of course, the feeling of “miserable” is subjective. For me, 65 is shorts weather and 75 is the hottest I’d ever want it. My relatives from Arizona think 65 is time for winter parkas and that 75 is where you set your thermostat in the winter to save money. Yet my relatives and I are going to survive the same extremes of temperatures; we’ll just feel differently about the experience.
It’s survivable, but not “easily survivable”. If you don’t conserve your energy and keep hydrated, heat stroke can hit you quite quickly.
I lived in an extremely hot town in West Africa where AC was nowhere to be found. You do adapt to the heat and it becomes more bearable. But people also took the heat extremely seriously. You’d rarely see people working or walking around between 11-2, it’s just too hot.
Thank you for the answers. But what about animals?
Humidity is to hot weather what wind chill is to cold. They both determine your body’s ability to regulate its temperature, and therefore your ‘comfort’ level. Humidity doesn’t let your body radiate heat away fast enough, blowing cold air saps it away too fast. This is why both are used in weather forecasting, to better explain & predict how comfortable you’ll feel.
I fed our horses today and it’s 90 degrees out. Both of then were drenched in sweat, making their coats appear much darker than normal. It didn’t seem to me like they were very comfortable. I know that when it’s hot like this and it rains they’ll stand out in the rain and get soaked. When is cool out they’ll go into their stables. I don’t think they like the extreme heat very much.
Humans and horses are unusual among mammals in using sweat to cool off. Other animals such as dogs pant to evaporate water from their tongues and mouths to cool off that way.
If you’ve ever seen a dog on a hot day, panting and generally drooping, you can tell from their body language they aren’t comfortable.
I grew up in West Africa and school was 8 till 1. Then we went home and stayed in. By 4pm it was OK to go out again. Everyone had ceiling fans to keep the air moving and I remember that my father wore three shirts a day because of the sweat. Of course, the houses we lived in were built for the climate with open plan and open crawl (or in our case walk) space underneath.
The average temperature in Freetown is around 80 degrees (remarkably constant through the year) with humidity around 90 (variable over quite a wide range).
Kangaroos chew on their forearms to soak their fur with saliva for the same effect.
The OP has specified a temperature “close to 90” - so the high 80s (= 32 C). There’d have to be something seriously wrong for a person not to easily survive this.
ISTR reading that humans are uniquely adapted to shed heat in ways that many other animals aren’t, and it’s due to our evolution as endurance hunters (i.e. our ancestors would literally chase other animals into the ground over the course of hours and days). One of the problems that our prey would suffer is overheating- they can’t keep up the pace that we can, without overheating.
So it may be that we feel the heat more because our heat adaptations allow us to be more active in the heat than other animals. In other words, a dog might just lay around and be lazy in the heat, while humans will get up and do work, because we’re able, although we definitely are uncomfortable while doing so.
The ideal temperature is about 55 F. Anything much higher, such as 60-70 F and I feel awful. Above that I don’t move.
It’s worth noting that there is some evidence that what we consider a comfortable temperature is at least partially determined by what we’re used to. There are accounts of feral children happily stripping naked at playing in the snow, for instance.
I agree with others that said, acclimation also plays a part in it. I lived in the Southern US and when I left, I was not using my a/c in 90 degree weather, when I moved there I was running around in shorts in 55 degree whether.
There is a joke among people in San Francisco how you can tell tourists, as they are the only ones wearing shorts.
Having grown up on a farm, I can say animals react quite differently from humans. I had a dog and it would always seek out bushes and hide all day when it was hot. One time I went into the bushes and to my surprise found it comfortable. The cows never seemed to care. Sure they didn’t like the heat but eating was always there first priority and it’s not like farm cows are starved.
Feral children?? :0