For a country which loves to talk about the weather, we do not do it very well. They order these things much better in the United States.
It helps that the US resisted the wholesale adoption of centigrade. Celsius, while fine for performing nerdy scientific experiments, is insufficiently granular for everyday use. I favour a uniquely British measure of temperature known as the tabloid scale, where very low temperatures are denoted in Celsius but high temperatures are given in Fahrenheit. (No Sun journalist should be made to write ‘Temperatures are set to soar into the low- to mid-30s’; it simply doesn’t work.)
But the other American practice we need to adopt is the ‘feels-like’ temperature. They use this in weather forecasts to denote the perceptual effects of heat rather than the objective temperature.
The human body does not measure temperature, it feels it. And it feels it most intensely when it threatens to overwhelm the body’s capacity for thermoregulation. A healthy human body must maintain a core temperature of around 98.6°F and can safely rise above this by only a few degrees. As hairless mammals, we are mostly dependent on perspiration to keep cool. Consequently, we feel the ill-effects of heat most when we lack the means to sweat efficiently. Low humidity and the presence of a breeze are highly conducive to self-cooling. High humidity and windlessness compromise it.
Hence the ‘feels-like’ temperature, as given on American weather forecasts, sensibly takes account of both these factors, alongside the ambient temperature itself. Their forecasts are consequently much more nuanced than ours.
Sensible people might consider humidity in their holiday planning. I am more contented in Phoenix, Arizona, at 105°F than in London at 85°. I also have a theory – which makes sense in evolutionary terms – that the nearby presence of water, whether a beach, a river or a swimming pool, makes heat less annoying, even if we don’t actually go in the water. Simply knowing you can cool off if necessary makes heat more tolerable.
This is why hot weather in France may be more disagreeable – and dangerous – than hot weather in, say, Turkey. In most very hot countries, you know you can nip indoors to chill from time to time; the pathological French hatred for air conditioning makes heat inescapable. In a US heatwave, the poor and elderly can take refuge in air-conditioned public buildings. In a French heatwave, it’s not uncommon for 15,000 people to die (that’s almost one Crécy or three Agincourts, to use the accepted metrics for dead French people). Happily, in Britain, there are three things we can do to avert this problem.
We need to make it acceptable for men to wear shorts in all social settings
The first is to lose any aversion to air conditioning driven by spurious environmental concerns or virtue-signalling. A good air-conditioning unit is also an air-to-air heat pump and will be used much more often to warm our homes than to cool them. That is why most modern hotels, which have done the maths, use this same mechanism both to heat their rooms and to cool them. It saves them a fortune in energy costs.
The second thing you can do is to buy, say, a Shark TurboBlade bed fan. This highly directional device blows air over you while you sleep, making up for the fact that there is often little breeze at night. There are also both cheaper and more expensive alternatives to this, from fancy temperature control systems for your bed to simple pillow ice-packs.
The third solution is to change dress codes. We need more naturist parks and beaches for a start. But we also need to make it acceptable for men to wear shorts in all social settings. Most British men, free of social pressures, would wear shorts all the time, except perhaps for polar expeditions. Women currently have much more flexibility to dress for hot weather than men do. This discrimination has to stop.
To book tickets to An evening with Rory Sutherland: The world according to the Wiki Man on 29 July at the Emmanuel Centre in London, go to spectator.com/events
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