[masraum]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

It just amazes me the people in Europe are dying from the heat and people in the US are as well.

I grew up in the deep south, San Marcos, TX and Montgomery, AL and Oklahoma City for on year. Hawaii never got super hot. Never once did I get to attend a school with air conditioning. Now they close school if the AC units are not cooling. I remember sweat dripping from my nose onto test papers.

I think of my paternal grandfather often in the heat. He was born on a farm in 1900, no electricity of course. When he was 20 he married my grandmother, and bought a "house" that was 12 x14 feet. No electricity, a hand pump for water, and a outhouse out back. It would be like living in my storage shed, only I have electricity out there. Then when grandma had to cook, she had to fire up the wood burning stove to heat the house up even more. During the dust bowl days, they could not open the windows or the doors as the house would fill with dirt.

Grandpa worked for Armor and Co, cutting up animals. Imagine the heat and stench of an un-air conditioned kill floor, in the summer heat. No air blowing just lots of sweat. He survived and worked there from the day the plant opened to the day it closed. People were just tough back then.

I can handle hot days fine if I have lots of water to drink. I did an HPDE ar Roebling Road, just outside of Savannah, GA. The heat index was just stupid, 130+ degrees. I drank a case of water and managed to have a little urination once. It was sure glorious to crank up the AC on the journey back to the hotel.

I think a lot of it is acclimation. I've lived in places where the temp was 100º+ for weeks. I've lived places where the heat and humidity were both high. I've lived places where it was snow cold for months on end.

I've also had periods where I spent most of my time in the summer (or winter) outside in the weather and other periods (these days) where most of my time is spent in AC. Our bodies acclimate to the conditions that we are in most of the time. I can be perfectly comfortable in 35º weather, to the point where I can be wearing a t-shirt. I can be comfortable in 95º humid weather. But if you picked up the 13-20 year old me that spent most of his time outside in the heat in the summer, and dropped me into the snow cold winter somewhere, I'd think I was going to die. If you snatched me when I was young and living in Japan, and dropped me into a Texas August day, I'd think I was going to die.

I think what our bodies are used to affects how they react. There are marathons that are run in heat in the south and folks don't die. I remember reading about the London marathon one year where the temp was in the 80s and they doubled the medical staff on hand because they expected lots of medical issues. Because those folks aren't used to those temps, and certainly aren't used to pushing themselves to the extremes of running a marathon in those temps.

That acclimation is why for hundreds of years folks lived just fine (relatively) without AC. Because they were used to it, and lived in it all of the time (and likely had homes designed to allow air-flow, and/or high ceilings, and other aspects of design centered around not having AC.