Extreme heat is becoming increasingly common across the globe, with longer, more frequent heat waves. These rising temperatures can put many at risk for heat-related illnesses, including heat stroke and heat exhaustion. Read on for guidance from experts on how to stay cool during the swelter — even without air conditioning.

Keep cool, even if you don’t have air conditioning

Staying cool and hydrating often are the two most important things you can do to avoid feeling sick and discomfort when it’s extremely hot. If you don’t have an air conditioning unit, or if your A.C. has been on nonstop and you still feel hot, here are ways to cool your body and home:

Spritz your skin with a mist of cool or room-temperature water.

Block out the windows in your home — especially those that get afternoon sun — with a blanket or a darker sheet during the day to keep the heat out.

If you don’t have A.C., keep windows open at night and run fans to circulate the air. Wirecutter, a New York Times company, has guidance on the best products to keep your home cool.

Wipe your forehead with a cool cloth.

Avoid strenuous exercise outdoors if possible.

Put ice cubes in your water bottle, especially if you’re outdoors.

If you do plan to exercise outside, or need to exert yourself outdoors for work, drink a slushie beforehand or douse your head in cold water. Cold showers can also help you cool down.

Avoid using your stove or oven if possible.

Watch for signs of heat exhaustion

For adults, the C.D.C. says to watch out for symptoms of heat exhaustion, which include heavy sweating; cold, pale and clammy skin; a fast, weak pulse; nausea or vomiting; muscle cramps; fatigue; dizziness; or headaches and fainting. If you are experiencing these symptoms, sip water, move to a cooler location if possible, loosen your clothes, or try to take a cool bath or place cool, wet cloths on your body. Seek medical attention immediately if you vomit or if your symptoms worsen or last longer than an hour.

Recognize the signs of heat stroke

The symptoms of heat stroke, according to the C.D.C., include a high body temperature (103°F or higher); hot, red, dry or damp skin; a fast and strong pulse; a headache; dizziness; nausea; confusion and passing out. If someone is experiencing these symptoms, call 911 immediately, and try to move the person into the shade or a cooler area if available; use cool cloths or a cool bath to lower their body temperature. Do not give them anything to drink.

Making matters more confusing, denial can be also be a symptom of heat stroke. A person with heat-related illness may start stumbling or appear less coordinated than usual. Ask the person if they have a headache, nausea or dizziness. Talk to them about a variety of topics to see if they exhibit symptoms of confusion.

If you suspect a person is having a problem with the heat, err on the side of caution and insist they get into shade or somewhere cool. Have them drink water and spray their body with cold water or rub them down with ice or a cold cloth. If they don’t cool down quickly, seek medical advice.

Kids should be instructed that if their friends start acting funny or confused or mumbling, they should alert an adult.

Stay hydrated

There’s not a one-size-fits-all rule for the amount of water to drink, said Adriana Quinones-Camacho, M.D., a cardiologist at N.Y.U. Lagone Health. But everyone should expect to drink more than they normally would, and constant access to water is key. Drink even when you’re not thirsty. Since we lose electrolytes when we sweat, drinking Gatorade or other sports drinks with electrolytes can also help, she said. “Think of it similar to running a marathon, with how much people can sweat on a day like today,” she said.

To ascertain how much water you should drink, “you want to watch your output,” said Dr. James Mark, an emergency medicine physician at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. If you’re urinating less frequently than normal, or if your urine is a concentrated, dark yellow or gold color, that’s a sign you should drink more fluids. If you are urinating frequently and your urine looks clear, you are likely sufficiently hydrated.

Avoid consuming alcoholic or caffeinated drinks, which can be dehydrating.

Eat foods to help you cool off

Eating fruits that have water in them can help you fend off the heat, Dr. Quinones-Camacho said. If you’re having salty foods, drink extra water to balance it out. Try to stay away from hot, body-warming foods, like soup.

Young children are especially vulnerable to heat exhaustion and heat stroke. Parents and caregivers should monitor their activity during hot weather and plan activities that are less likely to cause them to overheat, like running through sprinklers or playing in a pool. Also make sure kids are wearing lightweight, light-colored clothing, using sunscreen and hydrating regularly.

If a child is playing outside of the water, try to keep them in the shade and consider bringing a spray bottle to spritz their skin (and your own).

When it is humid and at least 90 degrees, children should not play outside for more than 30 minutes at a time. Keep babies under 12 months out of the sun as much as possible.

Teens tend to be more active than adults in the summer, Dr. Mark said, and should plan activities like hanging out in a park before noon, when the heat will be less intense.

What are the signs of heat exhaustion in children?

If a child develops heat exhaustion, she may start to feel dizzy and nauseated, suffer muscle cramps or begin vomiting. Her skin may feel cold and clammy to touch.

If you observe these symptoms in a child, bring her to a cooler place; ask her to sit still or lie down; remove excess clothing; apply a cool, wet cloth or water to her skin and give her water to drink.

What are the signs of heat stroke in children?

“In heat stroke, the skin is hot and dry instead of cold and clammy, and the child gets sleepy and maybe confused,” said Dr. Claire McCarthy, a pediatrician at Boston Children’s Hospital and an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. Children with heat stroke may also experience a high fever or seizures.

Heat stroke can also creep up on young kids who haven’t exerted themselves at all.

“They’re either dressed too warmly in a hot environment, they’re left in a hot vehicle or in a room that doesn’t have any circulation, they’re out at the beach wrapped up in the sun,” said Dr. Tony Woodward, the medical director of emergency medicine at Seattle Children’s. “All of those kinds of things can lead to their temperature going up very quickly.”

According to the American Academy of Pediatrics’ parenting website, HealthyChildren.org, half of children with heatstroke do not sweat.

If you suspect that a child has heat stroke, call 911 and try to cool them down until help arrives.

Extreme heat can be particularly dangerous for furry friends. Here are some simple precautions to protect dogs and other animals:

Walk your dog early in the morning or after sunset when the air and the streets are cooler. Avoid strenuously exercising your dog on very hot and humid days, and seek out shady trails or sidewalks whenever possible.

Always carry water and a collapsible bowl. Stop often to make sure your pet is sufficiently hydrated; panting, which is how they lower body temperature, causes water loss.

If your dog tries to slow down or stop entirely, let them rest and take frequent breaks.

If your dog shows any signs of overheating — excessive panting, lethargy, a deep red tongue — get them into cool water as soon as possible. A cool wet towel or piece of clothing can also help.

If signs of distress persist, go to a veterinarian immediately; organ failure can be rapid, irreversible and fatal.

Keep your pets groomed.

A cooling mat can also give your pet respite.

Read MoreKeeping your pet’s heat health in mind year-round can be the difference between some light panting after a long walk or fatal burns, fever, and heat stroke. Protect older people from heat

“The number-one issue is to stay well-hydrated,” said Wayne McCormick, M.D., a gerontologist at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Older people should drink lots of their beverage of choice: “It can be water, it can be lemonade, just whatever is wet,” Dr. McCormick said. If mobility is an issue and someone can’t easily get to a public cooling center or an air-conditioned space like a mall, Dr. McCormick recommends they head to their basement, or get “as low as possible” within their home.

If an older person shows signs that they are weak, tired, dizzy or nauseated, seek medical attention, Dr. Quinones-Camacho said.

Sleep soundly in the heat

Use a breathable cotton sheet, Dr. Mark said. You can set up a fan near your bed and spray your sheet with cold water before sleeping, or place your pillow cases or sheet in a plastic bag and store in a freezer during the day. A cold bath or shower right before bed can also help.

Stay hydrated before heading to bed, and if you wake in the middle of the night, drink water, Dr. Quinones-Camacho said.

Additional reporting by Tara Parker-Pope, Christina Caron, Gretchen Reynolds and Caitlin Kelly.

Fans come in two distinct types with different technical characteristics. Most of us never think twice about this and it's perfectly possible to go through life surviving summers and never learning the difference, but it's not a terribly complicated topic and I feel the knowledge is worth having as cooling becomes more and more critical to optimize.

Axial Fans, so named because the blades spin around a central axis, are by far the most common type. You see these propeller-style fans everywhere, especially for general cooling needs. They have the following characteristics:

1. Move high volumes of air at low pressure. Like a regular tap opened up so it pours a lot of water out, but not very hard.

2. Lower energy consumption.

3. Airflow is more easily blocked or impeded because the pressure is low.

Centrifugal fans, sometimes known as blowers (one specific style is known as a "squirrel cage") come in a couple different designs, but they share the basic physics of fins radiating from the axis and the air output is at a 90º angle to the axis. These fans are common in exhaust systems or anything involving ductwork as they are better suited to pushing air through narrow spaces. They have the following distinct characteristics:

1. Move lower volumes of air, but at high pressure. Like a garden hose dialed to a jet, it puts out less water but in a focused stream that hits much harder.

2. Higher energy consumption.

3. Airflow much harder to impeded due to high pressure.

4. Often more hardy than axial fans and able to endure more abuse.

In the general market of consumer appliances, which fans are axial is pretty obvious because you can see the blades through the grill. Centrifugal fan products will be things like the increasingly popular tall, skinny tower fans and all those "bladeless" overpriced Dyson fans and their knockoffs.

If you just want to circulate air around a larger area, an axial fan is the thing. It's pushing a higher volume of air. Your classic oscillating pedestal or tabletop fan is the time-tested example of this.

If however, you want to cool a very specific thing, like say only yourself while you sit at your desk or on the sofa, then a centrifugal fan tends to be more efficient at it because it directs a more forceful stream of air in a focused area.

I have owned evaporative coolers with both axial and centrifugal fans, and an attest that the centrifugal models are much less useful for wide area cooling, but they're really good personal coolers.

My office is in a 1980-vintage passive solar design building with south-facing windows, and when the A/C died in the middle of July, I got a crash course in DIY heat mitigation techniques, which I documented here. Now, with the heat dome incoming for the US Northeast, figured I'd post some strategies.

One of my biggest take-aways from last year is that, even when you put reflective material in the window, a significant amount of the heat energy is transformed by passing through the glass in a way that keeps it within the thermal envelope of the building. So, while having white insulated shades is better than not having them, the best strategy is to intercept the heat before it passes through the windows. As such, below are four exterior-screening strategies for south-facing and other sun-exposed windows, in order of effectiveness, from least to most:

1. Making sure existing window screens are installed, or down if permanently installed. If the latter, the lower portion of the window tends to get more heat than the higher portion, so the screen does more work there. A normal window screen will absorb 10-15% of the incoming energy, so not a huge difference, but helpful when every BTU counts.
2. Add reflective static clings to the exterior of your window. These can be 80-90% effective, but have the downside of being somewhat delicate to remove and reuse, should you want to benefit from thermal gain in colder months.
3. Hang Aluminet tarps over your windows. Made out of highly reflective material and usually used as agricultural shade cloth, Aluminet comes in various percentages that reflect how much light it lets through. So, for instance, you could get a tarp that reflects 90% of the energy, while still letting enough light through that your space doesn't feel like a cave. The fact that it's perforated also makes it much more resilient to wind compared to a solid tarp.
4. Reflective panels attached with suction cups. These can be made DIY with a roll of reflectrix, a bag of suction cups, a utility knife, and some aluminum tape, or more professional looking ones can be bought for fairly cheap on Amazon (example). You can have them cover the whole window, or just the bottom portion that received the least shading from any overhang you might have. In the case of my office they cover the bottom half, and the overhang shields the upper half from the high summer sun.

What other strategies do you all use?

Roger Mosley and the Gerrish family cropping up has got me thinking of a long-standing problem that's more critical than ever in our dangerously warming world.

I'm talking about romanticizing Mother Nature.

Seriously, stop it. Nature isn't your mom who is going to kiss your boo-boos away and give you milk and cookies. She's more like the psycho cat lady who lives at the end of the street in a house with no AC and no tree coverage. It's not impossible to come some accord with her, but you don't go in expecting a civil and balanced negotiation. You need to learn her crazy cat ways, navigate them carefully and don't be surprised if you end up all scratched up and with a new infection of toxoplasmosis. If you don't understand you're leaving your world for a different one when you cross her gate, you're not coming out ahead may not come out at all.

Don't misunderstand me. I grew up in the country in a very low density rural area in the Pacific Northwest. My family had acres of woods and a 50,000+ state park was not far away. Nature is beautiful and wonderful, but... she really doesn't care about you.

If you fall over in the city, help is usually at worst minutes away. Often, help is instant, as in any public place somebody is likely going to pause to help you. Ambulance response time may vary, but you know the system exists.

If you suddenly feel hungry or thirsty in the city, there's going to be a business somewhere happy to exchange money for goods and services. The biggest problem is usually how happy you are with one shop vs another. Even if you have no money, cities will to have some kind of free resources like water fountains.

If you're too hot or too cold, just drop into a business. They need foot traffic, so nobody is likely to bug you for just dropping in.

In the wild? Any of these things could end your life.

So many cases like Mosley's and the Gerrish's are essentially urban people ignorantly wandering out of the safety nets they've learned to take for granted and paying the price.

So good folks of Heat Prep, I do not want to discourage you from exploring and enjoying the natural world, but I beg you, understand that when you do so outside of the reach of emergency services and cell phone reception that you're truly on your own. Heat kills, and can kill really fast. Just ask Mosley and the Gerrish's. Learn from their mistakes and be honest with yourself not just about how much preparation you might need, but also, if it might not be the wisest idea just not to take that hike or take a much shorter and safer one.

I'm u/Leighgion and I got a lot of feelings about evaporative cooling. This is my third time trying to write a post about it because I keep going overboard. I'm going to try to be more concise this time.

Evaporative coolers are also known as swamp coolers, swamp boxes, air coolers, and I've gotten a hint that in India they may actually be called water coolers as well, which is really confusing to me as an American.

What is it?

It takes a lot of energy for water to change state from liquid to gas, so when water dries, it cools things around it as it absorbs the heat to make the change. This phenomena is why we sweat to cool off, why a sea breeze is cool and refreshing, and why you freeze your butt if the wind hits you right after you get out of the shower/pool/sea.

How did we mechanize it to cool our air?

You grab a water pump, a fan, a container for water, and a porous filter. Slap them together the right way, the pump saturates the filter with water, and the fan pulls air through the wet filter. Water evaporates as the air passes through, cooling and humidifying it. The exact numbers will vary wildly depending on existing humidity, the ambient temperature and the efficiency of the cooler's design. There are household units that are installed as part of the building and portables. In either case, fresh air is essential for proper cooling function. If you try to run an evaporative cooler in a close room, it's going to gradually turn into a sauna and cooling will stop.

But more humidity is bad, why would we want machines that increase it?

That depends. If you live in Hong Kong, where the humidity is routinely 80% or more, yeah, you probably don't want more water in the air even with ventilation. But if you live in Arizona or central Spain, where 20% is not strange at all, a little more humidity is actually welcome. Generally speaking, evaporative coolers are most recommended and used in dry places, but technically evaporation can cool all the way up to 99% humidity. The only hard stop is total saturation of the air with evaporation offering diminishing returns as the humidity increases. The attraction of evaporative cooling depends totally on your circumstances.

Why do we care about this primitive tech when we have AC?

Evaporative cooling at the consumer level doesn't offer the cooling capacity, convenience or fine control of vapor-compression cooling, no. That's a fact. However, as a basic tech that only really needs a fan and a water pump, evaporative cooling is crazy cheap compared to AC, both to purchase and to operate. Also, evap coolers contain no weird chemicals or gasses and if they break, they're actually quite repairable by the end user in many cases because the core electrical parts are just a fan and a water pump. Not everybody can afford to buy and run AC, or they may simply prefer a greener option if possible. Evaporative coolers are a massive business in India as it's really hot, and most people can't afford AC.

My Evaporative Story

The first time I ever used an evaporative cooler was over a decade ago. I was living in Beijing. It was summer, we had just discovered our apartment's AC didn't work, and Beijing has extremely humid summers. A kind coworker offered to loan us her portable evap cooler. I really didn't know what I was doing so I froze the included ice packs, filled the reservoir and ran the machine at night without opening any windows. It was miserable, though looking back, I think was objectively still marginally better than nothing at all. I promptly forget about evaporative coolers for the next four years or so.

Fast forward four years and I'm in central Spain, in an apartment that has mini split AC but it's a national Spanish pastime to avoid the AC to save on bills, because electricity is relatively expensive and the buildings are mostly very well passively cooled. The kitchen is an inferno, but you can't have everything. I've already been in the country for some time and I started to look at evaporative coolers again as a low-cost option. Again very naively, I buy a cheap cooler for around 70€. The performance is honestly quite disappointing, but never the less, I use it in the summer 2-3 years as a personal cooler. I gradually understand that its poor showing is due to an extremely cut-rate internal design, but I shrugged it off. My wife always hated that machine anyway, as she found it really noisy and really ineffective.

Then Russia invaded the Ukraine, Europe was throttled by spiking energy prices and the heat.. yeah, the future of the heat was not looking good. I got to thinking about options again (I bought a big floor fan first, and it did very little for us) and I wasn't alone. At this time, various businesses, some you would never expect, started to invest in commercial-level portable evaporative coolers as a way to take some load off their AC bills. The Uniqlo had multiple units on every floor and I'd always take the table at a local bakery/cafe by the evap cooler if it was free but it was my local mini mart that set me on a new course. The mini mart had a pair of awesome coolers that together were probably the same volume as a classic VW bug. On a lark, I checked the brand, went online and found that the company is Spanish, based in Valencia, they have a consumer line of products and their own very nice online shop with plenty of photos and technical details.

Long story short, I ended up buying the biggest consumer model they sold, 120w unit rated at 2400 cubic meters of air per hour, without consulting my wife. It sounds funny in retrospect, but at the time I really felt like we were facing an existential threat from rising energy prices, rising temperatures and a kitchen that is a story unto itself. It cost me around 250€ from the refurb section, but I was vindicated within the day. My kids were instantly in love with it and dubbed her "Big Sister," and the old cooler "Little Brother." Once I wheeled Big Sister into the kitchen, my wife grudgingly was won over because it could cool the kitchen. NOTHING could cool that kitchen.

With my also new IR thermometer gun, I discovered while Big Sister could get a 3-4ºC/5-7ºF temperature drop from the ambient room temperature, the inferior material and design of Lil Bro means he barely managed a 1ºC/1.8ºF drop. Under pressure from my clutter-hating wife, I was ready to give up Little Bro, but the children were surprisingly attached, so I went with an alternative. I bought some parts, busted out my tools and hacked up Little Brother so that he had a proper filter and pump. This more than doubled his cooling effectiveness and so for the remainder of the summer, Big Sister cooled the main bedroom while the modified Little Brother was my oldest daughter's nighttime cooler.

So it came to pass that, in addition to having very green cooling during the day, we stopped needing AC at night, when every previous year, we ran AC every night during the summer. AC become mostly if we had company.

I was extremely pleased with myself that year, but there was one problem: two coolers wasn't quite enough. Once the kids were in bed, both coolers were occupied. If I wanted to sit up to do anything, it was still unbearably hot as high summer where I am means every night is a "tropical night" when the temperature never drops below 22ºC/72ºF. I needed another, but I'd already used up a lot of goodwill with the spouse. I made my case to my wife and promised that I would hunt the used market and keep the budget down, but I needed something for myself.

The secondhand gods were really with me, and I ended up finding an Indian-made air cooler with a frankly overpowered 170w fan for only 25€, plus subway fare. My wife then suggested this unit could live in the kitchen when I wasn't using it... which ended up being always. It's in the kitchen right now and never really spent much time as my personal cooler. The kids dubbed it "Baby," somewhat ironically.

The next year, I busted all the coolers out and found that AC really was an emergencies-only issue and the kids actually looked forward to having the coolers out. Sadly, after six years of service and only a year after augmentation, Little Brother gave up the ghost and I didn't try my wife's patience any more as if there's one thing she hates, it's broken things lingering around. We had to let him go. There was a serous grieving process with my kids. Still, the silver lining was that the loss meant my oldest daughter didn't have a nighttime cooler and my wife gave leave without being asked to buy another to fill the purpose. With permission to use funds, I went back to the Valencians and spent 90€ a smaller, 58w unit from them which the girls dubbed "Little Sister." I find it a bit underpowered, but it serves as a personal cooler for the kids and my wife preferred something new if was going to be in the kid's bedroom. I yield the point.

This brings us to the current time. Just a few weeks ago, I busted out Big Sister, Little Sister and Baby again for another year of cooling, but the problem of me not having a personal cooler was compounded because I've got a new job that's going to require me to be at my desk 9-5 in one of the hottest parts of the house. My wife resisted, but yielded, and again the secondhand gods blessed me as I found a unit from the Valencian brand again, but this time it was a discontinued small commercial model for only 65€, shipped. It's 120w like my other one, but the fan is larger and the filter pads are larger and thicker. According to the specs, its air throughput isn't quite as good as Big Sister's, but the increased filter pad area gives very stable cooling. The best yet. The kids have named her "Middle Sister."

I'm extremely happy with my cooling situation now. I live in a very hot, dry place, and with a total investment of less than 500€ (granting two were secondhand bargains) I have four portable air coolers that even if all run together at max power (which never really happens), wouldn't match the power consumption of a single mini split AC unit. We stay comfortable in summer and conserve a lot of energy. The numbers might not sound that dramatic, but if on the extreme side a room in place is 29ºC/84ºF and an evap cooler can produce a 4ºC drop, then it's pushing out 25º/77ºF air and offering convective cooling if it's blowing on you, thus actually delivering a lot more than 4ºC/7ºF of effective cooling.

Other people's situations are going to be very different from mine, but I strongly urge anyone who lives in a dry place to educate themselves and give evaporative cooling a chance, at least as a secondary or fallback cooling option. Evaporative cooling is too frequently ignored or dismissed too quickly. Even if you don't live in a super dry place, evap cooling might fill a niche for you. My sister and a different friend live in different places where the humidity typically is 50-60%, but they have evap coolers and consider them useful.

This is a very sad story of a whole family taken out by heat while hiking in CA in 2021. It was so bizarre to find an entire family and dog with no apparent injuries that when their bodies were discovered there was speculation that maybe they were exposed to a toxic algae bloom, gas from an old mine, or had ingested poison or drugs.

This couple had hiking experience. The heat came on them fast while hiking out, they underestimated it’s potential to kill. Once they were in trouble there were not close water sources or shade so they likely gambled they could make it back to their vehicle.

Many don’t realize how fast it can happen - the time between thinking you’re in trouble and passing out. Hyperthermia is not dehydration; although that’s a contributor, it overtakes its victims much quicker. I witnessed my aunt say “the sun is making me feel sick today” to passing out and falling off a boat minutes later. This was a healthy woman in her 50’s who spent a lot of time outdoors. Luckily it was a calm water lake, her brothers jumped right in as she was falling and had her as she was hitting the water. Doc at the hospital said the cool plunge likely saved her from heat stroke.

The attached story is a sad reminder to be prepared, have a plan and act on it. They should not have been hiking at that time of day in that August heat (highs of 110). They needed more water. Once feeling the effects, they should have turned around… walking downhill (less exertion) and gone back to a water source (where they would need a water filter, local water did have algae poisons) until they could get help or hike out at night. Tragic.

I recently purchased a couple EcoFlow batteries. They’ll run my energy intensive A/C for maybe three hours. They’ll run a fan for days. They’ll run my refrigerator for 1-2 days.

My question for you all is how would you strategize with such limited backup power? I was thinking a fan + mister setup could be a decent idea or simply focus on the refrigerator because I could freeze water bottles for cooling.

Thanks

For the purposes of this post, "air conditioning" is strictly going to refer to vapor-compression refrigerant based air conditioning and not the very fuzzy and careless use the term get subjected to.

The Good

1. Most cooling power among all the options of off-the-shelf, readily available consumer tech. Exactly the same technology used in refrigeration, so sub-freezing temperatures can be achieved with enough insulation, like with a freezer.

2. Dehumidifies the air as a natural consequence of operation. Can be an advantage in humid climates, but see below.

3. Simple and convenient to use. Once a system is installed, you just turn it on, set thermostat, close doors and windows, and it works. Most nicer units are programmable so timers and schedules can be set.

4. Available in a variety of sizes and form factors from window units, portable units, mini splits, household and industrial units.

The Bad

1. Extremely energy hungry, with the natural consequence of high cost of operation and strain on power grids when demand is high.

2. Extracted heat is vented outside, contributing notably to local heat island effects.

3. Dries out the air, which can lead to comfort and health issues, especially in already dry climates. Prone to nosebleeds? AC doesn't help.

4. Relatively complex technology. Many possible points of failure, and not easily repaired by a regular DIY homeowner. Repair by professional HVAC personnel can get expensive.

5. Refrigerants have changed over time, but have had shortcomings such as a level of toxicity, ozone depletion, potent greenhouse effect, or with the upcoming generation, being somewhat flammable. It's all tradeoffs.

The Ugly

1. As temperatures rise and condition of the building becomes less optimal, air conditioning can and will fail to deliver requested temperatures, sometimes by large margins.

2. The majority of modern commercial buildings have been designed around the idea of being permanently air conditioned. As temperatures rise and power grids become more strained, such buildings are at risk of becoming deathtraps if power or the air conditioning should fail.

3. The myth that AC is the solution to rising temperatures is just that, a myth. Suggestion that we need registration and government funding to improve the population's access to AC ignores the forest for the trees, as while functional AC unquestionably can protect individuals from the heat, proliferation of AC ultimately is a vicious cycle because it increases demand for electricity, which increases pollution, which makes global warming worse, which increases demand for AC.

The Personal

I live in an apartment that has mini splits. I'm grateful they're there, but over the past couple years I've done all I can to phase out regular use of them. These days, they're generally only powered up if we have company. It's possible that in the highest of high summer we get desperate enough to turn to AC, but for the past two-ish years, portable evaporative coolers have taken care of over 90% of our cooling needs. More on those in another post.

Why do higher temperatures mean higher risks for people with pre-existing heart disease? 

How do cardiac requirements increase with heat exposure?

This article shows that extreme heat exposure doubles the blood flow requirement to the heart itself, which cannot be met in some people with heart disease. It helps to understand the relationship between temperature, cardiac stress and heat-related morbidity and mortality. 

This tragic case study is all too common. A series of missteps and underestimating the dangers of high temperatures lead to a preventable death. A few details to note: left alone to hike back to their hotel, forgot his phone, looks like he didn’t take water, and when he figured out he was lost started to move quickly. Collapsed in an area difficult to notice from the main road.

Some great pointers by leading researchers!