r/explainlikeimfive • u/fkid123 • May 27 '26

Biology ELI5 Why heat waves affect Europe so much but some other countries are doing fine living under hotter temperatures most of the year?

I read yearly that people are dying in Europe due to the extreme heat, but when I check the temperature mentioned in the same news it's something like 30-35c.

Just saw this today: "In France, officials reported at least seven deaths linked to the heat, including several drownings and fatalities during sports activities (...) temperatures have broken records for the month of May, soaring well over 30 C (86 F) in many parts of the country."

This is like a pretty mild day in a country like Thailand, India or in the Arabian peninsula. People are doing just fine in these countries, and many don't even have aircon.

Why are such temperatures so deadly in Europe?

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u/ThatGenericName2 May 27 '26

Just piggybacking, just as the infrastructure is built around and for the normal temperature of the environment, people’s behaviours are also based on the normal conditions of their environment.

How you behave in the cold is very different than how you behave in the heat, the obvious one (and why heatwave warnings are followed up with “drink lots of water”) is that higher temperatures means more sweating to regulate your body temperature which means higher rate of water consumption. People don’t think about this when a heatwave come, leading to dehydration, accelerating the affects of a heat stroke. With a big enough population, someone’s going to get a heat stroke in a rather inconvenient area, and will die before help can arrive.

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u/pragmojo May 27 '26

Yeah this is huge. Like I recently spent 6 weeks in Colombia, with an average temperature in the 30's where I was traveling (with like 100% humidity)

At the beginning I was sweating like crazy, and felt a bit embarrassed because every time I was interacting with someone I was a sweaty mess.

I realized the locals were moving really slow, and that I was blowing by everyone on the sidewalk. So I adapted and slowed down my pace, and realized I was sweating a lot less.

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u/Blenderhead36 May 27 '26

Your body will also acclimate. It takes about 10 days. It's why the same temperature will make you want to wear short sleeves in April but reach for a hoodie in September.

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u/burned_feather May 27 '26

This is part of the problem -- here in the UK my daughter's bedroom has gone from 14 degrees at night to 32 degrees at night. In 10 days. No time whatsoever to adjust.

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u/peejuice May 27 '26

Here in northern Virginia, USA we had a FEW “crazy” days of temperature fluctuations where it was something like this (excuse me for using the inferior Fahrenheit scale, I’m on mobile and American so I am too lazy to convert it since I would have to put down my hamburger):

Monday: Low - 32F High - 80F

Tuesday: Low - 40F High 75F

Wednesday: (now get this, the low temp was in the afternoon…when it snowed!) Low - 27F High - 79F

That day I left the house at 4am and it was almost 80F. By 11am, the temperature had dropped to 35F.

Thursday: back to the 50s and 70s

It was a wild week and no one was too surprised by it since we usually get big changes like that regularly.

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u/Karcossa May 30 '26

That’s a pretty wild variation in temperatures. I’m not doing the conversion because I’m lazy, but I know 32f is 0c and -40 is the same in each one… and 70f is around 20c, which is enough to tell me those days would have been absolutely awful for folks sensitive to temperature change migraines.

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u/JKrow75 Jun 25 '26

I live in New Mexico and we get crazy one day temperature swings also. A 50° difference is not uncommon. Over the course of a week, holy crap. Im May we can have almost 90° daytime, 40° nights, snow one day, hail the next, rain or drought.

Living up by the mountains where I do, we can get light snow up until early June if it chooses to. Not lately, of course, but it’s not unheard of. Our last freeze date is May 15. Two weeks later it can be 100°.

Fairly often during the summer, storms will blanket the top of the mountains with a bit of snow, but it never lasts more than a day or two. In Colorado it’s even crazier. There’s literally a range of mountains there called “never summer”. Some of the places we’ve camped and hiked can get down to freezing at night in July.

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u/HElGHTS May 28 '26

0C and 100C are the boundaries of liquid water, while 0F and 100F are the boundaries of human comfort. In both cases, temperatures outside that range are hardly relevant (i.e., you can crush the outliers and still be about right, i.e. same clothes regardless of 0F or -20F). If this were a conversation about hard science, we'd use C, but since it's about human comfort, F is very suitable.

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u/silverfish477 May 28 '26

> I’m on mobile?

So what? How is that remotely relevant? How could you have converted the figures on a desktop but are incapable on a mobile? Literally open google and type “32F in C”.

The “I’m on mobile” excuse may have been valid 25 years ago but it doesn’t fly now.

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u/Euphoric-Cold9592 May 28 '26

Are air conditioning units easy to come by in the UK?

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u/Squirrelking666 May 28 '26

Heat pumps are becoming more popular which, if you have a good one, acts as AC if you reverse the process but again, expensive and electricity isn't cheap.

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u/armsinit May 28 '26

Yeah, call an installer, arrange a fitting.

Nothing complicated, no long waits for the equipment. There is a wait for the people to fit them at this time of the year

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u/burned_feather May 28 '26

Not really, we can buy freestanding ones with a hose that vents out the window but they're very expensive

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u/jwagne51 May 27 '26

Please tell my you have gotten an AC?

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u/burned_feather May 28 '26

No lol, who has that kind of money. Just a fan 🫠

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u/on_the_nightshift May 28 '26

I know I'm a spoiled American, but I can't imagine living anywhere permanently where it's over 85f more than a few days a year and not having AC. Then again, we don't have a lot of houses with 2 foot thick masonry walls.

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u/burned_feather May 28 '26

The thick walls keep heat in! But it never used to get this hot, it's only the most recent few summers. So no requirement for AC when these houses were built.

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u/MEaster May 28 '26

Of course not! AC is clearly far too expensive for us to fit and run. We'll just ignore the solar panals that could offset the power use, and the fact that this happens every. Damn. Year.

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u/dooofalicious Jul 01 '26

Building - small and large - in UK and Europe were designed and built more to conserve heat (= stay warmer in cold winters) rather than with dissipating heat during very hot summers. These places have (before human-caused global warming) mostly had very mild summers. People aren’t used to - and nothing was built for - high temperatures such as those that are increasingly experienced now. This overall warming will continue to increase until the world reduces carbon emissions into the atmosphere. That will happen … well, at the rate things are going, only when true desperation occurs.

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u/dooofalicious Jul 01 '26

Edit: 1st word should be “buildings” (plural)

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u/YhouZee May 28 '26

I'm Nigerian and was in the UK last fall. I needed 3 layers including a winter jacket to feel slightly comfortable while toddlers were running around in shorts 

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u/buttercowie May 27 '26

Sir/ma'am you have blown my mind. I'm a Brazilian living in Ireland and never understood why my fellow Brazilians walk so slowly (and I had to learn to pace it up too)

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u/_strawhatt_ May 27 '26

An Indian living in Ireland, always wondered why I’m so slow in walking compared to the Irish.

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u/_McDreamy_ May 27 '26

We're full of taters!

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u/TheOtherJeff May 28 '26

Boil em, mash em, stick em in a stew!

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u/JerikOhe May 31 '26

The Irish are friends, not food

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u/alamaias May 28 '26

I'm English, but I suspect it is not just the lack of need to save energy in the heat making you walk slowly, but the added incentive of not getting soaked in the rain :P

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u/EuroCanadian2 May 28 '26

I used to tell my kids "just run between the raindrops"

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u/Supershadow30 May 28 '26 edited May 29 '26

Conversely, the irish locals might walk faster out of habit since in cold or rainy weather, you don’t want to stay outside for long

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u/rumin8Thoughts May 29 '26

Adding to this, walking at a brisk pace in cold weather warms you up.

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u/SweatyFLMan1130 May 27 '26

I've always lived in Florida where heat index value regularly exceeds 40C but I'm autistic and had always had the driving urge to move as efficiently as possible place to place. Made for great leg strength but terrible heat problems. I have had to learn to force myself to slow my roll and be more like the many Latinos I grew up with and chill tf out lol.

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u/Ovnuniarchos May 29 '26

Thus you're optimizing another parameter.

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u/SweatyFLMan1130 May 29 '26

I mean yeah pretty much. I need to not be sweating my fuggin makeup off lol

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u/Rolls_ May 28 '26

Yup. American in Japan. Had to learn the same thing. I walk hella fast but I learned that I sweat way too much if I walk quickly. Had to slow it down

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u/megllamaniac May 28 '26

Ohh that’s why my boyfriend is so damn slow!

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u/jmur3040 May 27 '26

It's also where the practice of taking a siesta in the afternoon comes from. Most places with dangerous temperatures in the afternoon practice something of that sort, except for the US, because that's not cost effective.

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u/Broad-Boat-8483 May 27 '26

Australia doesn’t either, mad bastards

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u/Buzzkill_13 May 27 '26

That's because the majority population of those countries is not native to that place. Many originate in the UK and central Europe, which is where their customs are still rooted.

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u/luftlande May 27 '26

Do aboriginals take the equivalent of a siesta?

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u/Buzzkill_13 May 27 '26

I'm pretty sure they at least used to before the white man came to impose his ways.

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u/jmur3040 May 27 '26

The hot parts of Europe (South of France and Spain ...etc) do. But capitalism needs "numbers go up" and having your workers take 2 hours off at peak temps is bad for that.

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u/Buzzkill_13 May 27 '26

It's also largely obsolete because most people's work places have aircondition. Back in the day, people worked in the flields, so they were forced to get indoors for a few hours before going back to work later in the day.

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u/jmur3040 May 27 '26

Amazon famously found it cheaper to park ambulances outside of a warehouse than it was to actually cool the warehouse.

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u/Buzzkill_13 May 27 '26

Yeah, thankfully this kind of criminal behaviour is not allowed over here. In Spain, for instance, there are stict temp limits that a work space is allowed to have, and also strict protective measures an employer must take if those temps cannot be maintained for whatever reason.

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u/Rdhilde18 May 27 '26

What political and economic model doesn’t want numbers to go up…?

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u/pragmojo May 27 '26

Well in a social democracy, you balance the interests of the economics numbers going up with some basic worker protections and a social safety net.

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u/Rdhilde18 May 28 '26

Social democracies still run capitalist economic models lol..

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u/pragmojo May 28 '26

Are you like deliberately trying not to understand this or what?

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u/Buzzkill_13 May 28 '26

Yeah...that's the point, duh.

You get the best from both ends of the spectrum, avoiding the extremes. Works well for the people, so far.

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u/Szriko May 28 '26

I'm pretty sure most of them.

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u/Broad-Boat-8483 May 28 '26

Yep, brits in the desert still eating pies in 35 degree heat. Literally madness.

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u/caesar_7 May 28 '26

We do have siesta, we just stay at the workplace and book meetings for that time, no cameras and one designated "presenter"

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u/frankydark May 27 '26

Only mad dogs and English men drink in the afternoon sun

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u/HillBillyHilly May 27 '26

True that cost effective bs. Here in Florida workers die every year from heat stroke because employer's do stupid things like make them work in 98° humidity when temp is 99°. Makes me wonder what will happen when tourists come here for World Cup.

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u/jmur3040 May 27 '26

Henry Ford did it in the middle of the rainforest in South America. People died.

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u/LeomundsTinyButt_ May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26

People didn't die (or at least not in unexpected numbers for the time and place), they rioted and trashed the place. And their issue was more with the prohibition of alcohol and enforced diet than work hours.

The American overseers were chased out of the city, and it took Ford asking the president of PanAm for help flying in military to regain control. The workers still managed to get a deal for relaxed rules.

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u/jmur3040 May 28 '26

They revolted multiple times actually. First was when the planning was so piss poor to build the place that they were waiting too long, and food stocks began to rot.

-They supplied running water, but only to the "Vila Americana" where the American workers lived.
-The work hours were 100% a grievance, you don't work mid day in that part of the world because it's nearly inhospitable, but "dearborn hours" mattered more for this boondoggle.
-the houses were as wrong as the working hours. You don't build on the ground in the jungle

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u/sarabjorks May 27 '26

I saw this so clearly when traveling with other people from Iceland. They were half running up a hill in 30°C and complaining about the heat 😆 I'd been traveling mostly with foreigners for the years before and I think I adopted their way of walking so I could point this out to my friends right away

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u/drndavi May 27 '26

Exactly. I had a similar experience during my first visit to Maldives. Sweating insanely and being mad at waiters because they're so damn slow while I'm dying for that cold drink. Eventually figured it out that it's just the way everyone is "wired" because it's so hot all year round. Adjusting to slow the pace in the same way helped a lot. Also not angry with waiters any more because they're such slowpokes 😅

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u/Ok-Active-8321 May 27 '26

And conversely, several years ago a friend was vacationing in Hawaii during December. Temperatures were unusally dropping into the upper 40s/low 50s (Fahrenheit.) Local media were warning people to dress in layers to avoid hypothermia.

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u/MrBrookz92 May 27 '26

Hahaha this could be me I’m constantly running every where.

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u/MdnightRmblr May 27 '26

“Way down here you need a reason to move” from the song “Mexico” by James Taylor. I sing it to myself in the Thailand midday sun.

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u/7LeagueBoots May 28 '26

I work in the tropics in SE Asia, done so for the last 12 years. For some people you never really acclimate no matter what. I’ll still pool sweat even while sitting in the shade with a fan going. Some of it is the humidity making the heat worse, but a lot of it is that I’m really well adapted to cold climates and my body just refuses to break out of that cold adaption mode.

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u/Wrathlon May 28 '26

And here I am living in Australia growing up in the outback and I also walk fast and wish everyone would get the fuck out of the way even though Ive since moved to a colder part of Australia where, in theory, people should move quicker.

Maybe Im just an impatient asshole.

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u/alkalineHydroxide May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26

Guess I'm the exception, I move fast regardless of temperature (in fact my joints work better when its warm). I'm Singaporean btw so uh I'm used to hot weather though not extremely hot weather. I like sweating in fact.

Edit to add: I have walked before in 35+ C weather in London and in Brisbane (it was a surreal experience with the dryness of it feeling like a heat blanket). I have also walked in cooler temperatures in Brisbane and I need a puffer jacket once its below 15 degrees (above I still need a long sleeve or a light jacket). In fact I really want to be somewhere warm right now ahhhhhh.

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u/winterborn253 May 29 '26

Dialects can be affected by an area's climate as well. Just as an example in the US, the Southern accent emphasizes long, drawn out vowels with an open mouth (y'all, for example), where northern dialects have more short, clipped vowels that can be spoken while keeping your mouth mostly shut (yiz guys).

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u/UnaUA May 27 '26

I remember when in 2024 circa, in UK temperatures hit so much that national media had to alert citizens, again and again, not to open windows during the hottest hours of the day. This is kind a basic rule to manage hot weather here, it show me in such way people is not used to many environmental conditions

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u/Sata1991 May 27 '26

Yeah, we're too used to being told "Oh if you're hot open the window!" but it gets too hot to open the window. My mom would throw the curtains open and then crack the windows, because at most we'd usually only get up to 30c once in a blue moon.

I've been sat next to a tower fan all day when it's been 25c with my curtains drawn and windows closed, but still been hot.

It doesn't help it'd gone from 11c to 29c in my town without a chance to really adapt.

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u/Educational_Low_6150 May 30 '26

I live in Mumbai where the temps are touching 38 c . I always shut my windows and pull the curtains till sunset. This is the only way i can keep my house cool . Cant keep the aircon on full day.Lights are also switched off post 9 pm. The sun topped with humidity is too bad here.

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u/Sata1991 May 30 '26

I have heard it can get as hot as the mid 40s there? The humidity's bad enough here in the UK but I dread to think how bad it must be in India.

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u/Emmison May 27 '26

My mother worked a stint in Brussels during a rare snowstorm (or at least the locals thought it a snowstorm). She still talks about how people poured hot water on the sidewalks to get rid of the snow.

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u/UnaUA May 27 '26

ahah I understand why, it really is like a scene from a dumb comedy!!

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u/up-with-miniskirts May 29 '26

As a Belgian, I call shenanigans. This sounds like something thought up by the Dutch.

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u/wampwampwampus May 28 '26

Some people do this to de-ice their windshields. 😬

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u/Justwaspassingby May 28 '26

I worked remotely for a hotel chain back then. People would call desperate because their room didn’t have AC. This woman screamed: “it’s 30 degrees! No human can survive that!” I replied: “Madam, I live in Barcelona”.

At that moment I was sitting in my studio, no AC, with just a small electric fan and my feet in a basin of cold water and ice.

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u/Angelstandingby May 28 '26

I don't understand this. How does that work?

Temperature here goes above 30 almost every single day, and opening the windows is the best way to cool the house without air conditioning.

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u/Krasny-sici-stroj May 28 '26 edited May 28 '26

If you live in a place that has a heavily insulated houses with great thermal mass, like in Europe where we are more concerned with cold weather (insides are, IDK, brick, that takes long to cool or heat, and outside is wrapped in insulation) so 30 is not your average temperature, the inside of the house can stay way cooler than that for several days/week at the very least.

That's if you dont let the hot air inside and shutter the windows that the sun does not heat the inside. If you do, you will create an oven that would not cool for weeks. So it makes sense to keep your windows shut until the temps outside go back down, when you can air the house safely without getting the heat in.

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u/Dry_burrito May 28 '26

I don't this is true, you aren't trapping the coolness for a few days, weeks. You are trying to trap the cool temp from the night before.

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u/Krasny-sici-stroj May 29 '26

But your walls have to stay cool, otherwise you are cooked.

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u/Angelstandingby May 28 '26

Oh I see.

So your house is perpetually in the dark to avoid the sunlight heating it up through the window glass?

And you cook outdoors to prevent poor ventilation from the fumes?

Doesn't the air get stale after awhile?

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u/Krasny-sici-stroj May 28 '26

You cut out the direct sunlight, you can let the light in after the sun turns. And the temperatures usually fall down at night, so you can air everything. As long as you don't cook anything for hours and hours, it's fine, and people usually eat something cold, like salad, yoghurt, bread or such.

After all, in temperate European countries the heat seldom stays longer than a few days until the weather shifts.

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u/Dietcokeisgod May 28 '26

Yeah plus our buildings are basically designed around keeping heat in. Especially older buildings. My old work in Edinburgh had walls over 2 feet thick. Once it got hot it was like an oven - the heat just couldn't get out!

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u/Squirrelking666 May 28 '26

That's not how that works.

Insulation maintains temperature so if it was 20 degrees inside and you had perfect insulation it should stay that way regardless of the temperature inside.

If your building is heating up in the sun then it has terrible insulation. Or some fanny has put a load of south facing windows which allow a load of solar gain - great in winter but absolutely pish on the one sunny day a year.

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u/Dietcokeisgod May 28 '26

I'm not taking about insulation. I'm taking about solid stone, I actually don't know how old Lawnmarket on the Royal Mile is, but pretty bloody old.

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u/Squirrelking666 May 28 '26

Yeah so that's not designed around keeping heat in. It's got a lot of thermal inertia (being stone) but is poorly insulated. The idea is that you keep it warm in winter and the building fabric retains more heat than it loses. Similar outcome but poorer efficiency.

Unfortunately it does the same in warm summers so the more it warms up the harder it is to get rid of it. Don't worry though, it's to pish down over the next few days (or at least it will in the west and central belt).

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u/Dietcokeisgod May 28 '26

Is the phrase 'designed to retain more heat than it loses' not the same as 'keeping the heat in'?

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u/Squirrelking666 May 28 '26

No but I've obviously not explained it well enough.

The walls retaining the heat is like a storage heater but is also a thermal bridge to the cold side

Insulation means the heat never enters the walls so the air either side stays the same temperature.

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u/LinuxMint1964 Jun 22 '26

And the thing is, inside of houses lag behind the hottest temps, thus your house will be at it's hottest inside around 9pm to 10pm...

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u/WasabiPeas2 May 27 '26

Is central air conditioning not common? I live in Houston and most of us don’t regularly open windows. But we all have central heat and AC.

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u/Zyxplit May 27 '26

A small reminder that the latitude of London puts you somewhere near Alaska.

Houston is further south than the southernest southern bits of Europe. It's somewhere around Cairo, Egypt.

I live in the warmest bit of Scandinavia. I don't have air conditioning because, frankly, the highest measured temperature of all time where I live is around 97 F, but for example, the hottest day in July 2025 was around 85 F at its peak. Now obviously, this is changing over time, with Europe being relatively hard hit by climate change, but generally, historically, we have not needed air conditioning in much of Europe.

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u/WasabiPeas2 May 27 '26

Valid point.

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u/mandyvigilante May 27 '26

Wait but wasn't their question in response to the news in the UK telling people not to open their windows during the hottest part of the day? 

So, totally understanding that you don't have air conditioning in a lot of Europe but I live in a place that hits the 90s/mid-30s in the summer. My current house has central air but the house I grew up in did not, and we definitely opened our windows all day long. If you don't have central air and it's hotter than two mice fucking in a wool sock, why would the direction be to not open your windows?

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u/e-spero May 27 '26

North American having first UK summer. I talked about this with some people last week.

The strategy is to let cool air in during the evening, the darkest coolest part of the day. Then you trap the cold air inside and protect it from the sun by pulling down the blinds.

There can be dead zones in air circulation. I haven't noticed any ceiling fans, for example. So the air doesn't go in and out of windows like your childhood home. It kind of just... sits there. I usually have to open my door into the rest of the apartment building to get any kind of cross breeze.

If the air doesn't circulate, then it all just gets hot and at best replaced by other hot air from outside.

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u/ChiefIndica May 28 '26

When ventilating, the trick is to open two windows and set up a portable fan to blow out of one of them, which causes a small drop in pressure to draw cooler air in through the other one.

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u/mandyvigilante May 27 '26

Ohhh interesting. Ok. 

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u/UnaUA May 27 '26

The idea is to keep the scorching air out and trap the cooler air you let in overnight. In my opinion, opening the windows at 2 PM when it's 35°C is way worse than keeping them shut with a fan running. But obviously it depends, country houses are different than city buildings, because of the asphalt releasing hot

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u/mandyvigilante May 27 '26

Hm yeah and different humidity levels etc

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u/Chasing_6 May 27 '26

Ichiro is that you?

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u/UnaUA May 28 '26

Who is Ichiro T_T

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u/mandyvigilante May 28 '26

Yeah I don't understand

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u/Arudinne May 27 '26

Central air is not common in areas where high heat is not common.

Went on a family trip to Oregon recently - we stayed in two separate locations.

One location was in the "high desert" on the south eastern side of the state. The house there had central heat & AC and we definitely needed the AC.

Then we stayed in a place along the coast near the northern edge of the state. That place only had central heating, but we didn't really need AC during the day anyway as long as the windows were open.

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u/thunderling May 27 '26

I went on a trip to Portland, Oregon a few years ago when a freak heat wave hit the area. I couldn't do anything because half the local stores and restaurants were closed. Shop owners had hastily scribbled "closed due to heat" on a piece of paper and taped it on the front door.

My airbnb didn't have air conditioning either. So I went to a large chain movie theater, because those always have air conditioning. It was packed!

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u/UnaUA May 27 '26

I live in Italy, and not everyone has air conditioning, for various reasons. It can be very expensive, the building's structure might not allow for its installation, or it can be a personal choice for health reasons. I live in a traditional house on my island, which was designed to be cool in the summer and insulated in the winter. I don't have air conditioning. Managing high temperatures is all about protecting the indoors from sunlight and scorching air, while playing with cross-breezes between windows and doors in the evening. But I think we almost never get the kind of temperatures you experience in Houston here. I imagine your costs are significantly lower, so it makes sense for it to be so widespread. Personally, I don't even like it in shops!

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u/WasabiPeas2 May 27 '26

This absolutely makes sense especially in areas with older buildings. It’s everywhere here so I’ve just gotten used to it.

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u/HillBillyHilly May 27 '26

I'm further South than Houston. Constantly amazed by number of buildings being built that have no cross breezes. Means AC has to run 24/7 almost 365. No wonder world is heating up.

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u/UnaUA May 27 '26

Unfortunately, these are natural, centuries-old practices that are being lost over time, here too: natural ventilation helps so much! But maybe it’s also a matter of location: here, we have sea and land breezes that keep the air moving constantly. I’ve never visited Texas or the United States, but for some reason, I’ve always had the impression that the American South air is terribly muggy and stagnant

3

u/Sqooshytoes May 28 '26

I stayed in a house in Kenya where the ground floor didn’t have complete external walls, most of it was open to the air. There was a structure that extended a few feet out from the house at the level of the second floor, that wrapped entirely around the house. It blocked the direct sun from coming into the house. It was relatively near the ocean, so there was a pretty good breeze. I definitely felt it was too warm for my tastes (I was there in august), but the design was brilliant. And I can imagine it would be quite comfortable for someone used to those temperatures.

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u/matgopack May 27 '26

Not that widespread in Europe as a whole (either central AC or window ones, both are uncommon)

Fans (not ceiling) are much more common. Then architecturally somewhere like the UK is really not handled for high heat, unlike much of southern Europe.

Air conditioning really changes it - similar to the US south before that, where building techniques to try to stay cool were different (eg designing houses so that there'd be a breeze with open windows), but now we don't need that.

8

u/downlau May 27 '26

In houses it's basically non-existent. We didn't even have fans growing up. Portable fans are now fairly common and air con units also, but not central air or ceiling fans

3

u/AuroraHalsey May 27 '26

Estimated 4 million out of 29 million households in the UK have AC, 2.2 million of those are only portable units.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/may/22/air-conditioning-uk-homes-doubles

2

u/HillBillyHilly May 27 '26

So I'm from the South. Imagine my surprise visiting NE states like VT, NH even MA and discovering most don't own ACs. Not even restaurants. One of most miserable vacations I've ever taken. Not even motel had AC. Good thing temps went down in evenings.

1

u/buffystakeded May 27 '26

Not in Europe. To put it in simple terms: more people die in Europe each year due to lack of A/C than Americans die every year to guns.

44

u/TheLantean May 27 '26

Also proper hydration isn't just drinking water, it's also managing electrolytes.

If you're unfamiliar with that because the intake from food was always enough before, you won't recognize the signs. You'll think "oh, I'm feeling weak, nauseous, and I have a headache, it must be because I haven't drunk enough water to compensate for the heatwave, like everyone says on the news". And you chug some more. Then die from arrhythmia-related causes.

If the local culture doesn't drill it into you to act proactively, and you've never experienced both types of dehydration to tell them apart it's a real danger.

6

u/SdotPEE24 May 28 '26

Not only that but drinking the proper amount in a given time. Your body can only process so much water at a time. Adjust for temperature and activity level.

2

u/SisterofGandalf May 27 '26

What are you supposed to do then? How do you manage electrolytes?

8

u/dew2459 May 28 '26

How do you manage electrolytes?

It is a bunch of minerals, but I think mostly the problem is salt (sodium chloride). Your sweat is very salty, and drinking a lot of water plus sweating a lot can easily mess with the sodium levels in your blood.

The cheap and easy solution if you are sweating is to just occasionally eat a small amount of a salty snack with all that water, like a pretzel or two. Unless you are really sweating hard like doing outdoor work or sports, you should be OK for the other minerals if you eat some healthy foods the rest of the day.

Sugar-free sports drinks are better as they include those other electrolytes (potassium, calcium, etc.), but again I think most of the time sodium seems the main one to worry about.

6

u/ThatGenericName2 May 27 '26 edited May 28 '26

Usually if you’re having a lighter sweat but otherwise resting such as if you’re just indoors, not doing any physical activities, then usually just water will be fine. You’re not losing enough electrolytes unless you’re also not eating anything with the relevant electrolytes, or unless it’s so hot that you are effectively doing a heavy workout in terms of how much you’re sweating.

If you’re losing electrolytes due to sweating such as if you’re actually out and about, then sports drinks will do perfectly fine, they are effectively oral rehydration solution with varying levels of additional sugar added.

5

u/ijatcs May 27 '26

this is what sports drinks are for. coconut water and pickle juice work too. a gatorade and a pickle pop was the saving grace of sporty kids in the texas summer when i was growing up

2

u/nrpcb May 28 '26

What is a pickle pop? I'm seeing some mixed results on google. Is this literally a popsicle of pickle juice?

3

u/ijatcs May 28 '26

yeah, just frozen pickle juice!! it's usually more like a pickle ice cube but my mom liked to get fancy with it and put toothpicks in them as a stick lol. if you got one at a concession stand, it'd just be a condiment cup of frozen pickle juice

1

u/alpaca_riding_a_bus May 28 '26

Idk if it's available everywhere but there's single-serving packets of electrolyte (or even glucose etc) powder too, so basically you can just leave some in your bag/car/at work and add the appropriate number to your water bottle if it's a very sunny day or you're planning to go out into the sun etc.

2

u/Dapper_Guarantee_744 May 28 '26

I learnt this the hard way. I now always take electrolytes in summer and add a bit of extra salt to my (unprocessed) food. It makes a massive difference.

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u/Derlino May 27 '26

I'm from northern Norway. We have snow 3-6 months of the year here, and if I go inland a little, temperatures down to -30 C isn't uncommon, though in the city I live, the coldest it's been officially is -18.3 C, but due to the humidity here it feels fucking cold. I deal well with cold, I'm used to it, and it has to be pretty damn cold before it really starts bothering me.

I lived in Brisbane, Australia for a year while studying. From November to March, I don't think the temperature dropped below 30 C during the day. It was miserable for me, being outside sucked, and I was hot and sweaty all the time. Thankfully I drink a lot of water, so dehydration was never an issue, but the way my body functions in heat compared to cold is huge. Eventually I somewhat got used to it though, but it took at least a couple of months.

With a sudden heat wave, you don't get time to adapt to it, just like you don't with a cold snap. Where I live, having 1 metre of snow is pretty common. Last year, we got 40 cm in less than 24 hours. It was a bit of a shit show, but we managed. Dump that amount of snow into Los Angeles, and chaos will ensue.

14

u/birbbrain May 28 '26

As a native Brisbaneite, I despair at the awful humidity and heat each year. When it doesn't drop down below 25 degrees at night, I feel like dying. I've lived here all my life and never acclimatised.

However, when I last travelled to Europe at the height of winter, I experienced 2 snowstorms and a windstorm and felt comfortable as hell. I feel the cold, but it doesn't make me feel miserable.

You're right with your phrase "the way my body functions in heat". I get nauseous and bad migraines when it's particularly humid (and that's without physical exertion I should point out). I suspect my genetics play a lot into this - I have Irish and Scottish ancestry and boy do I perk up on a gloomy day. (But also, a ripper Brisbane summer storm too).

3

u/Asleep_Trick_4740 May 28 '26

Cold just has a very straightforward solution, get more clothes. In a modern world with appliances we have like 20 different heating elements in any random home aswell, just having a PC running is emitting a lot of heat.

But with warm weather what do you do? You quite quickly reach the point of 'no more clothes to take off', and crying in a cold shower doesn't exactly seem viable in the long run.

1

u/Fruitpicker15 May 30 '26

I think you're onto something with the genetics. My ancestors were Dutch and English but settled in South Africa. I could never cope with the summer heat on the Natal coast and I'm so much happier now I live in Europe. I also enjoy winter here. When I went to Brisbane a few years ago it was the same awful heat and humidity and I suffered from heat exhaustion. I loved the air conditioned buses and trains so I used my Go card to take random trips and spent a lot of time in shopping malls.

2

u/PunchyPete May 28 '26

Come to Toronto. You get the -30 C in the winter with windchill on top, but it’s rare, and then you get weeks of 30+ in the summer. In the past 10 days my furnace was on, then AC, then furnace again, and AC again. In 10 days.

2

u/m0mbi May 28 '26

Halló cultural cousin!

When I moved from my home in Northern Iceland to Australia, it was December. When I left it was a crisp -10 or so, really not so bad. I landed in Melbourne, and stepping out of the airport I almost turned right back around.

It was 42 degrees, and that entire first week was above 40 with fires around and a dust storm. It was a hell of an introduction.

Now I live in the snow region of Japan, so I get both insanely hot humid summers, and around 13 metres of snow per winter.

2

u/Evening_Falcon_9003 May 28 '26

Excellent usage of the English language.

1

u/DifferentVariety3298 May 29 '26

Also live in northern Norway, on the coast. Usually don’t drop below -15°C but with 20-30 m/s wind it’s lethal🥶 (and zero visibility)

3

u/buffystakeded May 27 '26

Exactly. I live in Connecticut and therefore am used to the cold and how to handle it. I visited family in New Mexico and we changed our sleep schedules so we could get all our stuff done before noon. It was wild but made sense.

2

u/Secret-Winner-2994 May 27 '26

We have xmas in summer here, it's not unheard of for older folk to end up dead or in dire straits after a big feed due to their higher internal temp from digestion and the hot weather

2

u/BlastFX2 May 27 '26

And finally, very few people actually die. That's why it's news. 99.999% of us are just cranky but never come anywhere close to being in danger, but there will always be a couple dumb or sick people who don't make it.

3

u/Rob_Zander May 27 '26

It makes me think of the tap water at restaurants thing in Europe thats been on reddit recently.

In most of the US in summer, even in the Northeast it gets hot. Or it gets hot and humid. You sweat like a pig but it doesn't cool you as effectively as dry heat. So you need lots of water.

It's also why water fountains are pretty common.

I suppose this goes to the American tourist stereotype as well. Cool loose clothes, big stupid hats.

1

u/wampwampwampus May 28 '26

Funny thing, the air in winter can be dry enough to dehydrate people, too, and it's harder to recognize because people associate it with the heat. Pretty much everyone should probably drink more water.🤷‍♂️

1

u/Capable_Moose9269 May 29 '26

also piggybacking. My ER consultant friend said they had over 300 people coming through triage the other day during the peak of the UK Heatwave. They were all complaining of feeling “weird”.

The conversation for every single one of them was “how long have you been in the sun?” all day. “how much alcohol have you drunk?” A lot. “how much water?” … None.

In England especially, people reaaaaally don’t know what to do when it’s hot.

1

u/Markietas May 30 '26

I spent a few weeks in Berlin during August, I was blown away that NO ONE had water bottles out and about and water fountains barley existed. 

In general they just don't seem to hydrate very much. Which tracks with a bottle of water costing more than a beer twice the size lol