(Photo by Carlos Yepes at Scopio)
Sometime today or tomorrow, the UK will reach a landmark: the highest temperature ever recorded in this country, 40 to 43 Celsius. 40 Celsius is 104 Fahrenheit.
I grew up in Texas when air conditioning was uncommon. The schools weren’t air conditioned when I went through them. The gym at Rice University wasn’t air conditioned either, and wasn’t well ventilated. Aside from the doors, it had some relatively short windows just below the very high ceiling, and ceiling fans way up there that scarcely sent any air movement to the floor. In August, the hottest month, we began training for volleyball season. My last couple of years there, we wore long sleeved jerseys. Humidity along the Gulf Coast is high, so sweat doesn’t evaporate to cool you off. It just runs down and puddles in your shoes.
I grew up in heat like what the UK is getting, but that doesn’t mean I like it or find it comfortable.
We have two problems with this heat here. No living thing here is accustomed to it, and our infrastructure isn’t built for it.
Some of our roads will melt. Some of our buses are air conditioned and some are not. For our trains, many won’t be able to run or will only be able to run slowly due to warped rails and sagging power lines. The train cars are usually metal ovens in weather like this, not air conditioned and not able to open enough windows. Skyscrapers and big stores have air conditioning systems, but otherwise we don’t have much of it. What we do have is sized for milder temperatures.
In Texas and at family property on the Mississippi coast, we had either a huge box fan mounted in a window (powered with electric motors salvaged from old Packard cars) or a whole-house fan mounted in a ceiling that pulled air through the house and pushed it out. We had ceiling fans which are almost silent, cost hardly anything to run, and make a room feel a few degrees cooler than it is. We drank a lot of fluids throughout the day, because we sweated a lot. We took a nap or at least stayed inside or in shade doing something quiet like reading for the hottest couple of hours of the day. Exertion and being out in the sun were for early morning or for evening. Mowing the grass, painting the house, fishing, bicycling, climbing trees, playing, having a game of softball, whatever, were not for the heat of midday.
Violating such norms was not just unpleasant. Several years ago a Southerner I used to work with decided to put new shingles on his roof in the height of a Tennessee summer. He worked on it in the middle of the day. He got heatstroke and died.
Southern USA houses built before air conditioning have lots of windows to be able to catch any breeze from any direction. They have big screened-in porches to sit on, catching the breeze even better. Southerners perfected the art of sitting in a rocking chair on the porch, sipping iced tea, getting maximum movement of the chair with minimum flexing of one ankle for a bit more air movement, swapping stories first about ourselves, then about people we knew, then making stories up. I’ve always thought that’s why so many of the USA’s best authors in that era were Southerners.
The average home or small business in the UK doesn’t have that. We don’t have porches or verandas. We don’t have air conditioning. We don’t have good cross-ventilation. Our buildings are designed more for holding in heat and are terrible at dissipating heat. Our typical house construction has exterior walls of brick over concrete block, providing immense thermal mass. It soaks up heat on days like these and radiates the heat throughout the night.
If you work in a business with air conditioning, the best place to be for the next couple of days is at work. Otherwise, most people are stuck in the heat, at home or work or school.
Some people aren’t going to make it through this heat wave.
Just since I moved to the UK at the end of 2006, I can see the weather patterns changing here. Heat waves like this will happen more often. The UK faces an increasing need to make some changes to handle weather like this. Those changes range from the infrastructure dealt with by government, to workplaces and schools, to homes.
Other countries face their own variations on the same theme.
Mother Nature is sending a message, and we will have to pay attention whether we want to or not.