If our internal body temperature is 98°, how come we prefer weather at about 70?
In: Biology
Our body *produces* heat by being alive, so we need to constant get rid of this heat or we’ll cook ourselves to death.
We can dump the heat via radiation (being hot in a cold place) or through sweating.
Radiation only helps if the air is quite a bit cooler than we are, 70F would be great.
Sweating can cool us even when it’s super hot, but it’s hampered by humidity. At around 80-80% humidity we can no longer cool ourselves via sweating.
So in a nutshell, a human could survive in theory with the temperature being 120F so long as they had some shade, plenty of gatorade, and the air was dry.
Once the temperature gets to be about 80F and the humidity approaches 100% neither radiation nor sweating is effective any longer and that’s when things get rough.
Google “Wet Bulb Events” for more info but that’s a sincere threat to humanity as part of climate change, we just need a couple of good days at 80F with high humidity and pretty much everyone without central AC is pretty dang muerto.
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