Even if they are the same temperature the reaction to them is starkly different.
In: Biology
Air is an insulator, which is to say it is relatively poor at transferring heat. You can be blasted in the face with 400°F air when you open the oven and be OK, but if you were splashed with even 200°F water you would be seriously burned.
This goes both ways. You are fine standing in a 70°F room, even naked, but being immersed in 70°F water would feel very cold because it is allowing heat to transfer out of you much more quickly.
Our bodies produce heat as a byproduct of our metabolism and we need to constantly shed it to our environment. The rate of heat transfer increases with the difference in temperature, and since air is so bad at transferring heat we need a significant difference to reach a comfortable rate. Water though is much better at transferring heat so we can shed body heat at a comfortable rate even when the water is much closer to body temperature.
We might for example be able to shed as much body heat into water at 85°F than we can into air at 70°F due to how bad air is at exchanging heat.
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