Thread by @jzellis

I'm gonna explain to y'all why Britain considers 78°F/25°C hot. I know hot because I grew up in Texas and spent half my life in Las Vegas. So I am absolutely qualified to explain this to the rest of you who laugh at UK "heat waves".

First of all, most people don't really seem to get how far north Britain is. If I flew due west I'd hit northern Quebec. If it wasn't for the North Atlantic Current, this island would look more like Iceland. So it didn't used to get *hot* here really at all.

The climate has always been coldish-cool and it's crazy humid. Like Florida humid. It rains a lot. The closest climate to it I'm familiar with is Seattle.

Know what people in climates like that don't have?

Air conditioning. They didn't need it until recently.

The houses are built to retain heat, not circulate breezes. They're bunkers - small windows, a lot of transom - the ones that don't slide up like sash windows but have a smol window at the top that opens outward to keep rain from getting in.

No ceiling fans either.

So imagine being in a stone or brick building in Tampa at 70% humidity at 75°F with no AC, ceiling fan or breeze, and that's my house on the edge of London today.

It's goddamn miserable, and I say that as a dude who's experienced 125°F dry heat many times. Better that than this.

The British use those tower fans, which any hot climate person rightly regards with contempt. They are useless. The only thing that works in heat is a box fan in a window pulling air from the shady side of the house.

Guess what they don't have here?

You know those Lasko box fans you can get in literally any American store for less than $20? This is the cheapest equivalent I can find here. That's $83 at today's exchange rates. I've literally never seen one here.

Their entire society is designed around chilly damp.

Now, I have issues with AC for environmental reasons, but I'm also not interested in stroking out from heat, so when I moved here I dropped £100 on a used standalone AC unit off Marketplace. It's the size of a dryer and it takes up way too much room in our house, but it works.

I have an accordioning vent hose that goes out the back transom window into our back garden.

It uses roughly £1 of electricity per hour. Not per day, per hour. This is not ideal if you're poor, and we are poor. But at least I have it. Very few people here do, even in new houses.

The heat wave summer before last killed hundreds, maybe thousands of Brits. They don't know how to handle this weather anymore than Texans know how to handle blizzards. They think they can stiff-upper-lip through it and it kills them.

It also kills power and transportation.

The power grid is hot. In hot places like Vegas, it requires special infrastructure to keep transformers from popping like Orville Redenbacher in a microwave. They didn't build those cooling subsystems in here for the same reason they don't do it in Moscow or Helsinki: why?

It's expensive and requires constant maintenance. As do rail systems, which buckle in heat if the length of rail segments is too long. So the trains stop working if it's even a warm day by, for example, Southern California standards.

Britain is just not equipped for heat.

I'm outside right now and it's 76°F and 53% humidity and it feels like I'm in a sauna. Thank God the clouds are out because earlier it was really unpleasant.

Understand me when I tell you I am used to heat most of you can't imagine.

This is still nasty and gross to me.

And it's only going to get worse, and it's going to take years for these poor bastards to update their infrastructure and culture to it. I warn as many of them as I can. They can believe me or not.

Sun's out. I'm heading for the shade now. 😂😎🥵

Turned off comments once the fucktards showed up. I don't debate climate change and I don't care what you think of that.