Too hot? Too cold?

by Dr Bob Rich

Don’t reach for the thermostat yet.

You can save a huge amount of electricity, gas, firewood or whatever your temperature-control energy source is and yet live a good life.

Let me tell you a story. After all, it is one of my favourite pastimes. In the 1970s, I worked for a research organisation that received funding to reduce staff turnover at remote mining communities in Australia’s tropical areas. Poring over the records soon revealed that there were three kinds of employees: single men, men who left their families behind and took regular breaks to be home with them, and men who brought their families with them.

The first two kinds lasted at the job without much trouble. The culprits were the third kind.

On-site observation showed that the men and children soon got adapted to the heat, but the wives never did. They went from air-conditioned house in air-conditioned car to air-conditioned shops and things. Each time they emerged into the real world, the heat punched them in the face. So, they soon started nagging their husbands to go.

The research team’s solution used the mighty force of greed. The wives were paid to play tennis out in the heat.

Staff turnover reduced.

I remember a second story from my teenage years. One of my addictions was reading, and by 17, I’d read everything in the school library, and in the local public library. This included everything, even encyclopaedias. And there was interesting stuff about Antarctic explorers. One mob were pulling their sleds across the snow and ice — no sissy stuff like dogs for them, they did the pulling themselves — when a heatwave caught them. The temperature rose almost to freezing point, you know, 0°C or 32°F? They were so hot they had to take their shirts off and pull bare-chested.

So, here is the first energy-saving trick: vigorous exercise induces your body to rapidly adapt to any temperature regime. Currently it’s autumn sliding into winter in the Southern Hemisphere, spring springing toward summer north of the Equator. So, it’s an ideal time to get started. Pick the warmest time of the day in the north, coolest in the south, and do vigorous exercise. A minimum of 20 minutes three times a week is good, if your body allows it. The criterion is, work up a bit of a sweat.

By the time the worst of the season arrives, you’ll be able to shrug it off.

The second point is, you don’t actually need to control the temperature of your house. You only need to control the temperature of a few millimetres of air next to your skin. A recent invention to achieve this, perhaps a million years ago, is clothing. That works well in the coolth, while in the warmth we need to learn from the cultures who live in hot climates. Desert dwellers wear long, loose, voluminous robes, and their heads are mostly covered. Think Tuareg, like this bloke below:

‘Tuareg’, by Bradley C Watson (Creative Commons)

Mind you, why isn’t the camel dressed in the same way?

In the humid tropics, people live in the shade, like the Dayaks in Borneo. They use evaporative cooling by actually building their houses over a stretch of river.

Another story: when I was a tiny tot, the summer my family spent as Hitler’s guest in the ghetto was terribly hot. My grandmother, the fount of all wisdom, wrapped me in a wet sheet, and this worked so well that the adults also used this trick. Nowadays, you can buy a special cloth that holds a lot of water without dripping. You can wrap this around your neck.

The final tool is something that works for every source of discomfort: equanimity, or simple acceptance. A chapter of my book, From Depression to Contentment (here’s a ‘genius link’ to it), teaches you how, or if you are too poor to buy an electronic copy, you can read the short story Buddhist equanimity is useful.

Last winter, a dear friend defied the lockdown and visited us. My wife and I were quite comfortable, with temperature at 16 degrees C, but I noticed her shivering, so put on the reverse cycle thingie to warm up the room for her. Even in winter, our solar panels squeezed out enough electricity to run it without drawing power from the grid, so it was a zero footprint exercise.

So, there you have it. Save the planet without frostbite or heatstroke.

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