Freedom degrees. Roughly -13° or 38° if you live in the sane parts of the world.
I’d pick triple digits, mostly because I’ve lived in places that routinely hit 100° in the summer, and I hate shoveling snow.
I can survive in 9c but 100c will kill me.
yhea 9° is still shorts and t-shirts weather for me.
This, exactly lol
If you actually live in those temp ranges, you’re fucked either way. Modern technology is what makes those ranges bearable.
That being said, I can bundle up pretty easy compared to mitigating heat.
Single digits for sure. I’ll be okay from -9 to +9, but I don’t really see a solution to a 999°F heatwave
Assuming modern technology didn’t suddenly disappear, I would pick the cold without a doubt. Give me a good sized greenhouse attached to my home for growing my garden and I would be happy as a lamb. I hate summer, and the heat that comes with it. While 9F is colder than I typically prefer for outdoor activities (I generally like it right around 40F) I can make clothing and gear adjustments to continue outdoor hobbies like hiking and backpacking. If it was perpetually colder here I would probably take up a snow sport too. (Currently it’s not snowy enough where I live for snow sports). Also if it’s that cold I would never have to deal with bugs again and I am 100% here for that.
As it currently is I’m basically stuck inside for 3 months of the year due to heat unless I want to drive 8 or more hours for a brief holiday respite. Summer is the worst. Give me arctic cold please.
I was voting cold before but I didn’t even think about the bugs. 1000% team cold now lol.
Right? I will happily deal with the cold to make mosquitoes, gnats and ticks a problem I no longer have.
Not even a choice.
If you choose over 100F you will see electronics failing more often, working harder, less efficient, working badly, etc because the heat is causing them to throttle in various ways. In the modern world it is far, far easier to heat up a space with a house full of electronics and humans than it is to keep it cool. The energy required to raise the temperature from say 5 degrees F to a more comfortable 40 degrees (35 degree change) pales in comparison to the energy required to keep yourself and your devices cool a mere 10-15 degrees less to around 90 degrees which is still uncomfortably hot and sweaty.
I’ll note that a constant 100 degrees is more than hot enough to cause various foods, medications, substances to break down and go bad. Check your medicine cabinet, most of your pills including over the counter are only rated for storage at up to 86 degrees. Your medicine will lose efficiency or go bad in some, perhaps many cases. Your food outside your fridge will spoil more quickly, mold and bacteria will grow more quickly and readily. Your fridge itself will work harder and die sooner.
The tap water will run hot or warm most of the time meaning a shower won’t necessarily cool you off much.
The colder temperatures are cheaper all costs considered, feel better, can be negated at a moment’s notice with socks, a jacket, and a blanket.
It’s easy to insulate a home against extreme cold and just retain heat you generate inside including by your body and devices. It requires a lot more effort to keep the inside cold when both the outside and things inside are generating heat and trying to warm it up.
This is a reason why climate change is a nightmare not just for human comfort but on so many levels. Our electronics are going to operate less efficiently in a warmer world and draw more power to do so.
The electronics is something I hadn’t even considered.
Single digit temperatures. One can always wear more clothing to keep warm, but can only get so naked in triple digit heat before dying from exhaustion or dehydration.
Friendo, for those of us that have lived in deserts, no one gets naked. During the day at least ;)
Light clothes are amazing. I lived for 3 years on the edge of the Sahara with no power and pulling water from a well. When it was 110+F, sitting under a tree and soaking your shirt in water was perfectly fine, and more than enough to be comfortable. Turbans are amazing technology.
And I’ve spent time above the Arctic circle. I can compare the two.
While you like to think “you can put in more clothes,” that’s nice and all… Both if you have the right clothes, and have imported heat and calories. OP is talking about perpetual Arctic circle winter. Nothing grows, you will run out if wood to burn to stay warm. You will import everything, from boots to gloves to pants to coats. Look at an Inuit diet. Now look at a Mediterranean diet. Civilization flourished in areas that get hot. Humans spent 50,000 years in the equatorial zone. We are built for it.
You do you, but, uh…enjoy your narwhal blubber and seal jerkey I guess?
👏
@ephrin Well, assuming I still had access to mitigation strategies, like well designed housing etc, I’d choose permanent 38C (100F) over permanent -13C.
Sure, modern tech is available. Both of these theoretical would be pretty intolerable without them.
This is a very different question outside of America and that one African country.
Which is why I made the jab at “freedom degrees” in the text. Also “single or triple digits” is easier and less random than “-13 or 38?” 😅
I might actually prefer winter all year if it wasn’t for that pesky “growing food” thing.
we are measuring in Kelvins right?
What would be a nickname for Kelvin, egg-head scientist degrees?
[edit] Said with love by an egg-head. [/edit]
Oblate-k
I’m pretty sure triple digit temperatures would result in death.
not if it’s in kelvin
Depend on the exact digits, 100 or 999 kelvins sure would.
Single digit. It’s easier to warm up than cool down, and I can’t stand hot weather. I’m also fairly used to freezing temps.
I literally moved from a 38 degrees+ country to a negative temps country. So yeah. Negative temps. 100%.
U can wear warm clothes. There exist no “cold” clothes.
Just get naked!
Triple. No hesitation.
First off, coats are heavy and stupid. Breezy linens all day every day.
What food you going to grow in below freezing temps? Millet, sorghum, rice, grapes, tomatoes, onions, garlic – all already grow in triple digit temps. I’m eating well.
Natural evaporative cooling is easier to achieve than burning slow-growing resources for heat daily. Millennia-old technology exists to handle high temps.
More people live in the Sahara than the Arctic. I’m not a penguin, no matter what the other kids said in school.
Coats are TOTALLY heavy and stupid.
What kind of crops are you going to grow at 125°? That’s still within OP’s specification of triple digits and with temps getting hotter we’re likely to see a lot more of this happening within our lifetime.
That’s when you dry out the stuff you grew when it was only 100°F
Also, Millet, sorghum, cow peas, pigeon peas, cactus, okra, and sweet potatoes are the crops that already grow in the Sahel, where it’s usually right around triple digits. People live like this right now. They have for generations.
Ya you’ll just run out of water eventually. You can also grow food in heated greenhouses in Iceland they used to grow bananas. Both suck
Ever heard of a well?
Ever heard of ground water not being an unlimited resource, that’s currently the problem in lots of places thanks to climate change and poor water management. I live in a place that used to have loads of springs in the forrest and we had a well that used to never dry up all of that is happening now. Not to mention all the insane parasites and deadly tropical diseases you’d have to contend with that still plague most of the developing world that have to live in tropical places.
Yes. I’ve lived in West Africa for about 7 years total. I’ve seen plenty of 50m deep wells pulled by hand go dry or collapse. People collecting water from puddles after a rain, rather than walk a mile to the well.
The old guys in Mali and Niger talk about being kids, roaming forests and keeping hyenas from eating the goats. One village I knew was named “it’s an elephant.” It’s all gone now. It’s been gone for 30 years. The elephants, the hyenas, the forests north of 13 degrees N, are mostly gone.
But some trees are still there, all the way into the Sahara. There are oasies and seasonal lakes with fish and wells and crops. Herders graze goats and donkeys in narrow bands far into the Sahara.
Im not saying it’s great, but im not saying it’s absolute devastation and hell on earth. I’d rather be there than some isolated community in Alaska or Siberia.
That’s really cool. I think both of the scenarios would be hell on earth, one describes what would happen with run away climate change the other describes a nuclear winter. I haven’t been to Alaska or Siberia but from the stupid documentaries I’ve seen people live happily up there, I watched one about some Russian Inuits who were reindeer herders. The kids went to school in the city but they would willingly return to their grandparents and parents and also said they wanted to continue being reindeer herders after they finished school. So people willingly choose that lifestyle. Anyways doing the kind of work that industrial society requires in 30+ degree temperatures is fucking hell, and seeing how our societies are run you know the psychotic bourgeoise are going to force you to keep working anyways. With the way the climates going we are going to be living in that 35 degree world, so ya don’t need to imagine the hypothetical you can just stick around for another 30 years.
Well, up until only a generation or two ago, no one born into those paces actually did have a choice to stay or not. It’s not easy to leave a family support network, especially in a niche environment.
That being said, living in the desert, I saw tons of Midwestern tourists that underestimated it, and quickly got into basic trouble that I learned to avoid as a child. Bit, the people that were always cool and always prepared to deal with a harsh environment were the people that had spent time in Alaska. Spend time in an extreme place, and you learn to respect any extreme place, and be perfectly fine.
And the extreme cold option is always an option on the table. Not nuclear winter, but one bad volcanic eruption can affect large parts of the globe. Just ask folks in 1816, when an eruption in Indonesia led to a year with literally no summer in most of the northern hemisphere. Totally brutal famine in Europe, as one could also expect from AMOC collapse.
True it needn’t be nuclear winter, I know about the volcanic eruption the bike was invented because of it apparently because so many horses died. Thanks for reminding me that the AMOC may collapse in my life time and I’ll probably starve :).
TBH I’d rather stay in my village with my family than be proletarianised and be forced to work in a big city and live in a slum with all the vice that comes along with it, but capitalism is a removed.
Ever since I had a heat exhaustion event in my late teens, I have been exceedingly sensitive to heat. Think actively sweating like I’m in a sauna - only in normal office temperatures. I have to shave my head for nearly half the year in order to not look like a drowned rat - and carry a “sweat towel” with me at all times to wipe the dripping sweat off a half dozen times an hour.
My home office is set to between 15℃ and 18℃ because that is the temperature where I feel the same amount of comfort as most other people do between 24℃ and 28℃. Throw a business suit into the mix, and that comfort range drops by 4-6℃.
There are times in the winter where I throw all the office windows open, let the -20℃ air roll in from outside, and actually enjoy wearing long pants and a sweater.
…I live in Canada. Near where it hit 50℃ during the heat dome a few years ago. Climate Change is going to be brutal for me.
I went through this in my middle teens. It took 10 or 20 years to go away.
Yeah, my heat exhaustion event was a quarter century ago. It’s just gotten worse and worse over the years.
That is just brutal.
So… triple digits then?
