alt Hacker NewsYeah it can be deadly but it is unfortunately quite common.
People adapt to it and can tolerate longer spans in it but it's still super taxing and requires regular breaks if you are doing any amount of serious activity. And of course lots of fans and anything else that can raise the evaporation rate and heat dissipation help.
The jokes ngl sound like the exact type of humor you'd expect from people who work out on the floor. Basically "oh well that's fucking horrifying, I bet we could make some money selling tickets".
I’m sorry, but you have no idea what you are talking about. 95% relative humidity means sweat won’t evaporate, and there is no evaporative cooling. 100F external temps are above cooling temps and near dangerous baseline body temperatures.
100+F + 95% relative humidity will literally kill people, regardless of adaptations. Fans won’t help.
Fatal core temperature ranges are so close, even baseline metabolic heat can kill someone from hyperthermia in those conditions.
[https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10010916/#:~:text=F....]
In a general environmental sense, current estimates have 95F outside temps and 95% relative humidity being the point where mass die offs of mammals start to occur. It’s a major concern with global temperature changes [https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0913352107].
Skin temperatures > 95F (which will occur if air temp is 95F or higher and there is no evaporative cooling ability) inevitably lead to hyperthermia even in fit and acclimated individuals - even at rest
Most of the time, people just don’t realize what the actual relative humidity is. ‘Terribly humid’ is usually more like 60% RH.
95% is saturated, often foggy/misty.
‘At least it’s a dry heat’ in Deserts, which allows people to survive high temps, are often 5-10% relative humidity or even lower. There, the biggest challenge is staying hydrated enough to sustain the rapid loss of water. In some situations it’s possible to lose a gallon an hour. But it’s possible.
In 95% RH, that gallon makes no difference and you’ll flat out die instead.