alt Hacker NewsI’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.
The amount of arrogance in this thread about what temperatures become fatal is baffling. Hyperthermia is not something that kills you on the timeline of minutes or even hours at wet bulb temperatures of 100F+, or even 105F+.
Remember, when people get sick it's not typically fatal for them to hold a body temperature of 104 degrees, even if sustained for more than 24 hours. Being in a work environment at 95+% relative humidity and 100F is going to be unpleasant, but as long as you are well adapted to it and you get to somewhere cooler within a few hours you are going to be fine.
People push well beyond a wet bulb of 105F in saunas all the time, often sustained for 30+ minutes. I think if you had yourself ever been in a room that's 110F and 100% humidity (meaning it's literally raining continuously from condensation) you'd realize that it's really not that extreme of a temperature, and that it takes hours for your core to heat up to a place where you will be at risk of dying.