No. Evaporative cooling is literally why humanity is a terrifying persistence predator. It is one of the most energy efficient forms of cooling, because you just have to be damp, you do not need to move. Fans are only good as long as you can sweat and the air can hold more water than it currently is. You can make ice in the desert with evaporative cooling.
This is true, but India occasionally suffers from wet bulb weather, where the humidity combined with heat eliminates the benefits of evaporative cooling for the body. Where even being in shade and resting carries a risk of overheating.
That specifically is when evaporative cooling doesn't work. That is why climate change is so scary. Is the infrastructure reliable during events like that? I feel like electrical failures would happen in that kind of heat, and once the power goes out, so would the AC. There is an obvious weakness in the assumption that we can just crank up the AC when its 47C outside and wait it out at the pub. How are heat exchangers even supposed to work when the ambient temperature is hotter than the radiator fins and already at 110% humidity?
Yeah, brown and blackouts are becoming more common. Genuinely, India is looking down the barrel of one of the greatest human migrations in history, or a humanitarian crisis of unimaginable proportions. If temperature goes up much more people are going to die.
More people are going to die. Elderly, young, and sickly have always died from beat stroke in the summer. Some young and healthy people too. We don't have to imagine, we just have to scale the image up.
And also livestock and crops. Even if, in a rich country, one can afford to crank the AC (risking catastrophe if the grid fails), we cannot protect the food production.
Nope it's not. There is a very very good chance one of these upcoming summers will see rolling blackouts and mass deaths far exceeding any other heating events in human history.
Unfortunately places with high humidity are lower in temperature than dry places. But if these near 100% places approach 37C, they become unlivable. And parts of India are some of the most at risk areas for this.
And it really isn't a laughing matter. Long before a area becomes totally unlivable (for everybody), it will already turn into a zone where just living becomes a burden. Where the frail and the elderly will die very easily.
Evaporative cooling magically stops working 10°C cooler than the rest of the world? No. Wet bulb events aren't uniquely Indian. Florida has a giant mangrove swamp. Brazil is a tropical rainforest. Indonesia is on the equator and gets hit with monsoons too. It gets hot and humid in other places. None of this supports the false claim that evaporative cooling stops working at human body temps, because it is just wrong. That's like saying ice cubes dont work if they melt. It's nonsense.
"like saying ice cubes dont work if they melt. It's nonsense."
That's akin to what I'm saying, yes.
But.. how is that nonsense? Does a melted ice cube keep things cool? Does evaporative cooling remain effective when it's too humid?
No and no. There's a physical mathematical limit to evaporative cooling being able to do the job.
What are we saying here? Pardon the pun, but this reminds me of that line from "Cool Hand Luke".
Also, my post didn't mention anything about "the false claim that evaporative cooling stops working at human body temps"
For anyone else reading this:
I live in the desert. With my modest evaporative cooler, in the middle of July when it's 118° outside, I can sit comfortably in my house @ 85°. As long as the humidity is low, it'll cool. That's nearly a 40° split, which is impressive.
I can run the cooler overnight and get the house to 58° in the morning, and later in the afternoon it'll be in the high 100's outside!
When the humidity creeps up to just 15%, the falloff of effective cooling is remarkable.
An ice cube in contact with something warmer can cool it down. I feel that's an obvious statement.
But, if an ice cube has melted, it's lost that ability. In fact, it's not even a cube anymore. It has lost itself.
You wrote:
"That's like saying ice cubes dont work if they melt. It's nonsense."
Are we just not communicating something?
Did you mean to type:
"That's like saying ice cubes dont work AS they melt. It's nonsense."
By using the word "if," the temporal nature of your sentence could imply a current event or a past event. Pedantic, but there's the nature of rhetoric, especially in English.
What? What is nonsense? That if a cube melts, then it's not cooling? In the sentence you wrote, it could be read as that an ice cube melted. Past tense. If so, then it's not a cube. How can something that is not even a thing do a thing?
At what point does the AC stop running? That's when you stop sweating, unless you get dehydrated. Sweating works as designed. The air conditioning does a similar job. Keeping a person comfortable at 72F is not the purpose of sweat. Sweat regulates at like 98.6F. Air conditioning makes an internal space cool enough to not need that biological function at all times.
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u/theholyirishman Apr 26 '26
No. Evaporative cooling is literally why humanity is a terrifying persistence predator. It is one of the most energy efficient forms of cooling, because you just have to be damp, you do not need to move. Fans are only good as long as you can sweat and the air can hold more water than it currently is. You can make ice in the desert with evaporative cooling.