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In the south, you’re probably driving around in an air conditioned vehicle, sitting in an air conditioned house, visiting an air conditioned business. You’re spending as little time outside as possible. In NYC, you’re walking all over the fucking place, waiting for a subway car, standing on a platform surrounded by 50 other people, climbing three flights of stairs to get out of the subway station and on to the street where you still need to walk 5 blocks to get where you’re going.
See, a lot of people are saying variations of this. And that's fine. I agree.
The thing is, it's not at ALL what I usually hear, when this topic comes up.
Usually, it's a bunch of unhinged rambling, about how New York's heat bubble is more effective, or something about the tall buildings funneling the heat through the urban canyons, or something about the air from the subway, etc. Oh, and there's ALWAYS some shit about humidity, as if New York City is somehow more humid than Houston.
It's not. They're both on the fucking water. Humidity is humidity. Water in the air. We get it. NYC doesn't have special water.
EDIT: I mean, maybe not "special water" in a good sense. It's probably got more rat droppings and leftover heroin residue from the 1970s than you'll find in Houston. At least by a little bit.
Seattle is humid but never sticky or uncomfortable. Dew point matters kids!
Seattle is humid but never sticky or uncomfortable
Not yet. But climate change is a seven-titted demon bitch.
That doesn’t make 81F hotter than 108F.
That’s obvious, but the sentence implies that we are talking about the experience of living in those temperatures in those places, you know, as a human and not just a computer comparing two numbers that are larger or smaller.
As a human, living in 108F is noticeably hotter than living in 81F and it is because one number is much larger than the other.
The point they're making is that folks aren't typically experiencing 108 as a significant part of their lives, because they're oftentimes shuttling around from air conditioned refuge to air conditioned refuge. There is minimum discomfort because if you don't have AC you legitimately might die.
However the portrayed lifestyle of NY folks involved much more engagement with the outdoors, resulting in lower instaneous discomfort, but added up over time.
So the claim being made isn't that the number 81 indicates a hotter environmental temperature than 108, it's that the experience of those at 81 add up to be just as, if not more uncomfortable.