How are we coping with the heat?

One of the first questions everyone asked me after I arrived in Tucson was: "So, how are you coping with the heat?" And my answer was....well, I guess I don't know anymore what my answer was. But here is what it should have been: "What do you mean how am I coping with it? Nobody here is coping with it, all you do is going from an air conditioned house to an air conditioned car to an air conditioned office and back. You should see Vienna in a heat wave!" As I write this, temperatures indoors and outdoors have just about dropped below 30 C, and it is 9:30 pm. Today's afternoon temperature was just around 38 C (100 F) and I was lucky: I had a cool basement laboratory to flee to, while other people went about their usual business on the surface: serving coffee, paving roads, showing apartments to people, sitting at office desks in 4th floors of west-facing buildings, without the luxury of a schedule flexible enough to move their work to a more protected place.

Very few places have air conditioning here. Some cafes and restaurants and a number of our laboratories do. My boss has a noisy, not very effective movable unit in her office. The gold broker next doors to cafe Milano does, but cafe Milano does not, and neither do most offices and apartments. So how do we cope? While in Tucson, from the perspective of a culture in which air conditioning is ubiquitous and overused, and a room temperature above 76 F (24.4 C) is deemed unacceptable, I started to wonder, too: how do the Viennese cope? How did I cope?

I guess, now that we are at the peak of a heat wave, my answer is threefold: First, we know that there won't be 5 months of it. This is by far the most important coping mechanism. We are expecting a temperature drop by 15 C this weekend, it's the main topic of conversation and everyone's silver lining. Second, we get used to it. Humans get used to a lot, and a few hours of 32+(90+) temperatures don't feel that bad when you are already used to a baseline of 28 (82). This is a chance you don't get living and working in Tucson. Third.....I don't know actually how some people cope. I don't know how the construction workers and kebab stand people (next to that grill all day!) and tram drivers cope. I don't know how old or sick people cope, because this is plenty exhausting for healthy, young people. I also don't know how I would cope if nighttime temperatures were to rise by a few more degrees.

I know how I cope in daytime: In 5 years of life in the desert including bike commuting, plenty of hiking and camping trips (including such follies as Death Valley and Grand Canyon in July), some semi-successful desert gardening attempts, and two years in a place with a swamp cooler, I have learned a few things about heat. One, it is cumulative. It makes a difference whether I spend a few hours in a cool cellar or not, it even makes a difference whether I make an effort to walk on the shady side of the streets during the day or not. There is a big difference between 32 C (89 F), 35 C (95 F) and 38 C (100 F), it's not just "all hot" (which was my pre-Tucson take on it). Which means, when it's 26 in the morning, and will be 35 in the afternoon, I close the darn windows. I am lucky enough to have an office in one of those older buildings with 0.5-meter thick walls, and my office stays quite bearable, as long as I close the window by 11 am or so. If I didn't know my pre-Tucson self, I would find it quite incredible that it has not crossed everyone's mind that opening a window may actually warm up a room, and that not every breeze is cool. But I know that I kept windows open as a default in past Viennese heat waves, and I see a lot of open windows everywhere these days, presumably causing lots of needless suffering.

Do I like the idea of a Vienna filled with noisy A/C units the way Tucson is? Not really. I had my fair amount of noise problems with them in the spacious desert Southwest, I don't think it is a good idea for densely built-up Vienna. It would be a great relief for a few days here and there - but people get lazy and in no time, they'd be running like they are in Tucson: all day, every day, out of convenience (I swear, there are people in Tucson who never stop using their compressor, but simply switch from heating to cooling sometime in March), no more getting used to any level of heat, living with a constant mechanical hum. Should I write about the warming climate here and what it will do to those "few days here and there"? Probably not, that'll turn into a whole other entry (and a side research project).

Life in Tucson, in contrast, would be very, very tough without any cooling. Without it, the town would simply not exist in its current size. The few days of Tucson-style heat we get here do get me thinking about life in Tucson 50 or 100 years ago. I look at the thick walls in old Viennese houses with green inner courtyards that are just a couple degrees cooler than the street and think about adobe buildings and what the urban landscape of the Old Pueblo might have been when it was actually old. I see people here at 4 pm, sitting in some corner, panting, with a fan blowing onto them, and I wonder what the diurnal rhythm of work and rest may have been in old Tucson. It must have been a few very hardy people, who lived there. The monsoon still means so much to people now, what must it have meant back in the day! Forget all the gun-waving horseback-riding movie heroes. This is how I imagine the Wild West: a lot of early mornings, a lot of hard work before sunrise, a lot of energy used just dealing with the afternoon heat, and, at all times, hoping for rain.