Thermal misery index: Bangkok v Phnom Penh

Having spent some time in Phnom Penh over the past month, it seemed to me that the Cambodian city was much more hot and glaring than Bangkok. So today back in BKK I checked this by compiling one of my favorite indexes for the two cities: Extreme Cooling Degree Days (CDD29). This was derived from the excellent web site degreedays.net which allows you to calculate cooling degree days based on any temperature base you like. In this case I used a base of 29C (84F) which is the maximum allowable temperature for comfortable (sweat-free) sleeping IMHO.

Cambodian expats escribe PP as insufferable in the hot season (April-May) and the above graph suggests it is a little but not much worse than Bangkok at that critical time of year.

On the other hand PP has many fewer high-rise buildings than BKK, and the shading seems to me much less there, the sun penetrating down to street level. A more accurate comparison would require a careful comparison of downtown urban microclimates, and also, I conclude, consideration of the degree that uncomfortable glare aggravates the subjective sense of thermal discomfort.

Thermal misery index: Bangkok v Phnom Penh

Having spent some time in Phnom Penh over the past month, it seemed to me that the Cambodian city was much more hot and glaring than Bangkok. So today back in BKK I checked this by compiling one of my favorite indexes for the two cities: Extreme Cooling Degree Days (CDD29). This was derived from the excellent web site degreedays.net which allows you to calculate cooling degree days based on any temperature base you like. In this case I used a base of 29C (84F) which is the maximum allowable temperature for comfortable (sweat-free) sleeping IMHO.

Cambodian expats escribe PP as insufferable in the hot season (April-May) and the above graph suggests it is a little but not much worse than Bangkok at that critical time of year.

On the other hand PP has many fewer high-rise buildings than BKK, and the shading seems to me much less there, the sun penetrating down to street level. A more accurate comparison would require a careful comparison of downtown urban microclimates, and also, I conclude, consideration of the degree that uncomfortable glare aggravates the subjective sense of thermal discomfort.

Pope Francis on air conditioning

Many people were surprised, some even outraged (in these parts of the world where SIN brings other things to mind) when His Holiness singled out air conditioning as a sin for our times in his recent Encyclical Letter, Laudati Si.  Here is what he had to say:

“People may well have a growing ecological sensitivity but it has not succeeded in changing their harmful habits of consumption which, rather than decreasing, appear to be growing all the more. A simple example is the increasing use and power of air-conditioning. The markets, which immediately benefit from sales, stimulate ever greater demand. An outsider looking at our world would be amazed at such behavior, which at times appears self-destructive.”

Many papal critics harped on the idea that air conditioning is a necessity for "modern life" in the tropics. I suspect that most of the criticism came from the northern latitudes or tropical-based expats, and refers to themselves, not the locals. Perhaps  experienced equatorial native views, along the lines of The Thai King's "sufficiency economy", which call for restraint, a middle way, and mindfulness of behavior, including in hot weather, are a fair but yet unappreciated response in Western countries to these criticisms of the pope's advice and teaching. I suspect that contemporary US ideas on what is really "necessary" for life will be soon much influenced by Francis' fresh new views from the southern latitudes, which remind me of the idea of quality v. quantity that were suggested by one of my favorite books, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, many years ago.

Pope Francis on air conditioning

Many people were surprised, some even outraged (in these parts of the world where SIN brings other things to mind) when His Holiness singled out air conditioning as a sin for our times in his recent Encyclical Letter, Laudati Si.  Here is what he had to say:

“People may well have a growing ecological sensitivity but it has not succeeded in changing their harmful habits of consumption which, rather than decreasing, appear to be growing all the more. A simple example is the increasing use and power of air-conditioning. The markets, which immediately benefit from sales, stimulate ever greater demand. An outsider looking at our world would be amazed at such behavior, which at times appears self-destructive.”

Many papal critics harped on the idea that air conditioning is a necessity for "modern life" in the tropics. I suspect that most of the criticism came from the northern latitudes or tropical-based expats, and refers to themselves, not the locals. Perhaps  experienced equatorial native views, along the lines of The Thai King's "sufficiency economy", which call for restraint, a middle way, and mindfulness of behavior, including in hot weather, are a fair but yet unappreciated response in Western countries to these criticisms of the pope's advice and teaching. I suspect that contemporary US ideas on what is really "necessary" for life will be soon much influenced by Francis' fresh new views from the southern latitudes, which remind me of the idea of quality v. quantity that were suggested by one of my favorite books, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, many years ago.

Deadly heat at Mumbai? Bangkok compared.

Mumbai's "Deadly Heat Wave" this year at top; parallel Bangkok, routinely much worse without all the fuss, bottom. Maybe all this fright mongering is a phony form of global compassion,  a PR creation of global warming enthusiasts?

Deadly heat at Mumbai? Bangkok compared.

Mumbai's "Deadly Heat Wave" this year at top; parallel Bangkok, routinely much worse without all the fuss, bottom. Maybe all this fright mongering is a phony form of global compassion,  a PR creation of global warming enthusiasts?

Bangkok heat: cause of death?

A friend of mine, Greg Baecher, has spent much of his academic career analyzing risk for complicated failures. He recently wrote to me as follows:

I am increasingly of the opinion that failures seldom occur as we have analyzed and predicted them. They occur from system interactions which are essentially unidentifiable ahead of time: the odd combination of usual events which taken together in a particular order become malicious. The probability of any such set approaches zero, but their combinatorial number is extremely large; hence, one such might happen with non-neglibible probability.

Now thinking as one does at times at this time of life on the subject of mortality I propose that this comment is applicable to problems to be reckoned with by us elders. As our fragility increases with age, so do the potential causes of our demise become more complex and similar to the "system interactions" Greg describes.  The man who sat next to me in The Londoner a year ago fell and broke his hip, or perhaps, as another version of the story has it, was knocked down by a bag-snatching thief while returning unsteadily from the pub. In any event a month later he is dead. Rendered immobile, he could no longer spend his evenings at The Londoner talking with his friends. "He lost his point," we mumbled gloomily at the bar.

John Updike's unforgettable character Rabbit (in the novel Rabbit at Rest) tries to recover past glory by playing basketball on a hot day with a teenager in the local Florida park; a fatal heart attack follows.

Hot weather in Bangkok, late April 2015

In this entry I want to describe what happened to another pub friend of mine, I'll call him Hector, dead now two days ago at the Police Hospital but not yet buried or burned as is done here in Thailand.

Hector drank a good deal of beer like many of us and was perhaps a few pounds heavier than necessary, but his better daily habits included a brisk 5 km dawn walk around the local park on Sukhumvit, the one established by a famous Thai politician as penance for his former deeds as a world-class brothel keeper and briber of police.

Now it is evident from the daily weather chart above for Don Muang airport that the humidity and heat in the early morning has been quite high here, and we would expect that toward the end of April Hector would have been sweating profusely at the end of his walks, with a tendency toward dehydration, perhaps exacerbated by the dehydrating effects of his beer the previous evening. (The latter contributing factor would be triumphantly overemphasized by those moralizing but otherwise minimally useful "health newsletters" so beloved in the nanny states of America.) Now it happened that Hector made much of preferring beer and Coca Cola to water, and out of deference to the time of day and maintenance of his weight he would avoid these preferred beverages at seven in the morning when he finished his walk but at the same time be less inclined to drink the amount of fluid, namely water, that might have been optimum for his condition.

It is well known that dehydration increases the level of salt and other wastes in the bodily fluids and urine which not surpisingly changes the electrical properties of the body and its organs, specifically the electrophysiology of the cardiovascular system. This promotes irregular heartbeats not infrequently causing one and sometimes several skipped beats, sometimes resulting in cardiac arrest for several seconds. Spontaneous refiring of the heart is the norm, but syncope, or fainting, may occur, with a serious hazard of falling. This was explained to me patiently by a cardiologist at the Samitivej Hospital (see my previous entry on this for details).

Hector was not so lucky.  (To be continued)