How to survive a Scottish heat wave

I remember holidaying in Shetland and my son complaining about the heat. It was probably no more than 24C, but when you are used to houses heated only to 18C and its a day for stripping off and sun bathing if it ever reaches 20C, 24C is hot.
And as I said in a previous article, we’ve had one of the coldest Junes in 40 years in Scotland. Tomorrow we are told by the BBC-Met Office, that it will reach 27C. So, this is very much from the fridge into the oven with no acclimatisation.
So this is the plan:

• Ice cubes have gone into the freezer
• All the windows have been open full since early morning.
• If the sun breaks through the curtains will be shut (but best to keep the draught)
• When the outside temperature (currently 16C) goes above the internal temperature (currently 18C), I will shut the windows and shut any curtains I can.

This evening and tomorrow morning (not when we are sleeping) I plan to repeat the exercise, opening the windows wide if the inside temperature is above outside.
This should easily get us through one day of 27C.
But, if this were to continue for a few days (which it does not look like it will), I would continue this exercise until the nights start getting too warm to cool the house, and then in the past living further south, I found the best thing was just to shut any curtains on the sunny side and leave the upstairs windows open as much of the time as I could and doors on the shaded side of the house.

Avoid the chimney effect

But if you want to stay cool (and there’s no point in Scotland getting used to warm!) whatever you do, avoid opening windows and doors on sunny side of the house because of the chimney effect.
This is because the air on the sunny side of a house is in a sun trap between the warm ground and warm wall of the house and so is a lot warmer. If the windows/doors on this side of the house are opened with upstairs ones also open, the house can act like a giant chimney flue, sucking in warm air at ground level and super-heating the house well above the ambient which makes it impossible to sleep at night (particularly in the UK which is relatively humid so that humidity rises substantially at night).

An alternative gullibles strategy

If I were a gullibles activist with a highly paid job telling other people how to cut down carbon emissions, I would not only have the money but be stupid enough to use this strategy:

1. Turn up the central heating (in Summer!) each day before the heat wave so that you get used to temperatures up to 27C.
2. When the heat wave comes – enjoy it (probably in your outdoor heated swimming pool with those solar panel ornaments you keep meaning to get working – whilst you heat it with coal powered electricity).
3. Then when it passes – just keep the central heating turned up – after all you are working in some massive green corps and your massive salary means you are doing a lot to save the planet, so you deserve to be allowed to emit more CO2 than everyone else.

Other Gullibles strategies:

1. Drive around in your air conditioned 4×4 (which you convinced yourself you need to visit your wind investments).
2. Buy a big air conditioning unit – and convince yourself that you are someone special that deserves to be cool whilst all the sceptics are boiling in their own heat because of all your good works.
3. Get an air plane ticket to Greenland to watch those poor polar bears (which you said aren’t there) and see all the ice (that you say melted) and stay in a nice cosy hotel (heated to the same temperature you are escaping and one you claim would be catastrophic for humans).