Will we British adapt to higher temperatures?

After facing yet another heatwave, British people are having to find ways to function in high temperatures. But won't we physically adapt to it eventually? Not quite, no.

Photo via Pixabay (although crediting seems a bit excessive here, as it’s a picture of the actual sun. How is someone meant to copyright that?)

For the past week or so in the UK, it has been very hot.

I was going to say you’d obviously know that “unless you’ve been living under a rock”, but given how humid this ridiculous island nation is, it’s probably no less hot on the underside of a rock, so even then you’d be aware of it.

It’s not like this is an entirely new phenomenon, either. The climate crisis has resulted in the UK’s already chaotic and unpredictable weather system adding ‘regular spells of high and deeply unpleasant heat’ into its repertoire, and that doesn’t look to be changing any time soon. We’ll just have to learn to live with it.

How do we do that, though? What changes can we make to make us better able to function in recurring high temperatures?

This question is inspired by the local BBC radio station who called me this morning to ask if I would be a suitable guest for their planned call in show, all about when we in the UK will adapt to the recurring heat.

I had to double check, but apparently they did mean “How soon will our bodies change to be better tolerate high temperatures?”

While I’m not exactly an evolutionary biologist, I’m well informed enough to know the answer to that is… quite a while.

Despite the many times sci-fi has implied otherwise, the evolution of new, workable traits and functions into a species’ anatomy usually takes millions of years.

For example, the modern human brain is believed to have evolved, from a more primitive primate ancestor baseline brain, over about two million years. And that is considered hilariously fast by usual evolutionary speeds. It’s the evolution equivalent of being bitten by a radioactive spider one afternoon and waking up with super powers the next morning.

I’m not sure what sort of anatomical adaptation we’d end up acquiring to better beat the heat (Increased sweat glands? Reflective skin?) but even if it’s a small, subtle thing, we’re still talking many millennia before it could feasibly become commonplace in the population.

The poor researcher who contacted me seem to have been given the impression that it might show up within the next year. Or by the end of the show.

I was able to correct that assumption¹ and the discussion ended up being about more immediate and practical adaptions available to the people of Britain for dealing with hotter weather.

Assuming there are any.

What can we do about the heat, as British people?

Photo by Alireza Kaviani

Let’s get the obvious problems out of the way.

For one, the UK is probably the worst place to be when it comes to dealing with a spike in temperature. Every aspect of the country has been built and developed around dealing with damp, cold weather.

Britain, an island, surrounded by sea, where it rains 70% of the time, is a very damp place. And thus, a more humid place. The higher the humidity, the less able we are to cool down through sweating.

So when someone from a dryer, even desert country, laughs at how we collectively collapse in a paltry 32°C heat when their homes regularly hit 40°C and above, it’s like someone wearing just a pair of speedos laughing at someone dressed in tweed and wrapped in blankets for complaining about “being too hot”.

Compounding that, our homes and buildings are intended to keep heat in via various layers of insulation. Great when it’s cold out, nightmarish when it’s hot. Until recently, that second one wasn’t a common problem. But now it is.

And scarce few UK homes have air conditioning installed. Why would they? That would be like building homes with meteor bunkers as standard. Which would be ridiculous!

Unless meteors became a bi-monthly occurrence. At which point, it wouldn’t be.

Our infrastructure and culture are aligned with the cold too, hence railway lines buckle in the heat. And consider our diet. What is ‘classic’ British food? A full English breakfast? A Sunday Roast? A Cornish pasty? Dense, hot, calorific, fortifying foods that warm you up and give you the energy you need to stay warm. Lovely in the cold, nauseating in the heat.

And at the most fundamental level, British people, despite some claims to the contrary, are human beings. As in, mammals. As in, endotherms. We are beings that maintain a consistent internal body temperature, because we must. The internal chemical processes that keep us alive can only happen withing a specific range of temperatures, hence if our internal temperature goes above or below a very narrow window, we become very unwell. Or possibly dead.

But as the corporate managers who use slogans instead of understanding are wont to say, “Never mind the problems, what are the solutions?”

Well, scientifically, they’re hard to articulate.

Is heat resistance something you can learn, or develop? Evidence suggests… maybe?

Some people just seem naturally able to endure temperature extremes, like fellow Southwalian Cath ‘The Merthyr Mermaid’ Pendleton, whose baffling ability to endure the cold led to her swimming a mile in the Antarctic sea.

And a lot of athletes train in high temperatures to better their performance. But the science of this isn’t so clear cut. Research suggests that training in high temperatures can provide endurance of and better physical performance in such temperatures, most of these benefits are short lived (although easier to recapture).

This is presumably because of that whole ‘endothermic’ thing I just mentioned, meaning that while your working hard to raise your body temperature, your body is working just as hard to bring it back down.

It’s probably also worth mentioning that it works better if you endure temperature extremes in both directions. As in, high heat to deep cold, and repeat. To gain the benefits of this approach and be able to perform better in the heat, you’d ideally do a regular regimen for at least two weeks.

Weirdly, I can personally attest to this. Despite growing up in the South Wales valleys, a climate so damp I should technically be an amphibian, I am surprisingly able to endure temperature extremes better than most people. I believe this is due to, when I was a student, working in an Italian chain restaurant for nearly 2 months. I was on the pizza station, which meant standing next to the roaring open pizza oven for hours on end, with occasional visits to the walk in freezer to get more frozen pizza bases.

I suspect that after multiple weeks of such constant exposure to extremes of temperature, my brain just said “… you know what? I don’t care any more”.

The problem is, the UK heatwaves don’t occur in any predictable fashion. They just happen. And people still have to live their lives, and go to work and stuff. They can’t ‘train’ to put up with it, by regularly jumping into the ice bath they don’t have, which wouldn’t have long term benefits even if they did.

So, what can we do?

There are plenty of options. Invest in better, updated infrastructure. Provide support and opportunities for people to modify their homes. Rework our society to function in cold, wet, and heat.

How exactly do we do that? I don’t know. That’s where my expertise ends.

In all honestly, it ended about 12 paragraphs ago, but I didn’t realise. It’s too hot to focus on anything.

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If you liked this, you’ll love my latest book for kids, Why Your Parents Are Hung-Up on Your Phone and What To Do About It. It’s got nothing to do with any of this, but it’s too warm to think up some tenuous link to argue otherwise.

1. Nicely, and in friendly way, because ‘non-scientist doesn’t know specifics of science’ is not and has never been a failing, and I can’t abide anyone who smugly assumes otherwise.