Column Judith Witte: Heat stress

With all the heated debates surrounding the fall of our government, you’d almost miss the other news: the Netherlands now has a Heat Plan! According to KNMI and RIVM, we're in for some tough times. The number of tropical days with temperatures over 30 degrees has more than doubled in the past thirty years, and both the frequency and intensity of heatwaves are only expected to rise.

The Heat Plan addresses how we can make the built environment at least somewhat bearable for humans. It’s packed with new terms that a language enthusiast like me gets genuinely excited about. I came across words like ‘heat plan codes’, ‘Go-Hot’, and ‘Heat Power’. That last one is a new index that combines temperature, humidity, radiant heat, and wind in such a way that the overall impact of heat is displayed on a scale from 1 to 10. I’m not exactly sure how those factors are weighted. Numbers have never been my thing, my brain tends to overheat quickly when faced with math: stress! Still, I bravely tackled Rc-values and GWP’s for the June edition feature story.

The government’s Heat Plan also touches on ‘heat stress’. That, I can picture. That restless feeling, for instance, on a muggy, sticky night, when you’re sprawled across the sheets like a starfish. It also takes me back to the summer of 2005. A then still rare heatwave hit the country hard. My daughter, age 3 at the time, sat strapped into her car seat in our car without air conditioning. She was sweating, her hair sticking to her bright red cheeks. “I’m hot,” she complained. I laughed. Big mistake. Her expression turned stormy. She wrestled with the straps, she wanted out! Angry, she gave her arm a lick. With a tone somewhere between deeply offended and genuinely surprised, she said: “I’m even... SPICY!”

That spicy toddler is now a balanced young woman of 23, working as a building physicist. Every day, people in her field work with calculations involving light, air, sound, moisture, and heat (including cooling) in buildings, factors that are becoming increasingly important for the future.

Let’s all try to keep a cool head this summer in our overheated world. Work together to find solutions. And... don’t walk away when things get tough.

Judith Witte
[email protected]