How to keep cool

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:09Today, why can't you keep your cool?

0:20This is Hannah Burner, the co-host of Giggly Squad. We could all just stay in bed scrolling through other people's vacations forever, but where is the fun in that? The best memories come from stepping outside of your little bubble and being open to the unexpected. And what better way to be open to the unexpected than finally booking that trip to Europe? You guys know I'm a Delta girly. Every time I go, I get my Delta headphones. And when I fly to Europe, Delta treats me like a queen and they'll treat you too. I was always a little nervous about navigating a foreign country. but then I realized it's so important to grow and see different cultures and to put yourself in different situations and Delta held my hand the whole time.

1:02Being away just helps you put life into perspective and your little worries are not so bad. Travel really is the best way to discover something new about yourself and grow from the experience. Step outside your comfort zone this summer, get some Delta headphones and fly with Delta Airlines. They truly are the best way to get to Europe and they just make the whole journey feel so comfortable and seamless. Go book your next chapter right now at Delta.com.

1:33You've probably noticed it's really quite hot. And if your office is anything like ours, people are chatting about the weather quite a lot. First is the obligatory icebreaker. Oh my gosh, It's way too hot. And then there's problem solving. Solutions, personal hacks on how to stay cool. Be it dinky handheld plastic fans or those truly abominable air con collars that people are wearing around their necks. Endless ice coffee, feet in a bucket of cold water, head under a wet towel. We asked around to see if we'd missed any. Unbearable. I've had to buy an air conditioning unit for my bedroom. I use a wet towel around the neck when I'm driving especially just to keep cool like that.

2:17My grandmother who's like very traditional would tell me this would get me ill but I sometimes like sleep with wet hair. Because it's so warm and I have like a fan at me and my hair is kind of damp so that way I'm not just sweating. My husband is a big fan of opening the windows early in the morning but then shutting them. Fans with ice behind them, things like that. I'm just like you know grin and bear it. You want to stay cool with eating, like, with what you eat, because that actually kind of keeps your body temperatures, it moderates your body temperatures. So things like, you know, cucumbers, like having a salad.

2:52Ice cubes and cucumbers aside, though, if this is to be our new normal, and the science very much warns it is, how are we going to properly adapt? From our homes to our behaviour, our workplaces to our culture, heatwave experts warn that we've got a lot to learn. From The Guardian, I'm Nashi Nikbal. Today in Focus, how to future-proof against record-breaking heat.

3:24Tom Greenhill, you're a chartered engineer and a chartered environmentalist. a mentalist. And early on in your career, you became a specialist in improving the performance of new buildings in heatwaves. You've set up this website called the Heatwave Toolkit. What inspired you? I spent thousands of hours preparing buildings for future climates. If you're going to spend several million pounds on a building, you want it to last. It's going to last for decades. And I realised that the tools that engineers have are ones that are designed for that outlook. So let's talk through some of the solutions you offer.

3:58You've split them into three sections. Stop the sun, let cool airflow and slow down. First things first, stopping the sun. So the reason stop the sun is at first is because it's typically the most powerful thing you can do. The important thing is that external shading is super effective. It's really effective and it's far more effective than anything you do on the inside. Often when you watch the weather, they'll tell you to close the curtains but if you can if you can access the outside of your window putting something anything on the outside of your window if you can will be far more effective can i just say i mean this is familiar because my partner has spent the last few weeks installing all sorts of things at the back of the house because i won't let him do it on the front but i can confirm it's a lot cooler because of it it works and it's incredibly effective the next best thing you can do in terms of stop the sun is if you have any skylights is to shade those first if they are accessible.

4:50So for example, some anti-heat external blinds. Or one of my favourite things, somebody sent me this amazing idea is that they realised they had this roof-like lantern, which was generating so much heat. So roof lights... What's a roof-like lantern? Well, it's just an enormous roof light. And roof lights and skylights collect so much heat because they see the sun for so much of the day. And so anything you can do to shade a roof light will really help. And this person realised that their roof light was the same dimensions as a king-size bed. So they went to Ikea. That's a big light. So they went to Ikea.

5:23They bought a£5 elasticated sheet and within about 30 seconds popped it on to the top. And what's amazing about that is because it's very thin and it's white, they have fantastic shading, but also beautiful diffused daylight. Now, actually, that's an incredibly high-performance shading product. Right. Just for£5. Yeah. And so if you're designing an extension, why not size your roof light to Ikea sheets? External shading is really powerful, but it does not have to be expensive. And you may even be able to use materials that you already have at home. So you might have spare bedsheets that you could put outside, maybe a towel.

5:57Now, that might not feel very elegant. It doesn't. What do you say to the people that are like, I don't really want bedsheets hanging out the front? Well, what's been super interesting, actually, is that a lot of the ideas where people have tested them have been a brilliant gateway to actually investing in something more expensive. I've had a lot of people say there's an amazing material called shade cloth, which is an agricultural material from the US. And it's designed to go over polytunnels to stop crops being scorched effectively in the heat. But it's absolutely fantastic because it's a mesh.

6:27It enables you to have really good shading, but you're able to see through it. So you'd put it over windows. So you can stretch it over glazing. It requires a bit of DIY to make it look good. A lot of this feels a bit like a Blue Peter project. There are some Blue Peter projects involved, and I think that's the key to it. And I think a lot of these elements are kind of gateways to other things, because actually what you find is, yes, you spend£20 on some shade cloth for your bifold doors. And yes, it might not look great for now, but actually that means that you can use that, test it, feel the benefit.

6:57And that means that you can upgrade it to something more elegant afterwards. And what about if you're in rented accommodation and, you know, bifolds are far away from your reality? What then? Every home is different and everyone's going to have barriers to making these adjustments. It might be a security. I used to live in a ground floor flat. Did we want to have the windows open at night? Actually, that felt a bit uncomfortable. And yes, your landlord might not be brilliantly keen on you adapting their home. But what we're trying to do is to show people that actually there are some things you can do and it doesn't have to cost a lot and you can be flexible in how you do it.

7:33And now this area is kind of ripe for innovation. There's a fantastic designer called Amy Daniels who's created this really cool shaded awning product which clips on such windows. You open the such window a bit, clip it on top. Within a few minutes, you've got something that looks really elegant. It's a really good use of material. And it will shade your home and that window for most of the day. But it also costs less than£100. And that is dramatically cheaper than other products on the market. I've been trying lots of different things. And one example is the use of these Velux anti-heat blinds that are fantastically effective.

8:06They block something like 80 % of the heat, but still allow a view out through. And they cost about£50 each. So they're fantastically good value. With three of these blinds, my loft is exactly the same as my neighbour's. His loft was 28 degrees, pretty hot in a heatwave a couple of years ago. Mine was just 22. And that's the difference between being able to actually be in that room and sleep in it and not. Yeah, absolutely. Which brings me, I guess, to one of the more radical ones that you propose, which is familiar to me because my partner keeps trying to insist that we do this and we haven't quite got that yet.

8:40Yogurt. Tom, talk to me about yogurt. So anything you can do to that outside of your glass to help reflect the heat or to shade it is really helpful. And it wasn't my idea. One idea I heard about previously was to paint yogurt on the outside of your windows. So many questions. So what is fantastic about yogurt, it is biodegradable. You've probably got some in the back of your fridge. You probably have enough in your fridge right now to coat all of your glazing in your home. It's a very thin layer of yogurt there. It's an incredibly thin layer that you use. When you do it and you do it with a gloss roller, it will be very hard for you to realise any difference between that and a frosted glazing product.

9:24It looks exactly like ceramic fruited glazing, which is a really high specification glazing material that I specified in roof lights and art galleries in my professional history. And at two metres, there's no way you'd be able to tell the difference. And it washes off in the rain? It will last a heat wave easily. It will actually last far longer than that. It gives a really robust layer. Now, this is a pretty wild idea. It's not for everyone. It's been tested in the laboratory. It achieved a three and a half degree temperature difference. So, you know, that is significant. But yogurt, isn't it going to smell and go sour and go off?

9:58If I gave you the roller, I got you a piece of glass and I got you to do it, you would see the moisture in the yogurt evaporate in front of your eyes. You could smell it and after a few seconds it doesn't smell. And it works.

10:16Talk me through letting the cool air flow, because that's another top tip. and there's ways to do this right that aren't just about just fling open the windows what do you mean by cool airflow so what's really important is that in a heat wave you don't just want to open your windows you have to do it quite strategically so it's really important to only open your windows when it is cooler outside than in so you're only letting cool air in so you have to be quite strategic you know do you want to get a thermometer do you want to just do it by feeling but it's really important so that you wait until you know the evening and the temperature drops to then open your windows.

10:52So if you're opening up the windows and you can feel the airflow and you can see where it's going, stick a fan in one direction and help boost it. So when it is nighttime and you've got the cool air coming in, like try and boost it as much as you can. And that can just be done with a simple desk fan. And what about when it comes to air conditioning and the discussion around heat pumps, which most people assume are about heating? How does that look in a future UK that is getting hotter and hotter? So heat pumps are a fantastic tool to decarbonise our heating. Now, a fantastic side benefit of heat pumps is that they can provide cooling as well.

11:29How do they work? So heat pumps are machines that move heat from one space to another. Your fridge has a heat pump. It moves heat from the inside of your fridge to the outside to those black grills that you'll see on the back of your fridge. A heat pump in heating mode will move, if you have an air source heat pump, for example, it will move heat from the outside air. and put that heat through maybe your underfloor heating into your home. Those heat pumps can also be used to extract heat from the inside of your home and put it outside. And that is how an air conditioner works. Now, the really important thing is that these passive measures that we talk about in Stop, Flow and Slow, they should all be taken as a first element because what they'll do is they'll make your air conditioning even more effective.

12:16they'll reduce the size of it they'll reduce the the noise they'll reduce the running costs of it it will make it faster and more effective you know this year is going to be the least extreme that we'll ever experience oh my god and so people are going to need air conditioning but it's about getting that right but also we just need to know that these passive measures that are the complementary things that can make the air conditioning more effective or just people's lives easier. Yeah, exactly. And you know, these passive design solutions are not complicated. They don't have to be expensive, but they're so underutilised because we just don't understand them in the UK.

12:50You look to other cultures and other places with a much greater experience of heatwave preparation and just used to this climate that we're now living in. And you know, they adapt themselves brilliantly to it. And that's where we're going to have to get to. And it's just about getting there.

13:09The final section on your website is called slow down. Tom, why is it so important? We're going to have to change our behaviour and we shouldn't necessarily expect the same from ourselves in when a heatwave is coming. These heatwaves are relentless. You can't expect you to be as productive. Your cognitive performance will be low. This has been proven in lots of different academic studies where they've looked at people's exam performance and we shouldn't expect as much of yourselves. Maybe it's a guidance that should be issued to employers really and bosses rather than oneself. People are going to be sleeping less.

13:45My children are certainly sleeping less. That's causing my sleep to reduce. You know these things are going to have an impact and it's about slowing down. It's also really important to keep out the heat of the day. You know that's really common guidance that's provided but yeah really it's about don't push yourself too hard you know if you want to exercise if it's a heat wave maybe this isn't the way to exercise maybe give yourself a week off but actually if you need to then you know go for a run at night instead of during the day because your body responds much better to it and so yeah we're going to need to change your behavior you know your heat sensitivity is going to change throughout your life and whilst last year you know you were fine at some point you're not going to it's going to take a big impact on you and it's kind of about being realistic about that.

14:27Tom, you've spent thousands of hours thinking about this stuff and it's not for no reason that you're known as the heatwave guy. So I'm wondering how much does traffic on your site spike at times like this? And are you seeing it a couple of days before a heatwave or right in the middle when you might think it could be a little bit too late? That's a really interesting question. And I think that it actually reflects the current culture about heatwave preparation because the website spikes during a heatwave and as soon as we do it there's about a factor of 500 times less traffic afterwards so tells you everything about our culture so yeah it's a really significant difference you know and so these things are easily forgotten and i think that's totally typical of our culture to heatwave preparation

15:18Ajit Naranjan you're the Guardian's Europe Environment Correspondent and you've been it's fair to say, quite busy the last few weeks. We are only in July and the UK is already into its third heatwave. What about in Europe? How hot has it been across the continent? So Western Europe has been scorched by its hottest June on record. So the air over the month was about three degrees Celsius above the average from recent decades. And records have just been broken over and over and over again. I live in Berlin, which is a city in Northern Europe that is not known for being very hot. Here in Berlin, we saw two days of 39 degrees Celsius heat just a couple of weekends ago, temperatures I've never experienced in my life.

16:02Just a couple of hours away on the border with Poland, I visited a village where Germany's national heat record was provisionally broken. So 41.7 degrees Celsius was a measurement at this little weather station in this small little village in the eastern part of Germany. wow vienna and austria hit 40 degrees celsius for the first time and plenty of other cities tuning paris have broken their june heat records though not necessarily their all-time all-year records and how are you know the various local authorities in those instances dealing with the heat and how are they adapting in the short term there's not a lot that's going on i mean what's been done fairly well according to kind of a few heat experts i spoke to is this kind of immediate crisis response.

16:48So that means things like issuing red alerts so people are aware of the danger. And remember, forecasting these heatwaves has just gotten better and better. So there's much more preparedness when these things happen. Once people are alerted, then it kind of falls on the government to communicate to everyone that they need to adapt their behavior because you can save a lot of lives just by behaving slightly differently when it does get hot. On top of that, things like closing schools or canceling appointments in hospitals so that there's less pressure on the healthcare system. There's been a lot of that happening across the continent.

17:18And so the kind of examples of what you saw governments do over the last few weeks have ranged from, like on the colourful side of things, you've seen here in Berlin, the local police were using water cannons at the Norma Reserve for protesters as a way to cool people down. So as relief. Yeah, exactly. In France, a restricted alcohol consumption during kind of these national festivals, partly because drinking alcohol is a very dangerous thing to do in a heatwave. These sorts of big public events where you know people are going to be celebrating, kind of governments putting in place these sorts of policies relieves the pressure that the healthcare systems are going to face because they know they're going to get this influx of patients coming in who really are struggling with the heat.

17:59So Ajit, we also spoke to Tom Greenhill who created the Heatwave Toolkit website which is all about telling people how to cool their homes effectively, cheaply and what have you. A lot of the bigger solutions, from air conditioning to shutters, are just really quite expensive. And I wonder how much inequality is affecting people being impacted by climate change. Climate change does not hit everyone equally, and heat is absolutely not an exception to this. When you get these periods of hot weather, you have some people who are able to cool themselves with air conditioning, some people who live in these leafy green neighbourhoods where the actual temperature of where they live is just much lower because there's fewer buildings reflecting heat.

18:41And people know this. You walk through a park on a hot day versus, you know, through the streets. My God, the difference in heat and how much you feel it in an urban environment. Exactly. And for people who need to work outside, say you're a delivery driver, through to people working on farms, people who don't have houses and so are sleeping rough on the street. All of these people are obviously much harder hit when heat waves strike. And in many cases, yeah, there are limits in what you can do as an individual to stop that. At the same time, a lot of what heat experts are saying is that there is still a huge amount that we're just not doing.

19:17So I mean, solutions range from kind of the very big picture government policy sort of thing, like in Barcelona and many other parts of Spain and further afield in Europe, they set up cooling centres. And that can be as simple as turning a library that already has air conditioning into a public space that has extended opening hours, where you can get a glass of water, you can use a toilet. And that can be a huge relief for people who otherwise don't have a cool place to turn to. What kind of precautions are governments taking across Europe to address the disparities between people who can afford the air conditioning and those from lower income backgrounds who can't?

19:50Actively, I'm not sure if any government is putting that inequality in the forefront of their planning around heat, but it should be said that heat is killing a huge number of people also in these higher income brackets and more privileged people in society. In the UK, the latest analysis that just came out a couple of days ago estimated that 2 ,700 heat-related deaths took place in the UK just in May and June. Right. So these are additional deaths attributed to the heat waves. Exactly. They're not deaths that you'll see on a coroner's report. They're not listing heat as the cause of death, but they are deaths that we know when it gets hot, the number of people...

20:26It's exacerbating. Exactly. And that means that people who are maybe older, whose bodies are a bit frailer, people who've got pre-existing health conditions, young people, young children, particularly pregnant women. All of these groups are sending a much more risk of heat just pushing their bodies beyond what they're able to cope with. What experts have been calling for over and over again is use air conditioning where it makes sense, particularly to protect the most vulnerable people. So that does mean places like hospitals and care homes. If you do that, then you can reduce death tolls quite considerably.

20:59On top of that, the more societal solutions like cooling centres or changing working hours. So having, one thing trade unions in a lot of Europe are calling for is to have kind of these maximum working temperatures, where if the temperature goes above that, then automatically outdoor work should cease and people should be able to stay at home and have compensation and so on for that time that they're not able to work.

21:25I guess it's worth mentioning that the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is calling for maximum workplace temperatures. It's also a bill that's being worked on by the very popular Green Party MP, Hannah Spencer. But Ajit, when it comes to tackling the heat, governments are obviously responding in different ways, but are some doing it better than others? Yeah, I think you can say safely that Southern European countries, such as Spain and France, are definitely taking this much more seriously than Northern European countries. It feels like the political debate in countries like Germany, where I'm based, is not necessarily the culture war that has kind of been concocted around air conditioning, but more just a political reluctance to confront just how bad this is.

22:08I mean, if you look at the death tolls we're talking about, the World Health Organization estimates that 200 ,000 people have died over the last four years in Europe because of heat. Now, if you think about the scale of that death toll, it is really, it's hard even for the experts I speak to, to wrap their heads around it. In Europe each year, about 20 ,000 people die in road crashes. The scale of heat is mind-bogglingly large in terms of how many people it kills. And yet we don't treat it, for the most part, as a public health crisis. But these kind of longer-term solutions are still considered radical, right?

22:45So things like Paris, which over the last decade or so has made a huge effort to kind of go from a very car-centric city to one that pedestrianizes streets and reinstalls green spaces, removes car parking spots. Nobody really in the debates around that in France is saying that much about how this changes the heat. But it is an important factor. Coming up, will we be better prepared next summer?