It is Thursday the 17th of July 2025 in your listening to Skeptics with the K, the podcast for

science, reason and critical thinking. Skeptics with the K is produced by skeptic media

in association with the Merseyside Skeptic Society, a non-profit organization for the

promotion of scientific skepticism on Merseyside around the UK and internationally.

I'm your host, Mike Hall. With me today is Marsh.

Hello. And Alice. Hello.

Oh, so it has been really warm. It's been so warm. I don't know that I can cope. It's too hot for me to cope. I can't manage this kind of heat. The days are all really long. They're humid. They're oppressively warm. It's quite funny because I've been seeing a lot of... I've not been seeing people on social media necessarily complaining about the weather. I've seen specifically Americans on social media complaining about the weather

in the UK and acknowledging that they have previously been wrong to chastise British people for

complaining about hot weather in the UK. So I've been seeing very meta conversations about the weather

in the UK. As always happens when I'm doing a story, Alice, pinning the first thing that you said, because I will certainly come to that. It's a conversation I've had with Katie as well. There's this thing that Americans have where they say, British weather hits different. British hot hits different. And I've said to Katie, is that true? Is that the case? Because obviously Katie lived in San Antonio where it was 90 plus Fahrenheit most of the time, but is also very humid. Yes, yeah, yeah. Texas is pretty bad, just generally. And she's going, oh, Christ, no, Britain's so much worse. When it's hot, it's fucking intolerable. And she's looking at the... She's feeling and thinking, it must be like 100 degrees. and she looks at the temperature and it's like 75 Fahrenheit and goes, what the fuck? What are you doing, Britain? How the fuck have you pulled this off? And it's not just during the day, like the nights have been bad. Last night, as of recording, last night was terrible. It's like sticky and close and it's like throw your duvet away kind of warm. And I've got a massive fan on my ceiling.

That spins quite quick. Just sits there and says, Marsh, you're so great. So great.

I love her. Can I look? Do you do another podcast? I listen to that too. My bedroom is specifically

particularly horrific because we get the sun in the late afternoon on that side of the house.

It just heats up and heats up and heats up through two massive glass windows.

Because the windows on these houses are massive.

Yeah, they're reasonably big.

They're not like your kind of little boxy windows that you get on new build houses.

But also, so the sun's coming in.

All the heat from the rest of the house is rising into the bedroom. And, of course, asleep in a bedroom with two dogs, in a bed with two dogs. It was horrific last night and the night before. Yeah. It's been so bad. I've been sleeping on top of the covers. Yeah. I've just been slept on the bed, not in the bed in any capacity. I went to retrieve my flat sheet yet, because I have a flat sheet for this very purpose.

I don't want a flat sheet is, but carry on. Just a single sheet. A not fitted sheet. Yeah. A non-fitted sheet. That you can just throw over you so that you're covered, but you're not. No, a sheet is fine. But it turned out our, for some reason, our flat sheet smelled weirdly of damp.

So I've had to throw that in the wash and use just an empty duvet case. Right. Yeah. No, I've just raw dogged it. I've just lying on the bed. Well, it's kind of gone past the point of being lovely. It's kind of actively unpleasant now. Yeah. And we're coming out of our third heat wave of the year, so far.

We have had quite a few, yeah. That's like around the last weekend. We've had days here in Liverpool where it was like 30 degrees, something there's Celsius in that kind of area. And that's hot for around here. 30 degrees, once you get to 30 degrees. But when I was in a whole day in Croatia, there were days that it was 30 degrees, and that was the days that Nicola just shut down.

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