Yes I often hear sirens too, with lots of old people in Taipei not able to heat their homes (or not interested in doing so, if they have the means to do so). It’s very sad.
In my first year in Taiwan I had a coworker who’s mother died of exposure during a ‘cold’ snap, meanwhile back in the old country a friend of mines grandad lost a leg through falling asleep whilst warming himself by an open fire.
Just remember people aren’t dying from hypothermia, it isn’t that cold. It’s blood vessel often constrict when it’s cold, and this of course raises blood pressure, and can cause heart attack or stroke…
In a literal sense you are correct. However, windchill is derived from airspeed and humidity, both of which will lead to more rapid loss of body heat. So in terms of survival of old people it is extremely relevant.
And here was I under the naïve and false belief that heat loss - energy that flows due to a difference in temperature by mechanisms of convection, conduction and radiation between two objects or phases - would be slowed under the influence of a stationary boundary layer in the mobile fluid phase!
Riding your motor bike around in your skivvies for a few minutes in Taiwan climate would certainly demonstrate the physical science quickly. Surely, instinctive reactions would take hold more quickly than taking the time to analyze the method of temperature modulation.
Makes me think of my downhill school run using a old racer bike with metal handlebars. A good friend of mine - who is now a working rocket scientist with the European space agency - recommended gloves. I scoffed at his pseudo science of course. In a not entirely unrelated scientific exploration I saw a one handed motorbike rider take a tumble the day before yesterday. One hand in the pocket for warmth lead to some complications at the junction.
Its not that these aren’t a factor, its that there is no standard measurement for “feels like” so it can be misleading, same as we don’t use bananas as a standard unit of measurement in manufacturing.
This is not just for cold but heat, the fact that they are quoted by some media for clickbait and they like to choose the most extreme examples, this diminishes the credibility in my opinion.
As they include things like how these conditions affect bare skin over a period of time the full sentence should be something like, " The temperature could feel like ??c if you stand naked in the most exposed area with constant gust/rain/direct sun etc." but thats a bit long so they just say “feels like”.
I think the ‘feels like’ scale is perhaps more validly applied to the temperatures of capsicum containing foodstuffs: take this example: I went to a Sichuan hot pot place last night and it ‘felt like’ about 2,500 degrees. However as it turns out the A and E consultant assured me - to my great surprise - that there was no actual damage and the hot pot wasn’t actually that ‘hot’ at all.
Well as I have a couple of hours spare, the weather is nice I think I should put on my hoodie and head to the mountains or the beach and see how the weather feels like there.