Yes poor animals and to think about the vast wildlife of AU too... poor creatures.

Originally posted by Leonidas

It's pretty cold here right now, but we Canadians end up like that on a fairly regular basis throughout the year.

No way! 2-6 degrees is quite nice. Refreshing. If you don't like it, you just put some warm clothes on and you're fine. If it's 40 degrees and you don't like it, you're screwed!! Yes there are air conditioners, but there is heating in winter too. So we're just talking about when you're outdoors and there is no heating/cooling available, in which case the cold can be solved, but the heat cannot.

I agree that -30 celsius can be pretty hard going, but even that I prefer to 40 degrees. You just gear up really good, almost like an astronaut, and then it's just like a trip to the moon or a spacewalk or something.

I think the thing I prefer most about extreme cold vs extreme heat is that extreme cold is clean and pure, while extreme heat is dirty, filthy, swarming with germs and insects and microbes. 

I think the preference probably has alot to do with what you're forced to accept though. If you don't learn to accept winter and have fun with it here, you're just going to be miserable. But it still doesn't explain why so many people here have such a low tolerance for extreme heat, because we actually get alot of that in the summer too. I think it's because the heat is so much less avoidable, it hunts you down and you suffer and there's nothing you can do about it. You can always apply ingenuity and technology against the cold, but outside of indoor heating/cooling there's not a thing you can do about heat.

Ok, how about Islamabad, with its 45 C summers, -10 C winters and monsoon thrown in? Bloody complainers.

That helps, but not that much. You'll still be hot.

With enough layers and the right clothes, you can overheat and be pouring sweat even if it's -20 degrees out. So I still say that the cold is alot easier to mitigate than the heat.

Yes, my dislike of heat probably has alot to do with the extreme humidity we have here as well. I can imagine if you live somewhere that has a dry heat, it could be preferable to the cold. And actually, the worst kind of cold is wet cold, where it's cold enough to be unpleasant but not cold enough to freeze water vapour or stop it from raining. In that sense, 2-6 degrees can be alot more unpleasant than -20 under the right conditions.

Summertime makes me stinky, dull-witted, and listless. I don't know if it's the heat or the humidity but either way I just can't wait til its over. 

Well, I've worn loose fitting clothes, sat in the shade, and drank lots of water and it's no silver bullet. 

The cold can be entirely mitigated, to the point you can be sweating under too many layers. Loose clothes and lots of water will not make you feel like you're freezing at 50C! The effectiveness of that is pretty much limited to preventing heat exhaustion.

Besides, you're from the UK, so your opinion is questionable. "Mad dogs and Englishmen" and all that. Britons pride themselves on having a mental disorder that prevents them from registering the effects of extreme temperatures.

^

Being a person who's always felt almost as sentimental about places and things as I do about people, this sounds like a nightmare. 

• Victoria Police had confirmed 130+ people dead, while the CFA said more than 100 people were still unaccounted for.
• Up to 700 homes and 340,000ha of land were destroyed.
• More than 3730 people had registered with the Red Cross as having left their properties and the total homeless figure is expected to be much higher.