Excellent point, Roy. I guess my statement could lead people to believe that comfort is ALL in your mind when that’s certainly not what I intended. You never let me get away with anything!

You stated: Thermal comfort is a “condition of mind” that is “assessed by subjective evaluation.” That may be true, but it doesn’t change the fact that acceptable thermal comfort conditions are well known and quite consistent for almost all people. If you take metabolic rate and clothing level into account, then most people find that the same combinations of temperature, humidity, radiation, and air velocity are generally acceptable to people regardless of gender, age, race, etc. Ole Fanger did a lot of research to show this. ASHRAE Std. 55 and the Handbook provide those results from Fanger and others so that we can design and control buildings properly. When you go running, it isn’t your state of mind that is changing, it is your metabolic rate. You adjust by changing your clothing level, not your state of mind 😉

As someone who lives near a large, cold lake (Tahoe) I want to observe that folks who fall into the lake’s frigid water, even in summer, seldom die of hypothermia. The shock of encountering frigid water often induces a gasp and aspiration, followed by a shutdown of the extremities and drowning.

Of course, the end result, for a handful of individuals every year here, is sadly the same…