Question: Does farting make you cooler?
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: Here in the Northern Hemisphere, it is summertime. Everyone knows that the human body cools itself by sweating or finding an air-conditioned environment, but how much does farting help? This is unknown.
To determine how much heat is contained within each fart, we turned to our fart database, which contains extensive information about each of the 2000+ farts we have documented. Previous posts have examined the sound, smell, and wetness of these farts, but we also have data on the temperature of the air in the vicinity of each fart. Combining all this data into a fart-triggered average of temperature, we obtain the following:
Here the dashed line indicates the onset of the average fart, and the different lines correspond to sensors at different distances from the source. The two closest sensors (at 1” and 1.5”, blue and red lines) register an increase in temperature around the time of each fart, suggesting that the fart increases air temperature by a small amount. (Note that air temperature increases through time simply because of proximity to the farter).
For the entire database, here is the distribution of heat changes attributable to farts:
The distribution has a mean of 0.08o C.
The immutable laws of physics dictate that heat, being a form of energy, is conserved, so an equivalent amount of heat must be lost by the farter upon release of the fart. Indeed, given that the volume of air heated by the fart is 308.9 cm3, we can use the equations of heat transfer to determine that the heat generated by a fart is equivalent to 0.0003 kJ of energy.
This is not much energy. It’s similar to running a typical furnace for about 10 microseconds. So, farting won’t do much to combat the heat, but it doesn’t hurt.