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What a scorcher! It is getting mighty hot around here. For the last few days I have been saying a silent prayer to the inventor of modern office air conditioning. Without such technology, it is hard to imagine how much of our present-day economy could work at the pace it does. Large parts of the southern U.S., for example, as well as financial hubs like Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Frankfurt would be unworkable.
Come to think of it, air-conditioning is probably one of the most economically significant inventions of our time. It may even be more important than the internet, though I may be shot for even suggesting this.
Meanwhile, this report has some sizzling stats on how hot it is getting. I am a bit of a skeptic on the issue of the Greenhouse Effect, and naturally suspicious of the Green agenda thereon, but it is easy to see how this theory gains traction in such sweltering conditions as we have at the moment.
Right, time for an ice-cream.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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I am a bit of a skeptic on the issue of the Greenhouse Effect, and naturally suspicious of the Green agenda thereon, but it is easy to see how this theory gains traction in such sweltering conditions as we have at the moment.
Yeah, except we had a brutally cold Winter and Spring this year in New England, and I looked in vain for any mention of that in US national news. Individual snowstorms, yes. A trend lasting months and months, no. Unusually warm dry conditions in the Midwest made national headlines, but somehow unusually cold wet conditions in the Northeast didn’t.
I’m writing from Phoenix, Arizona. And it was 116 yesterday. Of course I was wandering about outside the day it hit 122, so this is nothing.
RK Jones
I am not sure the that the primitivists are going to get much traction by bemoaning the hot weather in the middle of July!
Now, if it was November…..
You haven’t even reached 100 yet? What a bunch of wimps! You Brits are just going to have to experience a summer in the Midwest or Southwest US. Now that will give you a true idea of what sweltering means!
Merlin: Ha! You Southwest wussies get the dry stuff! Visit sunny Louisiana…breaking a hundred and humid. It’s like having your face stuffed in Satan’s armpit.
The high in Palm Springs, CA yesterday was 118, with an 82 degree dew point. The heat index got up to 152 degrees.
That’s hot.
S. Weasel wrote:Merlin: Ha! You Southwest wussies get the dry stuff! Visit sunny Louisiana…breaking a hundred and humid. It’s like having your face stuffed in Satan’s armpit.
Having spent a year in central Louisiana, I second this emotion. There simply isn’t anything more enjoyable than randomly vomiting from too much exercise.
RK Jones
The sky is falling! We’re all going to die!
Unless, of course, we implement this 18 point protocol restricting the burning of certain fuels in certain nations, and exempting other nations on the grounds that . . . .
Well, of course, without the basic technology behind A/C, the Internet would probably also be impossible. All those servers running 24-7 need to be cooled, you know.
The servers would run fine, colocated happily in Nothern Norway, Iceland, Greenland, Siberia, and ALL of Alaska and northern Canada, tops of mountains and other places of civilized climate.
Where a hot day is one where the mid afternoon hot breaks 20C/60F and night time lows are above freezing.
For 3 months a year. the rest of time it’s pretty cool.
On the other hand, Washignton DC would pretty well be dead for 6 month of the year due to heat, which would be good.
Fred
Air conditioning, like vaccination, is a “solution” that tends to exacerbate the problem it was intended to solve, reducing one’s tolerance level and turning you into a whinger. (Then there are those of us for whom AC just makes us feel worse, but this is not a problem — unless they live with someone who feels the need to have it on non-stop all summer…)
Damaged Justice
Having just spent the 4th of July weekend watching Nascar Races in Daytona Beach (95 and humid as hell), all I can say is heres to exacerbating the problem. Lets have more exacerbating all round.
Eamon
You’re perfectly free to refrigerate your home. Personally, I try to stay out of businesses that use AC. Unfortunately, there are very few of them. As I said – isn’t choice marvelous?
S.Weasel, you must have missed the reports when people were complaining that we had the cold, snowy, awful winter weather because global warming had screwed up the entire planet to the point of causing the winters to be worse. I certainly remember them.
I’ve decided not to bother comparing lovely Baltimore weather to anywhere else. I’ll just sit inside with my home refrigeration.
Fred makes a good point. Before aircon Washington was uninhabitable half the year, and the Federal government got much less done. And it was a malarial swamp, too, with Dengue fever on the side.
Being born and raised in S. Florida and remembering the day we finally got air conditioning, I say “Thank you, Mr. Carrier!”
Air conditioning just had its centennial – invented 1902 by Willis Carrier, whose name is still on many A/C units.
Nice to see it getting some recognition.
And re your comment re its big impact on economics:
“Large parts of the southern U.S., for example, as well as financial hubs like Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Frankfurt would be unworkable. Come to think of it, air-conditioning is probably one of the most economically significant inventions of our time.”
the Federal Reserve Board (USA – Richmond) seems to agree:
Air Conditioning changes the world
Isn’t it, in fact, usually quite warm in July?
Do the global-warming wallahs have SUCH short memories.
“Fred makes a good point. Before aircon Washington was uninhabitable half the year, and the Federal government got much less done”
HAHAHAHA…they just have more time to get much less done now!
Think of how useless everyone is when the power goes out!!! Poweroutages may not happen all that often (unless you live in the stix), but when it does, people can’t do anything…We need to keep our primitive past alive or else we weaken our ability to survive.