I confess: I love heat. I love the sun baking on my skin. I love the caress of a warm breeze. While midday heat can get uncomfortably intense, hot days usually include fresh bright mornings, perfect for coffee outside, or a walk, and cooler evenings, perfect for dinner outside, a lingering glass of wine, maybe a street party. I love getting really hot then jumping into cool blue water. I love sitting under a canopy, a fan whirring overhead. Excessive sun exposure is bad, I don’t disagree, but, at its essence, the sun gives us life. We would not exist without the sun.
Human-induced global warming is real, with negative consequences throughout the ecosystem. So what’s the reaction? If technology is causing the problem, cure it with more technology. Air conditioning is being presented in the media as a basic need, on a par with food and shelter. Daily there are scare articles about the danger of heat. Temperatures approaching ninety degrees trigger a “heat emergency”. There is a time and a place for air conditioning but as an overall panacea it’s a failure. Air conditioning accounts for nearly 20% of greenhouse gas emissions in the US. So while dealing with the consequences of global warming, it’s a major contributor to the problem. Also, too much air conditioning use strains the electrical grid, producing blackouts. If there’s a blackout…there goes the air conditioning. Brilliant.
Fact is, humans in hot places have existed without air conditioning for millennia. We would do well to adopt some of the building strategies these civilizations have used. Thick stone walls. Closely built buildings with narrow alleyways. White roofs: white roofs reflect up to 90% of sunlight , lowering indoor air temperatures 2-5%. Trees. Tree cover can lower street temperatures up to twenty degrees, as Portland’s 2021 heat dome illustrated. Public pools, which seem to be on the decrease rather than the increase.
We would also benefit from societal/psychological adaptations to heat. In Southern Europe practically everywhere—except restaurants— shut down for two hours for lunch. If you walk through a smaller Southern European town midday through midafternoon the streets are silent except for the sound of chatter indoors and a scent of lunch cooking. Why can’t we do that? What is the purpose of running frenetically through the day no matter the weather? What is accomplished? Some deluded idea of “productivity”? Europeans also allow for generous vacation time in the summer, when they visit the cooler mountains and seacoasts. We should do this too.
It’s pretty stupid and unhealthy (for both people and the planet) to build glass towers without open windows, without fans or other means of air circulation, that require air conditioning systems to be livable. Or any other buildings without adequate natural air circulation for that matter. Why not build structures—and societies—adaptable to the natural changes of the seasons? Then we will use less technology, and mitigate the damage of our presence on the planet.
While I love heat, once summer’s been fully realized, I’m ready to welcome mist and coolness back into my sun-soaked pores. I dislike extreme cold, but I’ve got nothing against chilly. What I can’t stand is living in some kind of netherworld that knows no seasons, that bears no relationship to the world outside.
Every day of my trip I read scary stories on my news feed about a “heat emergency” in Southern Europe. But I was in Southern Europe, for a month, about as Southern as you could get (200 miles from Tunisia) and there was no emergency. The hottest it ever got was 96 degrees one day. Most of the time it was in the ‘80s. A few times we actually put on our jackets. Now we’re back home and it’s heat emergency time again. I get this creepy feeling (yes, I realize I have a paranoid sci fi imagination, but…) that some forces want us to stay inside, fearful of whatever lies outdoors. Think I’ll go out to the yard and pick some sun-ripened tomatoes.
I am no fan of heat as it triggers a health issue for me, but I do appreciate your perspective and the way you digressed into a more important subject, like the fact that air conditioning is being pushed but it makes up for 20% of greenhouse gasses planet wide. You know what else does? Travel. Boeing should plead guilty to not only production fraud but also not doing more to design planes that do not rely on fossil fuels. It kills me that people complain about heat and then travel in discriminately because they can. A friend of mine who was just here has already made 5 international flights this year. He has three more trips planned before the year is out. Because he can. Because he can afford it financially and because he says he grew up an international kid (Greek raised in Saudi Arabia). He travels on an inheritance from his father who was a Greek executive for Aramaco. Yeah, Saudi oil industry money. I swear carbon credits are a scam so I just want people to be more selective about their travel, and yeah and about turning on their AC. We have central and haven't used it since the heat dome sat on us a few years back, an event I keep trying desperately to forget. It destroyed my garden and several trees.