PRO: Air conditioning can actually lower room temperatures in a matter of minutes. Fans, by contrast, merely make it feel cooler through the clever trick of moving hot air around.
CON: Air conditioning might temporarily delude you about quite how much trouble this planet is actually in.
PRO: Air conditioning doesn’t just cool the air, but dehumidifies it. This is good, because dryer air can absorb more water, and the human body’s cooling mechanism involves the evaporation of sweat, which is why fans work. If you’ve ever wondered why weather forecasts sometimes bang on about “real feel” or “wetbulb temperatures” that combine temperature with humidity, this is why.
CON: Prolonged exposure to AC can dry your eyes and skin so badly that you end up looking like you just drank from the incorrect grail.
PRO: There are large and growing parts of the planet that are in serious danger of becoming uninhabitable without air conditioning. So perhaps that’s going to be a risk regardless.
CON: Many people believe air conditioning can cause infections.
PRO: Many people are, and this may come as a surprise to you, idiots. Actually, while AC can cause coughs or runny noses, this is the result of the way it dries your nasal passages. Incubating infections is not a risk unless the system has been badly maintained – when, admittedly, you can get legionnaire’s disease. But let’s not make a whole thing out of it.
CON: Cooling your home adds to your carbon emissions. That’s especially true of the cheap portable air conditioning units of the sort people are most likely to buy in a panic during a heatwave.
PRO: The heating systems you use to make sure you don’t freeze to death every winter also adds to your carbon emissions, and no one feels the need to place any moral inflection on that.
CON: A portable ACT unit requires roughly 1kw of electricity. According to uswitch.com, that can set you back upwards of 26p an hour – over £6 a day – to cool a single room. The average nuclear family, restricting usage to occupied bedrooms at night, is probably looking at a bill of over £100 a month. Built-in air con is even more expensive – as much as 69p an hour – plus there’s the upfront cost of buying and installing all this in the first place.
PRO: Being too tired to work because you’ve not been able to sleep in a fortnight or have died of heat exhaustion is also likely to impact your household finances.
CON: Many air conditioning systems contain hydrofluorocarbons – a type of greenhouse gas which, if released through improper disposal, can do vastly more environmental damage than mere carbon dioxide ever could.
PRO: This is an extremely strong case for disposing of them properly and – here’s a thought! – not releasing the bloody things.
CON: It is extremely hard to retrofit air conditioning to older buildings that don’t have space for it. That’s why AC is generally less popular in countries that rely on older architecture than those that have built large chunks of their housing stock since 1945.
PRO: It was the absence of air conditioning which allowed the southern United States to develop its unique political culture. Nobody in their right mind was going to voluntarily take a job picking cotton in the hot, humid summer of the Deep South: hence, mass chattel slavery and several centuries of hard-wired racism.
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CON: The rise of air conditioning over the past 80 years has allowed the racist states to overcome centuries of relative population loss, and amass increasing political power, and oh god.
PRO: Thanks to being designed for a cooler climate than the planet seems set to provide us with any time soon, upwards of 80% of British homes overheat in summer. That can impact on health, productivity, hydration levels and mean we’re all likely to be in a bloody terrible mood for literally weeks on end, and I have had enough, and I am bloody well sick of it.
CON: But thanks to our ever-forward-facing government, nobody thought to include air-to-air heat pumps of the sort that provide both cooling in summer and heating in winter in the government’s boiler upgrade scheme. And they can cost several thousand pounds just to install.
PRO: Air conditioning has opened up huge areas of previously hostile territory to human habitation, allowing new cities to bloom in the desert.
CON: Truly terrible things happen in both Las Vegas and the United Arab Emirates.
Jonn Elledge’s new book 31 Inventions That Built Our World is published in August by Headline
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