“When the air conditioning is too cold, when it is between 30 and 35°C outside, you impose violent temperature changes on your body. The body no longer understands what is happening to it, and our organs want to defend themselves,” Jean-Louis San Marco, Professor of Medicine at the University of Marseille, told Allô Docteurs. “When it is hot, the blood vessels [in our nose, in our throat] dilate to help the body eliminate excess heat. On the contrary, when it is cold, they contract to keep it. When we move too often from hot to cold, our mucous membranes get irritated.”
Homes in the U.S. used to be designed to take advantage of cross ventilation, shade from trees, etc.
We have a lot of housing stock now that was built when energy costs were low, so there’s no insulation in the walls or roofs and the windows don’t provide a cross breeze. They pretty much require constant use of either heat or A/C to maintain a reasonable temperature.
This. New Orleans shotguns were built tall and narrow to funnel heat up and take advantage of breezes (called a shotgun because you can shoot a gun from front to back - no walls between to stop breezes from circulating).
Stucco exterior walls and ivy do a lot to keep a house cool, even in a Mid-Western summer. A wood-framed house is like an oven.
I feel like life on earth lived for millions of years without air conditioning, and now everyone seems literally addicted to it. Ask them to give it up, and they will tell you their life will end.
I feel like air conditioning is a lingering effect of mid-20th-century excess — like enormous tailfins on a Cadillac, or building suburbs and then spraying them with DDT.
I remember as a kid getting into the car to go somewhere, and my mum telling me she’d planned the day so we could stay cool on the afternoon, because it was going to be 30C.
30! That was some heat wave. We’d close the windows and drapes in the early morning (the house had more insulation than average), and we’d have quiet time in the basement rec room, reading books or napping. No turning on the TV because the tube generated heat. No cooking; cold cuts and salad for dinner.
And it was hot, but it was okay.
Last summer we had several days over 40C. And while my apartment is great at retaining heat – if I cook/bake every day in the winter it has to be below -15C before I even turn on the heat – it gets uncomfortably warm quickly.
It’s not just the AC ubiquity – it is warmer now. And as mentioned above, our buildings and infrastructure are not made for it.
I’m in France right now and 40°c with 50-60% humidity is a fucking joke. All the macho journalists writing those “France does not need air conditioning because we are French, and the most resilient people!” op-eds upthread can fuck off and die.
It’s warm, and you get a bit sweaty when you move from place to place. That’s about it. It’s interesting and novel that France should be experiencing these kinds of spikes in temperature, but honestly, fuck off with your “We French…” editorials.
Even 50° at 50% humidity won’t kill you, unless you don’t understand how rehydration works, or you’re very young or very old. It’s unpleasant, sure, but the fact that you’re not “falling back on” air conditioning isn’t some kind of point of national pride, it’s just a question of not understanding what exactly is in store for you once this shit inevitably gets a lot, lot worse. There’s a shit ton of A/C in public places here, and it only needs to kick in for a month or so at most.
Singapore is about 32° and 90%+ humid 24/7/365. Once you get to that kind of humidity, your sweat stops evaporating and you can’t physically cool down without some kind of assistance. Air conditioning in those conditions isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of not wanting to kill people.
Uh, yeah, it’s the same temperature here in Louisiana. It’s pretty Frenchy here, and we use the hell out of some A/C. And outdoor misters with cool water, and every playground has a splash park.
As @AndyHilmer says, 50% humidity is pretty dry. At 100% humidity, the air is saturated and your sweat no longer evaporates, which means you just keep sweating because the evaporation is what cools you down. If you don’t get out of the heat or keep yourself really hydrated, you can die pretty quickly from dehydration.
At 50% humidity, the air can take twice as much water as it currently holds before it will become saturated, which is a lot of water when it comes to sweating; more than enough to cool one’s skin down and reduce core body temperature.
I’m going to guess that the macho op-eds up-thread were written by people who haven’t spent extended periods in an environment where sweating doesn’t cool you down. Airconditioning is basically an essential part of life for a lot of people in the tropics and elsewhere, who are either sick, too old or young, or too unfit to survive without it.
Pretending that it’s some kind of moral weakness is pretty low, and tying that into arguments about “national character” is downright reprehensible.
Ah, sorry; I was still referring to the op-eds, not your comment. I should have made that clearer but was trying to reply and watch Stranger Things at the same time…
The French jingos were. The technical details of what number means what and what applies when, it’s all in the larger discussion that we’re having now. Exciting, no?
