Save your lungs: Never surrender to air conditioning

Americans are really eager to export their favorite invention after the SUV, the air conditioning, to Europe. Western European mainstream media like the Economist are now really eager to get us to buy air conditioning.

I for one however, say I would rather die of a heat stroke than ever buy air conditioning. I’m going to do my best to make everyone see why air conditioning is not the way forward. I can forgive people for wanting air conditioning to be available for vulnerable elderly, I can not forgive people for buying air conditioning for themselves. If you buy air conditioning, I will haunt you in your nightmares.

Air conditioning makes the global warming problem worse

Let’s pretend we all have zero carbon electricity available, 24/7. I would still be against air conditioning. Why is that? An estimated 33% of an air conditioning unit’s carbon footprint, comes from its manufacturing and from the leaking of refrigerant fluids. No matter how much the Economist hammers on the idea that European electricity is now low carbon, a third of the impact of these abominations on our Earth is incurred the moment you buy them, regardless of whether you choose to ever make use of the thing.

Your air conditioning forces your neighbor to buy one too

Air conditioning doesn’t destroy heat. No, it destroys your neighborhood, by dumping your hot waste air into your environment. The heat is not destroyed, it is exported out of your home. The result is that if everyone in Paris began using air conditioning, the average temperature outside in the streets during a heatwave would be 2.4 degree Celsius higher than it is now.

You buy air conditioning, you increase the heat in your street, which then forces your neighbor to buy one too, whose neighbor then also buys air conditioning. You caused the problem.

The air from air conditioning will make you sick

Air conditioning systems when poorly maintained begin to spread mold spores and bacteria. Studies find that buildings with air conditioning lead to increased sick building syndrome. Your lung function can be observed to deteriorate when you are excessively exposed to air conditioning.

Exposure to excessive air conditioned air will result in hypersensitive pneumonitis. This is an inflammatory reaction in your tiny air sacs (alveoli). This leads to scarring. the scarring is irreversible. If you are exposed to excessive air conditioned air, you will suffer scarring of your lungs and there is nothing we know of that you can do to reverse the damage your lungs suffered.

Exposure to air conditioned air is associated with a doubled risk of asthma in children. People exposed to air conditioned air have been found to have a reduced lung volume by 30%. Ever notice how Europeans win many more Olympic medals than Americans do, relatively speaking? It could be because we don’t expose our children’s developing lungs to air conditioned air.

Transmission of viral respiratory pathogens like SARS-COV-2 has also been found to be linked to air conditioning use.

Air conditioning prohibits your body from acclimatising to the heat

How do people in places like Congo and India deal with the heat? Well, at least in part, they deal with it by simply dealing with it. When our bodies are exposed to heat, we produce physiological adaptations to the heat. This prevents us from suffering heat shock, when we are then exposed to acute heat. It takes us about 7 to 14 days of gradual adaptation to develop this natural capacity in our bodies.

If you choose not to acclimatize, what you’re effectively choosing is to make it difficult for yourself to go outside into the streets and into nature, where you have no cool air available. You’re also making this choice for any children you may have, whose memory of summer will be of sitting inside and avoiding the heat.

Natural acclimatisation also causes changes in your brain, that protect the brain against the risk of heat stroke.

Air conditioning will make you fat

Why are Americans so ugly and obese? Because they have air conditioning. I’m not eating a lot right now, because I don’t have a lot of hunger. I don’t have a lot of hunger, because it’s very warm right now. Sitting in the heat also increases the calories you expend, through sweating.

Similarly, exposure to the cold is good for our bodies, it forces us to spend more energy.

Why are we Europeans so superior to Americans in every sense of the word? Well, at least part of the answer, is air conditioning. We’re not fat, because we don’t have air conditioning. We don’t cost as much to the healthcare system, because we’re not fat. We will start losing our natural superiority to the Americans, if we start making the same kinds of stupid choices that Americans have already made.

Air conditioning won’t be available when we need it the most

You know what’s funny about global warming? The greenhouse effect traps heat. This means that you observe more global warming during the night, than during the day. Don’t think you’ll only be running your air conditioning during the day when the electricity from solar panels is available. You won’t. What will actually happen is that you will end up running your air conditioning 24 hours a day, because it is mainly the nights that will become unbearable.

We already established that air conditioning use increases temperatures in a city. When is most of this increase in temperatures observed? It’s during the night.

The urban heat island is what makes it so difficult for those of us who live in cities to sleep at night. The urban heat island effect increases night temperatures by 5-7 degree Celsius, compared to neighboring rural areas.

You people buy air conditioning and think to yourself: “Well I will only be using it during the day, when the electricity comes from solar panels”. That’s not what’s going to happen, you’ll end up running it 24/7 because you simply dump the heat outside of your house and then it moves back into your house when you stop running the air conditioner.

Singapore has the highest rate of installed air conditioning units of all the ASEAN countries. In Singapore, residential electricity use for air conditioning typically peaks between 9:00 PM and 8:00 AM, as most households run their units continuously overnight.

In parts of America, air conditioning can be 70% of total electricity use during parts of the day. Their grids struggle to handle to load during evening. If you want blackouts in a country like the Netherlands, be sure to buy your own air conditioning. Maybe we can become like India. Let me remind you of what the heatwaves in India are like:

I’m sure some of you have seen the international headlines or the new UN climate warnings about the heat dome over India right now. The IMD (our weather department) has issued red alerts across my region (the northwest/central belt). Yesterday, a town near me recorded 48.2°C.

I want to explain what 48 degrees actually feels like when you live in a developing country, because it is terrifying.

You can’t just “stay inside and run the AC.” The power grid simply cannot handle the load of millions of people trying to cool down, so we are dealing with rolling blackouts. Imagine sitting in the pitch dark in a concrete room that has been baking in the sun for 12 hours, with no ceiling fan, while the ambient temperature inside is still hovering near 40°C at midnight. You don’t sleep; you just pass out from exhaustion.

The taps are running dry because the heat evaporates local reservoirs and water usage spikes. People who have to work outside—street vendors, construction workers, delivery drivers—are collapsing. Even the water coming out of the cold tap during the day is hot enough to literally brew tea.

It feels like we are living on the absolute razor’s edge of what the human body can endure, and it’s only May.

So what you’re going to get is that in the future during the evening, every decadent Dutch moron is going to have their air conditioning running and our grid won’t be able to handle it, as it will be the equivalent of a winter peak in demand during a summer evening.

Oh, wanna hear a funny one? You’re going to struggle with electricity generation in summer too. Do not forget the summer doom of 2022 France. They lost 60% of their nuclear capacity, because of maintenance issues and because the water of their rivers was simply too hot to use for cooling.

It’s not just nuclear you lose. Hydropower didn’t work either, due to the droughts. You also naturally have very little wind power in summer. They even struggled to get the coal to the coal plants in Germany, because the river water level was too low for the ships. So you lose your generative capacity, at the same time as your demand peaks.

Even your solar panels become less efficient during a heatwave. This is why Belgium has the highest electricity prices of this year on a summer evening. If everyone starts using air conditioning, we’ll find that we start having blackouts during summer evenings.

If we had the levels of air conditioning use in 2022 in Europe that we have now, we would have been fucked. The grid would not have been equipped to handle it.

The actual solution to heatwaves

Reduce the urban heat island effect. You can do this by planting trees. You also need to stop making the heatwaves worse, by stopping with using the atmosphere as a place to dump your waste products.