At 4 a.m. you can have the most delusional thoughts.
Why is there a burglar in my shower?
There was a mild clattering. Soon after there was a tremendous crash. I swept the house, upstairs and down, laundry and closets. Everything was where it should be. No one was where they shouldn’t be. Finally we found the scene of the chaos: the shower.
We have this spring-loaded, corner shelf contraption. It is one of the devices upon which The Yankee places her dozens of shower care products. Somehow, perhaps because of the weight and strain, the thing decided to give way early this morning. The spring-loaded corner shelf contraption was resting at a diagonal position across the shower. The many plastic bottles and accoutrements were scattered about.
I’d forgotten just how scattered until later in the day when I returned for a shower. (No way was that getting cleaned up at 4 a.m.) This stuff has mystified me for a year. There are gels and soaps and rubs and bastes for every occasion. I’ve never bothered to count them, but noted today there were more than 15 separate items.
That’s just the liquid-based items.
Hot, hot, hot
I’ve almost stopped noticing. Three hours later the thermometer — and, sure, it is in a car, and runs a few degrees warm — had dropped only two degrees. That was after the workout. I pedaled 30 miles this evening. Started with a cramp in the calf, but all went well. Had a nice, even rhythm and just pushed on through.
Outsmarted myself, though. To nurse a blister I altered my stride and managed to mangle my foot. That wasn’t a sore, stiff, agitated muscle type thing. It was a crunchy metatarsal thing. It was an “evaluate each step to determine if it necessary thing.”
I used ice. Couldn’t tell you the last time I did that.
There’s an evening display of thunder. No rain, but an impressive soundtrack nonetheless. We haven’t had rain for a little over a week and are right at our average for this point of the year. Some parts of the state are thinking of beating the rush and starting a drought.
The almost sounds like an apology for the heat, but we know better. That’s why we’re staying in the shade. The official high today was in the 90s. The record for this day in history is 105, back in 1930 and they didn’t even have global warming back then. I’m betting, in the deep south in 1930 they’d have enjoyed a bit of air conditioning, contra Stan Cox‘s argument that that infernal air conditioner is costing us politically, ecologically and medically.
You can guess which ones are the most important for Cox, who says air conditioning made possible all those hasty elections in the 1990s and 2000s that he regrets. “It’s pretty much unanimously believed that if we had not had air conditioning, we could not have had this huge migration of population from the North to the Sun Belt.”
If only Willis Carrier, a New Yorker, knew what he was doing when he invented modern air conditioning in the first half of the 20th Century.
Science, Cox babbles on, urges you to “recognize that a lot of the health problems that we need A.C. to solve, it may have contributed to in the first place. We need to look at the conditions under which people die in heat waves, the harsh life conditions that they’re enduring more generally.”
That logical leap of faith hurts to think about, but some 70,ooo Europeans can’t disagree, their deaths in 2003 being one of those health problems that a modern convenience might have prevented. But air conditioning probably created the problem. Indeed, he says that some that is obvious has happened. In his next sentence he is uncertain if it happened. He could be confused by the heat.
Incidentally, Cox says he stays cool by turning on electric fans, still consuming power and scrubbing his property against the mold, or he would if he lived with all those silly, light-headed Southerners who seem to vote the wrong way.
How can this be fixed?
I think that we need to be changing a lot of the features of our society that have helped make us dependent on air conditioning in the first place.
Change! We’re going to add extra sweat glands to everyone!
In the end, someone will have to put some very hard limits on energy consumption and emissions overall.
If there isn’t already an HVAC lobby in D.C. they’re getting organized right now. We can only hope that someone doesn’t regulate sweat. Someone else must do it, though. One mustn’t do it themselves. One can’t trust another to do it for themselves. Someone else must get the job done.
Has a czar been appointed yet?
However the truth is, people could give up refrigerators or stoves or drive 9,000 miles less a year or stop using electric lighting, but none of those things would cut emissions as much as eliminating air conditioning.
So what we’re doing here is to present some unpalatable alternatives. And when readers think “refrigeration, cooking, car, lights” then they’ll make the self sacrifice of air, which is better for our health, to say nothing of those pesky politics.
I have a theory…
Stan Cox, science writer (an author railing against most everything in your life) has a theory. Well, it isn’t really a theory, but it is just easier to say that word, because some of the air conditioned folk have probably heard of the word and think it “sciencey.” What he has, though, is not a theory. Whatever it is, I hope he shares it with us!
(T)hat if we could require Congress to meet two days per week during the summer session out under a canopy on the Capitol lawn …
Less Congress? This could happen. That would be good. None of those people would want to suffer through those conditions. After all, Washington D.C. was a city people fled in the summers. And they were doing that generations before the advent of that inconveniently conditioned air which made everyone soft.
(T)hey might want to deal with ecological reality a little more straightforwardly than when they are sitting in the air-conditioned rooms inside.
Because, you see, reality under a tarp in the middle of the district in July is different than what’s going on for those good people’s districts, in terms of, oh, I dunno, politics, ecology, medicine and the economy. Cox is from Salina, Kansas. It gets hot there. Our sweaty Congress is presently headed by Nancy Pelosi, of San Francisco where it is in the mid-60s right now (so what’s the big deal?) and Harry Reid, who’s from the desert.
And heaven knows you won’t be able to get any traction from those Southern members. They started this problem anyway.
You know why the dinosaurs died? Climate change. They didn’t have heaters.
Just saying.
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