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Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, government was generally on recess in the summer as most officials were back home on their plantations on the rivers where it was cooler. Virginia vernacular architecture is almost entirely based on keeping houses as cool as possible in the summer.

Also, places like Phoenix were barely inhabited by white people before air conditioning, and the indigenous people who were in the area before colonization had other techniques to handle the heat. Even hot places like New Orleans that were inhabited built differently than most homes today.

And the UK still has questions… www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

🤔 guess they're all going to need some of that electricity from 🇨🇦 afterall.😂😂🤣😂🤣

Sorry, I should have prefaced my last reply with a disclaimer that I was pointing out a minor technicality. I'm not trying to claim that 100-degree temperatures aren't dangerous, or even that evaporative cooling is very effective at those temps.

And unfortunately, heat deaths are still massively underreported/undercounted (I believe by design here in AZ). The powers that be hate the headlines + press attention even though this is a massive public health crisis. www.abc15.com/news/local-n...

Also, the only reason why parts of the US are so populated is because of air conditioning. When AC became affordable, there was a huge migration to the Sunbelt. Not many people wanted to live in Phoenix without AC.

See also: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

But the summer:winter ratio is not changing significantly, is my point.

ephemeralnewyork.wordpress.com/2023/07/10/w... Note the people who died falling off roofs & fire escapes because they tried to sleep there. Those would also be heat-related deaths.

These lines of argument are all rooted in lack of empathy--minimizing the impacts of decisions that are not going to personally impact this folks.

More than 1000 people died in the 1995 heatwave, mostly in Chicago. We were road tripping cross-country and turned around in Iowa because the A/C in our little car couldn’t keep up with it. On the radio they also talked about livestock deaths—chickens were dying and exploding as they decomposed

Or my era? Unrestrained kids, bouncing around..MVC nightmare.

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i had a landlord try to strong arm evict me when I was having benefits issues by locking out the electricity in July in the south. I have a heart condition (and a feeding tube). the utility company had me on the priority reconnect list and the judge was NOT amused

Our AC is limping along now for about two weeks now. Replacement is this Thursday, but for two weeks the lowest it has been in the house during daytime is 77F. It tries to catch up overnight, by me trying to thaw out the AC coils. :-/

They will become a necessity in most urge countries that don't already have them

It’s so unfair that the dead can’t return to scold us.

30 years ago a heat wave hit Chicago. People died and we still talk about it. Three people died just a few years ago because the building didn't turn on the ac blockclubchicago.org/2022/05/16/a...

Yeah I live in TN, and I have POTS now- if I did not live in a house with the AC blasting, I would just perish. Getting out for gardening and small walks is hard enough during these months, and I'm still having more flare ups & attacks even w/ AC. Also, even if you are healthy, it's still awful?!?!

I think it says 75% The temp refers to 80°

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And temperatures in 1960 weren't anywhere near what they are today. bsky.app/profile/fain...

Wow. Did not know that. In addition to other points people have raised about populating & city heat islands, let's add: Summers really are hotter than they were in 1960. Also architecture is different - southern houses used to be built to get the maximum shade & breeze possible, but now they aren't.

I think about this every time I see another "is your ac killing our planet?" articles from certain types of news papers.

There's an argument I've read about suburbs in grad school that says that it's because of the development of affordable consumer AC that the sunbelt was able to grow in the US.

Faine why is this discourse still going? Haven't we won yet?

Heat is a bigger killer of old people than is often realised.

Local high schools (Dallas) have been building roofs over their football practice fields so the boys have shade while they're out running around. Evidently there's also supposed to be a wind tunnel effect to keep a breeze going.

also just saw today that heat related deaths account for the most weather-related deaths in the US and floods are 2nd (cbs sunday morning).

i remember the first year i moved to california i think there was a major heat wave in chicago and around 500 people died! friends were freaking out that i moved to earthquake country and i don’t think we have had 500 deaths from an earthquake since 1906?

We had a stark reminder of it here in the PNW in the 2021 heat dome that killed hundreds. AC was quite uncommon here because it was rarely needed. That’s sadly no longer the case. www.npr.org/2021/07/02/1...

Kind of like we seem to have forgotten that preventable diseases used to kill lots of people before vaccinations, and unsafe food, drugs and other products used to kill lots of people before regulations ...

We’ve forgotten about a lot of mortality from a lot of things: measles, polio, extreme heat, starvation, lack of medical care. But hey, MAGA.

Yes, it’s getting even more dangerous due to climate change.

Yes that’s true of Ontario Canada it used to always cool down at night was 25 degrees all Saturday night still

There wouldn’t be nearly as many people living there if there wasn’t AC. You can’t just say “no one needs it anymore.” They also built things different for A/C. Also a lot of old people there, the death toll would be immense.

it still happens most years in chicago, generally among the unhoused or elderly iirc.

In lots of cheaper used vehicles the AC doesn’t work well or is broken.

They are already ahead of you on both ends of the horseshoe Victim-blaming MAGA hangs on the kernel of truth that using A/C reduces heat adaption that occurs in healthy people Fringe left notes refrigerants are GHGs and complains that it heats the outdoors www.motherjones.com/environment/...

Majority of heat deaths remains folks indoors without a/c. I spoke recently at an American Meteorological Society conference: Link: ams.confex.com/ams/52BC21Me... If prompted to fill in 2 boxes, enter Berler in top box, 9WNJTM78JY8 in the bottom one. I am first up, talk is ~15 minutes.

We're installing geothermal for exactly that reason.

Like the Pacific NW and other northern areas where AC has not been a regular thing (getting more regular with climate change). I was so happy a few years ago when the first of the big "heat dome" systems hit Seattle and my parents had already put AC into the house they had recently moved into.

It took The Onion a full 8 years to decide it was no longer "too soon" to make fun of this tragedy. theonion.com/dozens-dead-...

Air conditioning should be required for all rentals, but landlords are greedy and we don't like helping poor people survive.

The US South would not have the population it does today without air conditioning. Compare census data to the development and proliferation of air conditioning there.

My wife grew up in Charleston in a small house with no air con. I've always been amazed on what they did to keep the heat on the body down. On the other hand I grew up in New England where air cond was not needed (mostly) nor installed even if you could afford it.

People lived and still do where there are basements!

Down by only 80%?

My son asked me about health care when I was a kid. "What about this, what about that?" When I got to the point of saying people "just died" of something now treatable, he didn't see that coming.

Extremely

Can’t sleep in movie theatre overnight

Vancouver, Canada 2021 was hit by a heat dome that locked in temperatures in the 100s. The high was 104 F. Over 600 people died in a week, most on the weekend. This is a city where summer temps used to be in the 70s and it rained. Now, we're in a 6 year drought and temps of 90+ are "normal".

Climate change is real but it’s not spectacular

And '96, '97, '98. I drove up to Chicago in the summer of '99, to meet with an online group from the old Yahoo user-created rooms. All it took was 15 minutes trapped on the El, staggering back to the hotel afterwards, and 30 minutes of the Blair Witch Project, for me to be vomiting and incoherent.

Plus not everyone can afford to or has the means to "beat the heat". Depends on where they live and what they can afford. We didn't even have an AC unit til.... I think I was in middle school? We only had a window unit on the 2nd floor. Otherwise we huddled in the basement or went to the lake.

Then of course plenty of other things in any sort of healthcare facility. However AC is incredibly important during summer. It is VERY easy to get dehydrated just from sweating and not realize. Heck us workers do it sometimes and have to sit down and just chug water when we realize it cuz busy.

On the other hand, that breeze is very welcome on a hot summer’s day.

Hilariously it's actually called the Windy City because of politicians talking too much ("windbags") back in the day rather than the weather. It does get cold though. (I live here.)

In 1985, 28 people died in Staffordshire from a Legionnaires' outbreak, stemming famously from a hospital's AC. Not sure what mid-80s heat death figures in central England were, but they weren't in the national consciousness.

Guess which was the Evolution and which the Devolution.

Yep. My mom has MS. She NEEDS AC in order to survive.

Elders, babies, and small children. :(. Cancer patients and the immunocompromised. AC should be seen as an antidote to a public health crisis of heat.

Listened to a discussion on a podcast recently about how homes in London don't have screens. It's been very hot so windows are open for airflow and mosquitoes just waltz in and bite everyone. Obviously no AC, so the need to open windows.

You probably don’t have the mosquitoes that North America does

Indoor cats plus AC (both not yet anything like the norm in the UK) tend to lead to closed/screened windows.

It is almost unheard of. We spent 2 summer months in Italy with the windows wide open and nary a bug flew in. Switzerland and France are the same, though I do remember mosquitoes in 1950 in France.

Exactly. They aren't precisely universal. In houses built pre 1900 especially, you're more likely to find windows that never had them at all. Helped my sis move back from a very old duplex in PA several years ago, and we had to sleep during day/work during night to cope w/o AC or proper vent.

They’re not a regular thing in most of Europe either and I do not understand it.

in the south people also used a pigment called haint blue to paint porches and exterior window trim. it contained lye, which helped repel mosquitoes

people used to go take the whole family and sleep in the city park for relief. it sucked!

Friend of a friend lost their dog in the last Seattle one a couple of years ago.

Yes before I had a/c I had to send my dog over to my sisters for July and August ! He has a big black fur coat which makes him even hotter

Yep this is why I'm so hardcore about keeping at least one room at or below 26C at all times with my girl. I can suffer in heat because I'm a human. She literally will just die.

Everyone here should really read this book… a.co/d/9ULRCKo

In Charleston they built houses to increase drafts to stay cool in summer. Unfortunately if they caught fire, they also went up like blazing infernos.

There is a reason the Biltmore House exists in the North Carolina mountains.

There were 739 heat related deaths just in Chicago over a 5-day period exactly 30 years ago. Younger people often ignore what’s killing their elders, then and now.

I'm pretty sure "used to be fine" is just a strange euphemism for "people died, like a lot"

Survivorship bias has a lot of people saying we used to be fine about things we categorically were not

Isn’t this the headline any time some European country that, for understandable reasons, has normalized AC every time there’s a heatwave?

I grew up in Georgia. Mowed lawns all summer in the heat (you’re acclimated when you’re born in it). Moved to Philly 20 years ago. Summer here is now like GA in the 70’s-80’s. Winter as well. Georgia peaches aren’t much of a thing anymore. Not enough ‘cold hours’, so trees produce much less.

I’m so sorry and that would happen to me too as my asthma only acts up in extreme heat or extreme cold

Screened porches are wonderful. We had such a nice one in my childhood home. Didn’t need to sleep there tho as house had central air.

My mom (born in 1947) talks about the sleeping porch she and her siblings would use in the summer-- they'd all go out to a screened-in porch at night for the breeze.

Texan here. Box fan in the window at night, flipping that pillow constantly for the “cool” side. Sleeping was not easy The joy when we got ceiling fans