Title: Air conditioning energy: AC saves lives and causes less climate change than heating.
Headings: Hot and Bothered
Hot and Bothered
Air conditioning isn’t bad for you or even (relatively) for the planet.
By Daniel Engber
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Content: A blast of cold, like you’d get when you walk into a chilled lobby on a summer day, “may feel good at first,” she writes, but the rapid shift in temperature can make “the hypothalamus go nuts, intensifying physical and psychological discomfort when the initial pleasure wears off.” I’ll admit that does sound pretty bad—no one wants a nutty hypothalamus. But the essay doesn’t tell us if these rapid shifts in temperature cause the same derangement during winter. Would it discombobulate the diencephalon to warm yourself beside the fire on a frigid night, or sip a steaming cup of cocoa? The wrongness of the essay doesn’t end with awkward stabs at neuroscience. At one point it proposes that building managers might be setting thermostats too low because they’re “heavyset, as body fat is the ultimate heat insulator.” This has the science somewhat backward: Body fat is indeed an insulator, and that means that it prevents a person’s core body heat from seeping out into her skin. ( You’ll recall the skin is where you’d find a person’s thermoreceptors.) As a result, a fat person might end up feeling colder than a skinny person, and not the other way around. (