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: The exact relationship between body composition and perceived warmth is very complicated and varies with context. As a rule of thumb, you’ll probably be warmest if you happen to be both fat and muscular .) Advertisement
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According to the Times, overcooling makes people less happy and productive. We “work less and make more mistakes” at 70 degrees than we do at 75 degrees, the essay says, citing figures from an observational study of 19 workers at a sales office in Piscataway, New Jersey. While it’s true the researchers found a correlation between ambient air temperature and workers’ “correct keystrokes,” the result applied only to a subset of their study group—the seven people who happened to experience temperature shifts of more than 7 degrees during the study. Even among this smaller group, the researchers found no effect of temperature on a second measure of productivity, “mouse-click rate.” Meanwhile, other studies done in natural work settings find that overheating has a large—and decidedly negative—effect on employees. One recent paper looked at 70 factory workers exposed to different temperatures and found that those in hotter conditions made more mistakes and showed signs of temporary cognitive impairment. Controlled experiments in the lab generally come to the same conclusion. And if you go by research from Japan, where office thermostats are set at 82 degrees during the summer, some two-thirds of employees describe themselves as being uncomfortable and unproductive in July and August.