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Not to mention cooling. How many people in the UK even have air conditioning?
by SaintGhurka 3y ago
Not to mention cooling. How many people in the UK even have air conditioning?
- secondcoming 3y agoI've lived all over the UK, houses and apartments, and never had air-con. You might get a week or so during summer when it's quite hot but then a large fan is sufficient.
- chongli 3y agoYeah whereas in the southern U.S. a lack of air conditioning is a medical emergency. It gets insanely hot down there!
- jacquesm 3y agoIt's technically uninhabitable. It only works because we have a lot of technology, similar to NL, the arctic and so on. There are a lot of areas in the world that we have essentially only borrowed as long as we can hold on to them but that are in most senses uninhabitable and hostile to unprotected life.
- esrauch 3y agoIs it uninhabitable? Maybe some specific areas in Arizona / New Mexico, the South Eastern US was already established States before air conditioning was even invented.
- jacquesm 3y agoYes, but not by these quantities of people. Critical infrastructure would be much harder to keep alive without AC and the same goes for the elderly. I would expect the average lifespan of the region to take a serious hit during a prolonged power outage in summer.
- wil421 3y agoYea no. Been to Costa Rica many times and no one has AC. People aren’t dying on the streets. My brother in law lived there for 10 years with no AC and it’s hotter, for longer, than my home in the Deep South.
- jacquesm 3y agoIt's the combination of temperature, humidity, wind and other factors that poses health risks. https://www.weather.gov/tsa/wbgt https://www.weather.gov/tsa/wbgt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature This stuff can and does kill and if you're not aware of it then pay attention: this is one of the more direct consequences of climate change, it may well push zones that are currently marginally habitable right into inhabitable.
- lancesells 3y agoAgreed. I would guess some desert areas might not be habitable but that's only a portion of a couple states. You can definitely live in places like Florida without AC.
- b112 3y agoPeople used to die of cold, and so why not heat? It was just the way things were.
- Retric 3y agoPeople dying of heat in the US tend to have other serious medical conditions so it’s unlikely to change overall life expectancy significantly. Also, peoples homes have been redesigned for AC. The most obvious being people used to sleep on upper story “Sleeping Porch” in the summers. Those living spaces have almost universally had walls added. There’s many more subtle architectural changes that have gone away such as ventilation above doors, setting homes up for cross ventilation etc. Most of which simple doesn’t make sense in a world with cheap AC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_porch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_porch / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona_room etc
- 3y ago
- rightbyte 3y agoPeople used to live there before ACs. It is down to inefficient construction designs.
- wil421 3y agoSpot on it’s very hot where I am and I run the AC about 9 months a year. My house has 2 units. Even in the winter there could be hot days where I’ll need to run it.