> If people are actively sweating while sitting at the office they are for sure not at 100% mental effort. Lee Kuan Yew, first prime minister of Singapore, sai

> If people are actively sweating while sitting at the office they are for sure not at 100% mental effort. Lee Kuan Yew, first prime minister of Singapore, said this about air-conditioning[1][2]: > Question: Anything else besides multicultural tolerance that enabled Singapore's success? > Answer: Air conditioning. Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics. Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency. Everywhere is getting hotter; Europe is seeing heatwaves that exceed temperatures seen even in the tropics. In summer Europe gets 15-16 hours of sunlight, and the fairly high humidity doesn't help. The tropics—especially those countries almost bang-smack on the Equator with Af Köppen–Geiger climate classification—are mostly uniformly warm and wet, with extremely hot (> 37 °C) air temperatures quite rare because of the uniform day-night cycle. And even then the very high humidity means the daytime heat is carried into the night, and the urban heat island effect necessitates air-conditioning indoors in highly built-up cities like the aforementioned Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and many parts of Indonesia. [1]: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5842.2009.01120.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5842.2009.01120.x [2]: https://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8278085/singapore-lee-kuan-yew-air-conditioning https://www.vox.com/2015/3/23/8278085/singapore-lee-kuan-yew...