AC, It “Destroys the Sinuses”

The French are famous for many things: food, fashion, contention. Today, as France is “being discomforted” by a heat wave that is slamming Europe, the debate rages: Many look at air conditioning as a selfish indulgence leading down the road to an ecological menace.
Jean-Luc Mélenchon is not just the country’s most prominent left-wing leader; he also is prime protector of the children. To wit, Melenchon warned that cooling would mean “increasing the damage,” and says he wouldn’t expose his grandchildren to air conditioning because it “destroys your sinuses.”

The Heat Is On

The WSJ’s Mathew Hennessey reminds readers in “Free Expressions” that Earth’s climate is variable. “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.”

This isn’t the first heat rodeo Paris has experienced. Extreme heat hit in July 1983. Supposedly 1911 was a scorcher. So was 1868 and 1825. Things, according to Hennessey, “get hazy after that.”

Upon Dick and I deplaning in Key West recently, the blast of heat on the tarmac was alarming. For certain a buck one-oh-9 knocked the pins out of Dick and me and made us question why 15,000 mostly elderly died in France during the summer of 1983. It was a man-made tragedy, but “not in the sense that the climate doomers would have you believe. Man’s technology could’ve prevented it, but man refused to use it,” writes Hennessey.

Europeans do not AC their homes the way Americans do. The consequences are proving deadly. Houston, which has roughly the same population as Paris (7.9 million), has few deaths from spiking temps, writes Mr. Hennessey.

The average summer temperature in Phoenix—a city full of elderly people that is only a little smaller than Paris—is over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Baking to death is a choice.

A Deadly Aversion

Roger Pielke Jr. of the American Enterprise Institute gets right to the heart of it:
“The larger problem is not technology or cost, but the fact that among many, cooling technologies have taken on a moral framing as a vice.”