Air Conditioning – Contributing to the downfall of Civilization

           It was 95^o this week – in September - and the world is complaining about the heat.  Air conditioners are working full time in homes, in offices, in stores, and in automobiles.  People now think that they are entitled to be cool – even when it’s hot out side.  Such was not always the case.

          These days my ranch foreman, Eric, and I seek shade when the temperatures climb.  “Too hot for us Northern Europeans” is my mantra.  But such was not the case in my younger years.

Fifty years ago there were two summer jobs that yielded not to temperature: stacking hay, and shoeing horses.

Both of these jobs are labor intensive.  Hay-stacking requires slinging hundreds a day of 60-100 pound bales.  Horseshoeing requires crouching beneath an animal, rasping a foot flat and beating on an iron shoe - with or without a forge.  Most of the time a horseshoer can find some shade; but hay-stacking, by definition, is done in an open field.

In the 1960s, yet, we often carried to the hayfield a gallon jug covered in burlap sacking to both insulate and provide some evaporation to lower the temperature from hot, to merely lukewarm. 

In later years, as home freezers became more common, I always had two jugs in the freezer: one half full – to which I would then add water – and one frozen clear through.  I depended on the constant consumption of cold water, and the continual evaporation of sweat through my cotton shirt to keep me cool.  Both jugs were usually empty by the end of a hot day.

In fact, I am old enough to remember the “Desert Water Bags” that were often seen hanging on the side of a car in the deserts of the Southwest. These were heavy canvas, which seeped just enough to keep them damp – cooling the contents with evaporation.  Cars were commonly seen along the highways with their hoods up, suffering from overheating or a vapor-lock of the fuel system.

It was in the 60s that I first saw a car with air conditioning, and have never lived in a home with A/C.

But now every car and piece of farm equipment has A/C, as do many homes and most commercial buildings. Rather than working with the heat by drinking water and sweating, we are now working against it – conditioning ourselves to be entitled to year-around comfort.  And in the meantime, the hot air is being extracted from our living spaces and dumped out into the environment.

Likewise, we are rapidly losing such things as clothes drying on the line, lawns, and hay fields that once cooled the air around us, and replacing them with clothes dryers, gravel beds, and parking lots that draw the heat in.

 

I’m not fully convinced in the “Global Warming” debate, but I see evidence all around me of the ‘Folly of Mankind’.