What the AirCon Debate Says About Britain's Climate Insanity - Konstantin Kisin

What the air-conditioning debate says about Britain's climate insanity. Every summer, like clockwork, Britain has the same conversation. The temperature creeps above 28 degrees, the country grinds to a halt, and the media bombards the public with hysteria about the hottest summer since records began and fear-mongering about the future. Naturally, this summer being actually unusually warm, a new level of insanity has been reached with a debate about the need to prevent people from using air-conditioning. Some councils have gone so far as to force residents to remove air-con they'd installed. The standard attack line against anyone attempting to introduce sanity into this debate is that they're a climate denier. To be very clear, I do not deny the climate, whatever that means, nor do I deny that in recent decades average global temperatures have increased and look set to continue. And while I'm skeptical about the predictive power of climate models, I'm perfectly happy to accept that human activity is a significant contributor to the changing climate. I am, in other words, a climate acceptor. But there are a number of things I refuse to accept because they are dangerous, irresponsible, counterproductive lies. First, I believe we must look at the current world temperatures in the right context. You've no doubt seen some version of this graph which shows just how terrified you must be. What you probably have never seen is a graph of average temperatures over a far more meaningful period, say, a billion years. Do current temperatures look unprecedented to you? Zooming in, here are average July temperatures in the British Isles since the emergence of Homo sapiens 300,000 years ago. For roughly 280,000 out of these 300,000 years, Britain was either under an ice sheet or barely habitable tundra. The last interglacial period, around 125,000 years ago, was warmer than today. We know this because we had hippopotamuses frolicking in the Thames, and elephants roam in the countryside. Look more closely at the last 50,000 years. Around 11,700 years ago, global temperatures rose by approximately 10 degrees Celsius in the space of a few decades. Not centuries, decades. The climate can move with extraordinary speed entirely independently of human activity. The younger driest cold snap that preceded it, a sudden plunge back to near glacial temperatures that lasted over a thousand years, ended so abruptly that it shows up as a single layer in ice cores. If that rate of temperature change were happening today in either direction, there would not be enough TV studios in Britain to broadcast the ensuing hysteria. During the Roman conquest of Britain 2,000 years ago, they grew grapes as far north as Hadrian's Wall, which separated England from Scotland. The medieval warm period that followed was warm enough that the Vikings colonized Greenland and farmed it, which is why they called it Greenland and not, fuck me, it's freezing land. Then came the Little Ice Age. The Thames froze so regularly between 30. 1800 and 1800 that Londoners held frost fairs on it. Markets, ox roasts and fun fairs on the frozen river. The last one was in 1814. None of these events make it into the standard climate presentation. They're inconvenient not because they disprove warming, but because they demolish the claim that current temperatures are unprecedented and that temperature stability is the natural order of things. The first thing we need to get into our heads is that neither the current temperature nor the rate of change in temperature are historically accurate. They're unprecedented. The second point I wish the reality deniers would accept is this: There is absolutely nothing we in Britain can do to stop climate change. Britain produces roughly 1% of global carbon emissions. One percent. China produces 30%. The United States produces around 14%. India is accelerating rapidly in order to catch up to the industrialized world. There's absolutely nothing we can do to stop them, to say nothing of the fact that rich people like us stopping poor people from becoming wealthier would be grotesquely immoral. This means that Britain faces a choice that our commentariat seems constitutionally incapable of framing honestly: what to do about something you can't prevent. The answer is actually simple and obvious. You do what serious countries do when faced with serious problems: adapt. The Dutch didn't wring their hands about sea levels. They built some of the most sophisticated flood management infrastructure in human history. They adapted. Given that the current climate is changing, and the current version of the Lunacy is a debate about air conditioning, let's take a more directly relevant example: Florida. Before air conditioning became widespread in the mid-20th century, Florida was a sparsely populated backwater. After air conditioning, the state's population exploded from 2.7 million in 1950 to 22 million people today. People moved there in their tens of millions precisely because technology had made an inhospitable climate livable. They adapted. Britain is being asked to look at this evidence and conclude that adaptation is immoral. There is also a productivity argument that almost never gets made on these discussions, which is strange because it is probably the most practically important one. Britain has a serious productivity problem. We are, as I've noted before, poorer than we were in 2007 on a GDP per capita basis. We're being overtaken by countries like Poland we once considered developing. One of the less glamorous contributors to this is we've spent decades building an office stock that becomes largely unusable for several weeks a year. The research on heat and cognitive performance is not ambiguous. Studies have found that performance on cognitive tasks drops by around 13% in hot conditions compared to temperature-controlled environments. A Harvard study found that workers in air-conditioned offices scored significantly higher on tests of cognitive function than those in non-air-conditioned buildings. The mechanism is simple. When your body is working hard to regulate its temperature, it has less capacity for everything else. You think more slowly, make more mistakes, die more quickly. And this is where the argument comes full circle. Adapting to climate change — building flood defences, retrofitting buildings, expanding energy infrastructure — requires money. Money requires productivity. Productivity requires a functioning economy. A functioning economy is precisely what Net Zero, as currently implemented in Britain, is actively dismantling. We are making ourselves poorer in the name of saving the planet, while the planet continues to warm because the countries that are actually responsible for warming it have no intention of following our example. We are then unable to afford the adaptation measures that would make us resilient to the warming we fail to prevent. And we top it all off by telling people that wanting to be cool in the middle of a heat wave is an act of environmental vandalism. This isn't science. It's a cult. The sensible position — the one that will never get you on the BBC — is this: Britain cannot stop climate change. Britain can adapt to it. Adaptation requires prosperity. It requires abandoning the fantasy that making ourselves poorer and colder in winter and hotter in summer is a meaningful contribution to the future of the planet. If you enjoy these videos, remember that they're available as articles on my Substack at constantinkissen.com. Days, weeks, sometimes months ahead of time. 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