The Anthropocene Reviewed(20)

Even the reading experience you’re having right now is contingent upon air-conditioning—this book was printed in an air-conditioned facility.* In fact, air-conditioning was invented for a facility not too dissimilar from the one that printed this book. In 1902, a young engineer named Willis Carrier was tasked with solving a problem in Buffalo, New York: A printing company’s magazine pages were warping due to summertime humidity. Carrier created a device that essentially reversed the process of electric heating, running air through cold coils instead of hot ones. This reduced humidity, but it also had the useful side effect of decreasing indoor temperatures. Carrier went on to make more inquiries into what he called “treating air,” and the company he cofounded, the Carrier Corporation, remains one of the largest air-conditioning manufacturers in the world.

Heat has long been a worry for humans. In ancient Egypt, houses were cooled by hanging reeds from windows and trickling water down them. Then, as now, controlling indoor temperatures wasn’t only about comfort and convenience, because heat can kill humans. In an essay with the catchy title “An Account of the Extraordinary Heat of the Weather in July 1757, and the Effects of It,” the English physician John Huxham wrote that heat caused “sudden and violent pains of the head, and vertigo, profuse sweats, great debility and depression of the spirits.” He also noted that the urine of heat wave victims was “high-colored and in small quantity.”

In many countries today, including the United States, heat waves cause more deaths than lightning, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes combined. A 2003 European heat wave that was concentrated in France led to the deaths of over seventy thousand people. Deadly heat waves from Australia to Algeria and from Canada to Argentina have been common throughout history, but one of the weirdnesses of the Anthropocene is that in the wealthier parts of the world, heat is now more of a health problem in mild climates than in hot ones. Over the past twenty years, people living in usually cool central France, where home AC is uncommon, have been far more likely to die from heat waves than people living in usually sweltering Phoenix, where over 90 percent of households have at least some form of air-conditioning.

There is another peculiarity of modern air-conditioning: cooling the indoors warms the outdoors. Most of the energy that powers air-conditioning systems comes from fossil fuels, the use of which warms the planet, which over time will necessitate more and more conditioning of air. According to the International Energy Agency, air-conditioning and electric fans combined already account for around 10 percent of all global electricity usage, and they expect AC usage will more than triple over the next thirty years. Like most other energy-intensive innovations, AC primarily benefits people in rich communities, while the consequences of climate change are borne disproportionately by people in impoverished communities.



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Climate change is probably the biggest shared challenge facing twenty-first-century humans, and I fear future generations will judge us harshly for our failure to do much about it. They will likely learn in their history classes—correctly—that as a species, we knew carbon emissions were affecting the planet’s climate back in the 1970s. And they will learn—correctly—about the efforts in the 1980s and 1990s to limit carbon emissions, efforts that ultimately failed for complicated and multifaceted reasons that I assume the history classes of the future will have successfully boiled down into a single narrative. And I suspect that our choices will seem unforgivable and even unfathomable to the people reading those history books. “It is fortunate,” Charles Dudley Warner wrote more than a century ago, “that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.”*

Even as we are beginning to experience the consequences of climate change, we are struggling to mount a global human response to this global problem caused by humans. Some of that is down to public misinformation and the widespread distrust of expertise. Some of it is because climate change feels like an important problem but not an urgent one. The wildfires that have become more common must be put out today. It is much harder for us to make the big changes that would, over generations, decrease the probability of those fires.

But I think it is also hard for us to confront human-caused climate change because the most privileged among us, the people who consume the most energy, can separate ourselves from the weather. I am certainly one such person. I am insulated from the weather by my house and its conditioned air. I eat strawberries in January. When it is raining, I can go inside. When it is dark, I can turn on lights. It is easy for me to feel like climate is mostly an outside phenomenon, whereas I am mostly an inside phenomenon.

But that’s all a misconception. I am utterly, wholly dependent on what I imagine as the outside world. I am contingent upon it. For humans, there is ultimately no way out of the obligations and limitations of nature. We are nature. And so, like history, the climate is both something that happens to us and something we make.



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Here in Indianapolis, high temperatures reach above 90 degrees Fahrenheit only about thirteen days per year, and yet most of our homes and office buildings are air-conditioned. This is in part because architecture has changed dramatically in the last fifty years, especially when it comes to commercial buildings, to assume the existence of air-conditioning. But AC is also becoming more common because more of us expect to be able to control our interior environments. When I’m outside, if I can adjust my wardrobe a bit, I feel entirely comfortable if the temperature is anywhere between 55 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit. But inside, my comfort zone drops dramatically, down to a couple of degrees. I loathe sweating while sitting inside, as I often did when I lived in an un-air-conditioned apartment in Chicago. I find it equally uncomfortable to feel goose bumps of chill indoors. Like an expensive painting or a fragile orchid, I thrive only in extremely specific conditions.