Overall, it's safe to say that Europe thinks America's love of air-conditioning is actually quite daft. Europeans have wondered about this particular U.S. addiction for a while now: Back in 1992, Cambridge University Prof. Gwyn Prins called America's love of air-conditioning the country's "most pervasive and least-noticed epidemic," according to the Economist. And according to the Environmental Protection Agency, it's getting worse: American demand for air-conditioning has only increased over the past decades.


kleinbl00:

Fuckin' AmazonPost.com sure is turning into a barrel-scraping shitshow. Let's check the AmazonPost from LAST MONTH about Europe's new crippling heat waves, something they've never encountered before. Then let's look at the Washington Post, prior to Bezos buying it, talking about the human impacts of global warming on temperatures in Europe.

    The three British authors -- Peter A. Stott of the University of Reading, and D.A. Stone and M.R. Allen of Oxford University -- used two computer models to assess the likelihood that a summer like that in 2003, which was Europe's hottest in centuries and was blamed for at least 35,000 deaths, would have occurred without human influences. They concluded, at a confidence level of more than 90 percent, that human activity doubled, if not quadrupled, the chances of "a heat wave exceeding this threshold magnitude."

If you dig into the heat wave of 2003 you'll find estimates between 35,000 and 70,000 deaths. That's somewhere between double and quadruple the death toll from the Tohoku quake.

This is a sham hitpiece assembled from two experts and a poll with no American component that has been glued together with two pointless quotes. It's not news, unless you think it's surprising that Europeans are having to suddenly wrap their heads around air conditioning because of globlal warming, or that it's surprising that socialist-leaning societies expect more government intervention in large policy decisions.

    "The bottom line is that America's a big, rich, hot country," Cox told The Post. "But if the second, fourth, and fifth most populous nations -- India, Indonesia, and Brazil, all hot and humid -- were to use as much energy per capita for air-conditioning as does the U.S., it would require 100 percent of those countries' electricity supplies, plus all of the electricity generated by Mexico, the U.K., Italy, and the entire continent of Africa," he added.

"If the developing world were to use energy at the same pace as the United States the globe would go up in an incandescent cinder," said every climate scientist since the beginning of the industrial revolution.


posted 3198 days ago