What the AirCon Debate Says About Britain's Climate Insanity - Konstantin Kisin
Episode Stats
Harmful content
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Summary
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. 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.
Transcript
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What the air conditioning debate says about Britain's climate insanity.
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Every summer, like clockwork, Britain has the same conversation.
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The temperature creeps above 28 degrees, the country grinds to a halt,
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and the media bombards the public with hysteria about
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the hottest summer since records began and fear-mongering about the future.
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Naturally, this summer being actually unusually warm,
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a new level of insanity has been reached with a debate about the need to prevent people from
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using air conditioning. Some councils have gone so far as to force residents to remove aircon
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they had installed. The standard attack line against anyone attempting to introduce sanity
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into this debate is that they're a climate denier. To be very clear, I do not deny the climate,
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whatever that means, nor do I deny that in recent decades, average global temperatures have
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increased and look set to continue. And while I'm skeptical about the predictive power of climate
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modeling, for the sake of argument, I'm perfectly happy to accept that human activity is a significant
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contributor to the changing climate. I am, in other words, a climate acceptor. But there are
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a number of things I refuse to accept because they are dangerous, irresponsible, counterproductive
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lies. First, I believe we must look at the current world temperatures in the right context.
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You've no doubt seen some version of this graph which shows just how terrified you must be.
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What you probably have never seen is a graph of average temperatures over a far more meaningful
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period, say a billion years. Do current temperatures look unprecedented to you? Zooming in, here are
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average July temperatures in the British Isles since the emergence of Homo sapiens 300,000 years
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ago. For roughly 280,000 out of these 300,000 years, Britain was either under an ice sheet
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The last interglacial period around 125,000 years ago
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global temperatures rose by approximately 10 degrees Celsius
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The Younger Dryas cold snap that preceded it, a sudden plunge back to near glacial temperatures
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that lasted over a thousand years, ended so abruptly that it shows up as a single layer
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If that rate of temperature change were happening today, in either direction, there would not
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be enough TV studios in Britain to broadcast the ensuing hysteria.
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During the Roman conquest of Britain 2,000 years ago, they grew grapes as far north as
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Hadrian's Wall, which separated England from Scotland.
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The medieval warm period that followed was warm enough that the Vikings colonized Greenland
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and farmed it, which is why they called it Greenland and not fuck me, it's freezing land.
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The Thames froze so regularly between 1300 and 1800 that Londoners held frost fairs on
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it, markets, ox roast, and fun fairs on the frozen river.
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None of these events make it into the standard climate presentation.
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They're inconvenient, not because they disprove warming,
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and that temperature stability is the natural order of things.
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The second point I wish the reality deniers would accept is this.
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There is absolutely nothing we in Britain can do to stop climate change.
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Britain produces roughly 1% of global carbon emissions.
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1%. China produces 30%. The United States produces around 14%. India is accelerating rapidly in order
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to catch up to the industrialized world. There's absolutely nothing we can do to stop them to say
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nothing of the fact that rich people like us stopping poor people from becoming wealthier
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would be grotesquely immoral. This means that Britain faces a choice that our commentariat
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seems constitutionally incapable of framing honestly. What to do about something you can't
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prevent? The answer is actually simple and obvious. You do what serious countries do when faced with
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serious problems. Adapt. The Dutch didn't wring their hands about sea levels. They built some of
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the most sophisticated flood management infrastructure in human history. They adapted.
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Given that the current version of the lunacy is a debate about air conditioning, let's take a more
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directly relevant example. Florida. Before air conditioning became widespread in the mid-20th
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century, Florida was a sparsely populated backwater. After air conditioning, the state's
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population exploded from 2.7 million in 1950 to 22 million people today. People moved there in
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their tens of millions precisely because technology had made an inhospitable climate livable.
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They adapted. Britain is being asked to look at this evidence and conclude that adaptation is
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immoral. There is also a productivity argument that almost never gets made on these discussions,
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which is strange because it is probably the most practically important one.
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We are, as I've noted before, poorer than we were in 2007 on a GDP per capita basis.
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We're being overtaken by countries like Poland we once considered developing.
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One of the less glamorous contributors to this is we've spent decades building an office stock
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that becomes largely unusable for several weeks a year.
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The research on heat and cognitive performance is not ambiguous.
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Studies have found that performance on cognitive tasks
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compared to temperature-controlled environments.
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in air-conditioned offices scored significantly higher
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When your body is working hard to regulate its temperature,
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And this is where the argument comes full circle.
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Adapting to climate change, building flood defenses, retrofitting buildings, expanding
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A functioning economy is precisely what net zero, as currently implemented in Britain,
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We are making ourselves poorer in the name of saving the planet while the planet continues
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to warm because the countries that are actually responsible for warming it have no intention
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of following our example. We are then unable to afford the adaptation measures that would make
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us resilient to the warming we fail to prevent. And we top it all off by telling people that
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wanting to be cool in the middle of a heat wave is an act of environmental vandalism. This isn't
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science. It's a cult. The sensible position, the one that will never get you on the BBC,
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is this. Britain cannot stop climate change. Britain can adapt to it. Adaptation requires
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prosperity. Prosperity requires abandoning the fantasy that making ourselves poorer and colder
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in winter and hotter in summer is a meaningful contribution to the future of the planet.
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