TRIGGERnometry - July 03, 2026


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


Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

163.26

Word count

1,566

Sentence count

111

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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00:00:30.240 What the air conditioning debate says about Britain's climate insanity.
00:00:38.480 Every summer, like clockwork, Britain has the same conversation.
00:00:42.240 The temperature creeps above 28 degrees, the country grinds to a halt,
00:00:46.800 and the media bombards the public with hysteria about
00:00:49.920 the hottest summer since records began and fear-mongering about the future.
00:00:54.640 Naturally, this summer being actually unusually warm,
00:00:57.760 a new level of insanity has been reached with a debate about the need to prevent people from
00:01:01.840 using air conditioning. Some councils have gone so far as to force residents to remove aircon
00:01:06.960 they had installed. The standard attack line against anyone attempting to introduce sanity
00:01:11.840 into this debate is that they're a climate denier. To be very clear, I do not deny the climate,
00:01:17.760 whatever that means, nor do I deny that in recent decades, average global temperatures have
00:01:22.400 increased and look set to continue. And while I'm skeptical about the predictive power of climate
00:01:27.280 modeling, for the sake of argument, I'm perfectly happy to accept that human activity is a significant
00:01:32.820 contributor to the changing climate. I am, in other words, a climate acceptor. But there are
00:01:38.620 a number of things I refuse to accept because they are dangerous, irresponsible, counterproductive
00:01:43.880 lies. First, I believe we must look at the current world temperatures in the right context.
00:01:48.800 You've no doubt seen some version of this graph which shows just how terrified you must be.
00:01:53.260 What you probably have never seen is a graph of average temperatures over a far more meaningful
00:01:58.420 period, say a billion years. Do current temperatures look unprecedented to you? Zooming in, here are
00:02:05.180 average July temperatures in the British Isles since the emergence of Homo sapiens 300,000 years
00:02:10.220 ago. For roughly 280,000 out of these 300,000 years, Britain was either under an ice sheet
00:02:17.040 or barely habitable tundra.
00:02:19.520 The last interglacial period around 125,000 years ago
00:02:23.020 was warmer than today.
00:02:24.560 We know this because we had hippopotamuses
00:02:26.540 frolicking in the Thames
00:02:27.620 and elephants roam in the countryside.
00:02:30.180 Look more closely at the last 50,000 years.
00:02:32.660 Around 11,700 years ago,
00:02:34.880 global temperatures rose by approximately 10 degrees Celsius
00:02:38.080 in the space of a few decades.
00:02:40.020 Not centuries, decades.
00:02:41.920 The climate can move with extraordinary speed
00:02:44.080 entirely independently of human activity.
00:02:46.360 The Younger Dryas cold snap that preceded it, a sudden plunge back to near glacial temperatures
00:02:51.520 that lasted over a thousand years, ended so abruptly that it shows up as a single layer
00:02:56.600 in ice cores.
00:02:57.880 If that rate of temperature change were happening today, in either direction, there would not
00:03:02.540 be enough TV studios in Britain to broadcast the ensuing hysteria.
00:03:06.480 During the Roman conquest of Britain 2,000 years ago, they grew grapes as far north as
00:03:11.180 Hadrian's Wall, which separated England from Scotland.
00:03:14.360 The medieval warm period that followed was warm enough that the Vikings colonized Greenland 0.99
00:03:18.720 and farmed it, which is why they called it Greenland and not fuck me, it's freezing land. 0.98
00:03:23.580 Then came the Little Ice Age. 0.98
00:03:25.460 The Thames froze so regularly between 1300 and 1800 that Londoners held frost fairs on
00:03:31.140 it, markets, ox roast, and fun fairs on the frozen river.
00:03:35.100 The last one was in 1814.
00:03:37.080 None of these events make it into the standard climate presentation.
00:03:41.200 They're inconvenient, not because they disprove warming,
00:03:43.640 but because they demolish the claim
00:03:45.160 that current temperatures are unprecedented
00:03:46.860 and that temperature stability is the natural order of things.
00:03:50.800 The first thing we need to get into our heads
00:03:52.600 is that neither the current temperature
00:03:54.160 nor the rate of change in temperature
00:03:56.360 are historically unprecedented.
00:03:58.800 The second point I wish the reality deniers would accept is this.
00:04:02.820 There is absolutely nothing we in Britain can do to stop climate change.
00:04:07.180 Britain produces roughly 1% of global carbon emissions.
00:04:10.560 1%. China produces 30%. The United States produces around 14%. India is accelerating rapidly in order
00:04:19.140 to catch up to the industrialized world. There's absolutely nothing we can do to stop them to say 1.00
00:04:24.380 nothing of the fact that rich people like us stopping poor people from becoming wealthier
00:04:28.860 would be grotesquely immoral. This means that Britain faces a choice that our commentariat
00:04:33.760 seems constitutionally incapable of framing honestly. What to do about something you can't
00:04:38.960 prevent? The answer is actually simple and obvious. You do what serious countries do when faced with
00:04:45.300 serious problems. Adapt. The Dutch didn't wring their hands about sea levels. They built some of
00:04:51.120 the most sophisticated flood management infrastructure in human history. They adapted.
00:04:55.920 Given that the current version of the lunacy is a debate about air conditioning, let's take a more
00:05:00.320 directly relevant example. Florida. Before air conditioning became widespread in the mid-20th
00:05:06.180 century, Florida was a sparsely populated backwater. After air conditioning, the state's
00:05:11.540 population exploded from 2.7 million in 1950 to 22 million people today. People moved there in
00:05:18.100 their tens of millions precisely because technology had made an inhospitable climate livable.
00:05:23.340 They adapted. Britain is being asked to look at this evidence and conclude that adaptation is
00:05:27.880 immoral. There is also a productivity argument that almost never gets made on these discussions,
00:05:32.820 which is strange because it is probably the most practically important one.
00:05:37.900 Britain has a serious productivity problem.
00:05:40.520 We are, as I've noted before, poorer than we were in 2007 on a GDP per capita basis.
00:05:46.680 We're being overtaken by countries like Poland we once considered developing. 0.77
00:05:50.540 One of the less glamorous contributors to this is we've spent decades building an office stock 0.96
00:05:54.500 that becomes largely unusable for several weeks a year.
00:05:57.480 The research on heat and cognitive performance is not ambiguous.
00:06:01.800 Studies have found that performance on cognitive tasks
00:06:04.340 drops by around 13% in hot conditions
00:06:06.880 compared to temperature-controlled environments.
00:06:09.860 A Harvard study found that workers
00:06:11.360 in air-conditioned offices scored significantly higher
00:06:13.920 on tests of cognitive function
00:06:15.320 than those in non-air-conditioned buildings.
00:06:18.120 The mechanism is simple.
00:06:19.560 When your body is working hard to regulate its temperature,
00:06:22.400 it has less capacity for everything else.
00:06:24.220 You think more slowly, make more mistakes,
00:06:26.520 and tire more quickly.
00:06:27.880 And this is where the argument comes full circle.
00:06:30.600 Adapting to climate change, building flood defenses, retrofitting buildings, expanding
00:06:35.060 energy infrastructure requires money.
00:06:37.720 Money requires productivity.
00:06:39.840 Productivity requires a functioning economy.
00:06:42.460 A functioning economy is precisely what net zero, as currently implemented in Britain,
00:06:47.300 is actively dismantling.
00:06:49.400 We are making ourselves poorer in the name of saving the planet while the planet continues
00:06:54.340 to warm because the countries that are actually responsible for warming it have no intention
00:06:59.040 of following our example. We are then unable to afford the adaptation measures that would make
00:07:04.020 us resilient to the warming we fail to prevent. And we top it all off by telling people that
00:07:08.420 wanting to be cool in the middle of a heat wave is an act of environmental vandalism. This isn't
00:07:13.300 science. It's a cult. The sensible position, the one that will never get you on the BBC,
00:07:19.100 is this. Britain cannot stop climate change. Britain can adapt to it. Adaptation requires
00:07:24.840 prosperity. Prosperity requires abandoning the fantasy that making ourselves poorer and colder
00:07:29.980 in winter and hotter in summer is a meaningful contribution to the future of the planet.
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