Deep freeze

One of the things that annoyed me most during my only serious visit to the USA, for a month in the late summer of 1979, was the prevalence in restaurants, bars and other public establishments of air conditioning, then still virtually unknown in Europe. Not only could I not see the need for it – since we Europeans really did manage perfectly well without it, even in the fiercely hotter parts of the continent such as Spain and Greece (which simply dealt with the extreme heat by shutting things down in mid-afternoon, having a healthy post-prandial snooze with the blinds and curtains closed, and going back to work in the cooler early evening hours – the famous siesta) – but I especially couldn’t see why it had to be so damn cold.

My visit to the States began in New York, which at that time of the year was a very hot and sweaty place; so you could perhaps understand why people might seek artificial relief from the oppressive climate. But it is generally understood that a temperature reduction of just 5ºC is enough to make us feel substantially cooler. Instead, air conditioning in New York was consistently set to around 25º, perhaps even lower, whereas the outdoor temperature was closer to 40º – a difference of at least 15º. No allowance was made for the body’s natural self-regulating ability.

The inevitable result was that I found myself literally shivering after just a few minutes at the table (I usually had to put on a warm jacket before the waiter had even arrived to say ‘Hi, I’m Dan, your waiter’); and after eventually adjusting to the far lower indoor temperature I had to re-emerge into a far higher outdoor one that made me feel as if someone had just thrown a damp blanket over me or I’d walked into a sauna fully clothed. In short, the temperature was never right; and before long the constant hot-cold-hot and damp-dry-damp fluctuations gave me a persistent cold.

A contributing factor to the popularity of air conditioning was surely the fact that many, if not most, Americans spent very little time truly outdoors. Their cars were also increasingly air-conditioned, and were used for even the shortest journeys, spawning vast car parks to cater to the influx. Many new housing districts were built without pedestrian facilities of any kind. My stepmother and a friend, both British, were once actually stopped by American police officers who saw them walking and automatically assumed they were in some kind of trouble (‘Ladies, what’s happened to your car?’). The natural climate was simply an enemy, to be fought with every possible technological resource.

Today, over 35 years later, an online BBC article reported on the perceived downsides of working in offices (which, being freelance, I can luckily avoid) – and one of them was ‘Arctic air conditioning’. Air conditioning has indeed become an ever more prevalent feature of European life – though the bar I’m now sitting in as I type this doesn’t have it even in the warmest months, which here in Holland (with so much damp in the soil) can be pretty sweaty too, from 30º upwards. But we can still manage perfectly well without it, if only because our homes are often designed to self-regulate (thick walls, louvred blinds and so on).

But once again, if air conditioning is in fact used over here, it’s almost invariably way too cold.

What’s going on? I can only assume that there’s some commercial advantage in setting the machines to way too low a temperature – or perhaps they’re quite simply not designed to be set otherwise. It’s either on, or off.

Whatever the explanation, air conditioning is extremely wasteful of energy, and so helps to pollute our already grossly overburdened environment. Its only benefits are in supposed human comfort – and yet the same improvement in our sense of well-being could be achieved with far less expenditure of electricity. A 5º difference in temperature would be quite enough, for our bodies can do the rest. As usual, nature can do far more than most of us give it credit for.

Someone, somewhere, is making a big profit out of forcing millions of people to shiver away in deep-freeze offices, cars, restaurants and bars, and then buy patent medicines when we inevitably catch cold – while our natural resistance to new infections (such as the Zika virus) is steadily undermined. All good for the economy, but no good for our health.

A telling development is the growing pressure on such economically challenged countries as Spain and Greece to abandon their ‘inefficient’ siesta culture and work ‘normal’ office hours.

Conspiracy theory? Well, maybe.