I tried going without air conditioning this summer, after moving to a new state and town in the spring.
I'm relatively far north in the USA, but even where I am, I found the 85F+ heat waves unbearable for WFH and sleep. I grew up without AC and grew to hate summers as a result. This summer I discovered that I just do not function intellectually above 80F indoors.
It's a bit different if you're outside with a breeze, enjoying nature, hiking, walking, biking, etc. I seem perfectly capable of reading a book or having a stimulating chat in those situations. But even with a fan going, there's a pretty low temperature ceiling for me where I can't work productively. And if it doesn't get below 70F at night, I can't sleep well, which has even more impact on my happiness and productivity.
So I can survive without AC. But I broke and got an AC unit a couple of weeks ago. This heat wave for the past week or so in the northeast convinced me that I was right to do so. I'm just not happy without it.
It's not "nobody needs AC", but the "oh my god I can't live without AC" is mostly fear. If you push yourself into situations where you're uncomfortably hot/code for a while, you'll find your dependance lessened. That's all.
I'm quite happy with my well-air-conditioned apartment, I have no problem with using it, and it's helpful. But I'm also fine with being outside the perfect temperature bubble sometimes.
I spent six weeks last summer working in my place without AC because the AC had broken and for various reasons it couldn't be fixed right away. I can say for certain that I did not become more tolerant of heat and my productivity was extremely low because I was lethargic all the time. I may have become slightly less uncomfortable in the heat but that didn't help with the lethargy.
There is quite a lot of distance between discomfort without AC and dying of the heat. If you're not doing heavy labor all day somewhere hot, living in death valley, or aged or otherwise health compromised there is a whole lot of room between "I'm hot" and "I'm dying". Heat dissipation is one of the major advantages of being human.
Where I live, elderly people who are used to not having AC (esp. from the time when intense heat was rarer here) often do not appreciate the importance of keeping their own climate controlled. It isn't actually always easy to tell when you're causing already-impaired organs a lot of stress. A lot of the heat-induced deaths occur as "sudden" heart attacks or strokes.
I think you and I agree that for e.g. a young healthy person it's bad and wasteful to keep the same temperature control. However, the comment to which I responded doesn't have the disclaimers you've added; it contributes to a "people should be able to tough it out" narrative that we shouldn't perpetuate when in reality, people are dying unnecessarily.
Yes, if you are elderly or have otherwise compromised health, heat will kill you, because that's just a thing. As your body degrades you get less good at regulating your temperature and need support. That's just a different topic from "I can't live without air conditioning", which, healthy people can. And specifically, pushing yourself to be in a particularly hot environment for a couple of weeks can significantly expand your heat tolerance.
So then this becomes a question of: is it responsible to talk about this with the general "you" as though unhealthy young people or healthy elderly people don't exist, as the parent comment did? To create a perception of AC being generally decadent that discourages it for all, including those who may not know they need it? I'd say it's not a small caveat to elide.
Something like one out of ten people around the world is over 65. In the US, something like one out of four. That's a huge chunk of humanity, not a corner case to handwave.
No. You have to be unhealthy to the extent that it probably isn’t safe for you to live alone and walking across a room is an accomplishment. That’s when you start to worry.
Not being an overweight and sedentary young person exaggerating the suffering of being in an 80 degree room.
Your own citation, 700 deaths annually out of a country of just under 330 million.
If only ~2 in a million die of heat or heat contributed causes per year, either people without air conditioning are incredibly rare (they’re not) or there have to be fairly extreme circumstances to risk death.
Do you really need more evidence or are you just being obtuse? Do you actually think healthy or even most unhealthy adults are risking death without AC in any but the most extreme circumstances?
If you have formed the opinion that it's not warranted to omit the scorn when you talk about people using AC, or to learn more about how it might be warranted, then that's pretty much that.
If anyone else has clicked into the thread for whatever reason and wants to learn, here are resources I'd recommend. US-centric, sorry.
* https://www.nationalpartnership.org/our-work/resources/healt... - Heat and pregnancy go together really badly. This piece is kind of lobbying, so less reputable than the CDC stuff, but aggregates some pretty eye-popping statistics; citations on page 5.
* https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/heatstress/acclima.html - NIOSH has some useful recommendations about how to acclimatize to heat safely. ("acclimatize" being the individual body ramping up its ability to deal with heat – interestingly, when people in this field use the word "adapt", increasing AC penetration is one of the things that goes into that)
That link says that there's an average of 702 heat related deaths per year. In 2020 there were 38,824 car accident deaths.[1] Yet everyone keeps driving, without question. Is it so much to ask to see if it's possible to tolerate living without AC for a while, just like humans did for several thousand years? Or is a tiny fraction of the number of auto-related deaths enough to make us throw up our hands and say "it's impossible, AC and climate change for everyone!"
> see if it's possible to tolerate living without AC for a while, just like humans did for several thousand years?
Ah, do you have evidence that >65s weren't dying because of heat stress for those thousands of years? That'd be cheering.
Deciding the excess heat often now caused by climate change should be allowed to kill large numbers of the elderly when AC can prevent it is quite a take. I certainly hope everyone holding such a belief does so because they have already eliminated all sources of emissions in their life that are not literally life and death.
This is the case of most “I can’t imagine” situations, just do it for a bit and your fear will prove mostly unfounded.