A massive heat dome is bringing extreme heat to a broad area of the eastern half of the United States this week. The following is an excerpt:
Temperatures and humidity will rise as much of the country finds itself under a “heat dome,” The Associated Press reported. A heat dome occurs when an area of high pressure in the atmosphere traps warm air beneath, effectively like placing a lid on top of a pot.
“Heat is likely to reach dangerous levels over much of the Central and Eastern U.S.,” an NWS representative wrote in a weather update posted on Facebook.
Temperatures are expected to reach nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) across the central and eastern U.S. (exceeding 100 F in some areas).
Heat is unpleasant, but it also kills. Extreme heat can get deadly when older people lack air conditioning. A heat wave in Chicago in 1995 killed an estimated 739 people, who died due to excessive heat that summer.
The following from Vox Media:
Heat isn’t just uncomfortable. It’s dangerous, killing more Americans in a typical year than any other form of extreme weather. Access to air conditioning can mean the difference between life and death.
Another study looked at cities in multiple countries between 1972 and 2009 and found that more air conditioning helped reduce excess heat deaths.
Having an air conditioner reduces death rates by 80%.
France reported about 5,000 deaths due to heat in the hot summer of 2023. Indeed, record breaking heat in Europe (where air conditioning is less common than in the U.S.) resulted in nearly 62,000 deaths in the summer of 2023. Twenty years earlier in the summer of 2003, a heat wave killed an estimated 15,000 people in France.
Many regions around the world, including cities in the U.S., would be almost uninhabitable without air conditioning. Think of areas like Phoenix, Houston, Atlanta, but those are hardly the only places. The father of modern Singapore credited air conditioning with making rapid economic growth possible in the city state.
Air conditioning boosts productivity. Imagine how much work would get done if your office building air conditioning broke down. More from Vox:
If you struggle to concentrate when the heat and humidity is high, you’re not alone. One study looked at office work and found that productivity begins to decline around 73 to 75 degrees Fahrenheit, while at 86°F, performance falls by almost 9 percent. Another study found that every 1 degree increase in average classroom temperature over a school year corresponded to a roughly 1 percent loss in students’ expected learning — but installing air conditioning eliminates about three-quarters of that effect.
A 2016 working paper finds that widespread adoption of air conditioning — especially by the most productive plants — substantially offsets the heat-induced drop in US manufacturing output, making cooling a critical adaptation tool.
Air conditioning also helps us sleep, which improves health.
Humans fall asleep fastest around 64–68°F, while temperatures above 75°F cause vital deep sleep and REM sleep to crater. A 2024 review of more than 50 lab and field studies found that bedroom cooling increased total sleep time 15 to 20 minutes and cut the total amount of time people spent awake after falling asleep by a third.
Many Progressives view air conditioning as an environmental disaster that contributes to climate change. Cooling consumes 10% of global electricity, while demand is expected to triple in the next 25 years globally. Some of the hottest regions of the world are also the poorest. Some of the poorest are also the hottest regions. These two inconvenient facts are not unrelated. Environmentalists may consider air conditioning something of a luxury but in many areas of the United States and the world it is a public health necessity.
Read more at Vox Media: 5 reasons to be grateful for air conditioning