No sweat

摘要

Summer humidity in the Gulf often nears 90%. Winds are scant. Even in the shade the heat hovers far above the body's natural temperature. No wonder that before 1950, fewer than 500,000 lived along the whole 500-mile southern littoral. Now, rimmed by the mirrored facades of office towers, gleaming petrochemical works, marinas, highways, bustling airports, vast shopping malls and sprawling subdivisions of sumptuous villas, it is home to 20m people. Their lives are made possible by "coolth"-artificially cooled air. Yet a chorus of critics counts air conditioning as more a curse than a miracle. Though food refrigeration is an unquestioned part of modern civilisation, chilling a room causes sniffiness. In his book "Losing our Cool" Stan Cox, a polemical plant scientist, blamed it for "resource waste, climate change, ozone depletion and disori-entation of the human mind and body". In 1992 Gwyn Prins, a Cambridge University professor, called "physical addiction" to cooled air America's "most pervasive and least noticed epidemic".