I’m often “freezing” in the summer.

Another scorcher today.

Yesterday’s post made me think about how we often experience intense cold in the summer months, as opposed to the winter. I’m thinking about suffering harsh air conditioning or jumping into a cold lake or getting an ice cream headache.
These things generally don’t happen in the winter. From November to March we experience a slight, general coldness as we shuffle from one heated environment to the next. But we don’t get that intense cold like we do in the summer.

By the way, we hear a lot in the media about how air conditioning is bad because it takes up extra energy and contributes to global warming. I’m no expert about how heating and air conditioning work – but isn’t lowering the temperature by a few degrees more energy efficient than heating a house by 25 degrees?

In the winter we heat our homes between 15 and 30 degrees, sometimes more. Surely that takes a lot more energy than cooling. Yet we never hear about how heating our homes is bad for the environment. Perhaps because cooling our homes and using air conditioning is a luxury. We don’t need to do it. Heating our homes is a necessity.

But then you can argue that people shouldn’t live in places like Canada, with their cold climates. It’s bad for the environment. People in colder climates waste too much energy changing the environment by heating it. We should all move to Hawaii.