I am not a cold weather person. I think New England is a beautiful place, but I really am not a cold weather person. I’m not real fond of intense heat either–I enjoy my creature comforts. Thus, I love the following story.

Yesterday’s Washington Post posted a story about a study by Tulane University, Carnegie Mellon University, the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showing that air conditioning has played a major role in reducing deaths of Americans on extremely hot days by keeping them cool. That makes perfect sense.

The article reports:

The likelihood of a premature death on an extremely hot day between 1929 and 1959 was 2.5 percent, the academics found, dropping to less than 0.5 percent after 1960. The paper, which is under review at an academic journal, compared days on which temperatures exceeded 90 degrees Fahrenheit with days when they ranged between 60 and 69 degrees Fahrenheit.

Because the article is in the Washington Post, the article goes on to explain how air conditioning will help all of us survive global warming. Putting that aside, isn’t it ironic that the thing the global warming camp criticizes as being one of the causes of global warming also saves lives.

The article reports:

The study’s results could be particularly important for nations such as India, where only a small portion of the population has residential air conditioning. The typical person in India experiences 33 days per year where the temperature rises above 90 degrees Fahrenheit; that could increase by as much as 100 days by the end of the century, according to some climate projections.

Anand Patwardhan, a visiting professor at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland in College Park, said he expects home air conditioning to become more common in India, but not as a conscious response to global warming.

“While it is certainly the case that residential air-conditioning helps in reducing mortality due to temperature extremes, the rapid growth of air-conditioning in the past is perhaps more due to rising incomes and increasing affordability of air-conditioning,” he wrote in an e-mail.

First of all, global warming is a political hoax designed to take money from economically successful countries and give it to third world dictators who will spend it on themselves while their people starve (remember food for oil–it worked the same way). The best scientific source of information on global warming is a website called wattsupwiththat. I strongly recommend it.

Anyway, the fact is that as countries become more wealthy, they consume more energy. The only real way to lower energy consumption is to lower standards of living. Americans who buy into unproven global warming theories might want to consider whether it is worth lowering their standard of living based on an unproven theory.