This year’s air-conditioning wars are heating up with Stan Cox’s latest enviro-alarmist piece over at the Washington Post. The environmental movement has become the latest home of luddites and secular-puritans who don’t see science as man’s triumph over nature, but as something which keeps us from achieving the life of the noble savage.

Since I value the scientific method and have been known to occasionally put off tasks, I lived for a couple weeks this summer without air conditioning. On an average day, I would arrive home from work, make dinner, and then promptly fall asleep because it was just too hot to do anything besides digest. I then managed to force myself to haul a window-unit out of the attic and set it up (thankfully before the last heat wave). Now, since my body isn’t fighting to keep cool, I can be more productive and work well into the evening (fashioning posts such as this one) without collapsing into a heat-induced fog. Several scientific studies have shown that people are more productive in comfortable temperatures, for the apparently well-published population who couldn’t figure this out intuitively. In addition, there’s less stress on my body, probably why we in America don’t see thousands of heat related deaths like they do in the supposedly environmentally friendly continent of Europe.