PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

In the ramshackle apartment blocks and sooty concrete homes that line the dusty roads of urban India, there is a new status symbol on proud display. An air-conditioner has become a sign of middle-class status in developing nations, a must-have dowry item.

It is cheaper than a car, and arguably more life-changing in steamy regions, where cooling can make it easier for a child to study or a worker to sleep.

But as air-conditioners sprout from windows and storefronts across the world, scientists are becoming increasingly alarmed about the impact of the gases on which they run. All are potent agents of global warming.

—“In Rising Use of Air-Conditioning, Hard Choices,” the New York Times, June 20th, 2012.

Flash-forward to today’s New York Times headline: “In U.S. Jails, a Constitutional Clash Over Air-Conditioning.”  Alan Blinder, the Timesman who wrote the story tweeted a link to his article, noting that “Most of Texas’s state prisons don’t have air-conditioning. That’s not just a Texas thing.”

Given the brutal Texas summer heat, I’m pretty sympathetic to his argument that prisons deserve some level of climate control in the summertime. But I don’t work for a newspaper that has spent the last 30 years or so tut-tutting its benefits for the rest of us. Or as Glenn tweets, “How can air conditioning be a constitutional right? Euros think it’s stupid and WaPo says it’s sexist.”

Not to mention John Kerry’s recent assertion that air conditioning is more deadly than ISIS.