Feeling the Heat

We are in the middle of a heat wave. As the temperature grows uncomfortable, I am tempted to open the refrigerator and stand in front of it. It’s nice and cool in my fridge, so my intuition says that opening the fridge door would also cool me and my house. While I might feel a bit cooler for a few minutes as the dissipating cold from the fridge blows out into my kitchen, the longer I stand there, the warmer my house would get. The physics of refrigeration would cause my fridge to use more energy and radiate heat into my kitchen. In the end, my intuition based on limited and localized data is inaccurate, and without understanding the underlying science, I draw the wrong conclusions.

Globally, it’s tempting to address the misery and hardship caused by the hotter weather through increased access to air conditioning, and it would certainly help a great many people. But just like my fridge, air conditioners produce heat as they cool, venting that heat outside and using large quantities of electricity. Since most electricity worldwide is generated through the burning of fossil fuels, in the end, individual rooms or buildings become cooler while the world overall continues to get warmer.

Our focus on attending to our immediate and personal concerns, even if our actions harm us in the longer term or create global problems isn’t unique to cooling ourselves during a heat wave. Through millennia of evolution, we have been programmed to take care of ourselves first, then our small family or social group, then our tribe or nation, then our species, and finally the rest of the planet. This hierarchy worked out well hundreds of years ago, when our population was a small fraction of what it is currently, and we were dispersed into small clans separated by vast expanses of wilderness.

We’ve also been programmed to respond to our senses and to take immediate action to protect ourselves. Dating back to our hunter-gatherer days when we were chased by predators, our ability to understand and react to our immediate surroundings was a survival skill. It was okay for us to misunderstand cause and effect so long as we knew how to act in the moment.

But things have changed. With our population closing on eight billion, having nearly tripled in the past fifty years, we have come to dominate the planet and push its resources to capacity. All of our choices, from the food we eat to the homes we build, our social and political structures, and the way we use energy, now carry global repercussions and come back to haunt us sooner than we expect. We can no longer afford to act selfishly and locally and need to understand the science surrounding our decisions. The alternative is global misery, as heat waves, famines, floods, fires, and wars dominate our news. We must accept that opening the fridge is an illusion, and work instead to find real, fact-based solutions.