Meanwhile, in Florida…
“Wanna see how many folks we can kill? Let’s repeal requirements for employers to provide adequate cooling!”
Don’t forget about eliminating water breaks!
Eventually they will realize that a major city in the desert is a bad idea.
There is a reason it is named Phoenix. That valley has been settled and abandoned several times throughout history.
The only reason it has survived this time is through the power of air conditioning.
Horse shit.
It was never abandoned. The valley was steadily habitated for thousands of years by a number of tribes before American settlers forces the Yaqui from the land.
None of them had air conditioning, and they thrived until a foreign invader took their land by force.
They were also nomadic, and left when it got too dry/hot. Which goes to show they were a lot smarter than most people living there now.
I don’t know the history here, but wouldn’t a nomadic people that leave when the heat / drought gets bad, still count as “abandoning”, in a sense? Or were they more or less a permanent settlement?
I think they were talking about the Anasazi, but that was a different part of Arizona.
You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
Nerfherders!!
If only there some way to keep it from getting so hot - oh, well.
While I’m all for helping avert the inevitable disaster from human caused climate change. Most of the parts of Arizona where it gets hot AF have always been deadly and like this. The difference for a long time was less concrete and asphalt, and less people. Honestly a lot of the areas around here in the Nevada/California/Arizona desert regions were nomadic areas with people coming to live here during more pleasant winter months. Living here in the summer is still a bad idea.
They water the air in Sedona. Let that sink in for a minute. They use machines to spray water into the air, and no, I’m not talking about a humidifier. Like over-the-door air conditioning units that just piss water all over the sidewalk, except it evaporates before it ever makes it to the concrete, just to keep people from passing out while walking to the corner store.
That’s not air conditioning, at all.
That’s evaporative cooling, and it’s been used for hundreds of years in cultures worldwide to help reduce heat. Adding humidity into dry air naturally reduces the heat index. It’s not supposed to make it to the ground, the entire point is for it to evaporate and increase ambient humidity in the air.
It’s extremely energy efficient, but is limited to very dry environments. Above about 30% ambient humidity it quickly stops being effective at cooling the air, and at around 60% ambient humidity it’s just no longer noticeable. So for a desert area, it is an ideal, cheap and easy way to cool an area.
There are evaporative systems designed for homes and businesses that use the same principle. A box with an opening on one side for airflow, a large wet pad and a fan combined with ducting, will cool an entire home. It uses remarkably little water, and power only to run a simple pump to keep the pad wet and the fan spinning. It uses a fraction of the power and air conditioner uses and is a lot more effective when humidity is low.
For most of the summer an air conditioner isn’t even needed to cool a home. Central ducting with an evaporative cooler will work for 90% of the summer. Only during the monsoons where the humidity is too high for it to be effective is an AC system really necessary.
Source: I live in AZ and my home has both an evaporative cooler and an air conditioner.
Yup. Evaporative cooling was popular in AZ before electricity was available. In the late 1800s to early 1900s there were many homes and building with cooling towers on them. People would hang wet sheets across them and the cooling effect would create a current as it fell down the tower which would on turn create more draft across the cooling cloth.
I meant “like” as in similar to, not as a filler word. I know they’re not air conditioners. I was likening the design for descriptive purposes for people who live in less arid regions. It was especially surprising to see them aimed outdoors when I visited. When I asked a shop attendant about them, he said they were to keep tourists from passing out because they drink too much alcohol and not enough water. Haha
That’s just evaporative cooling. People have been doing that for thousands of years. It’s pretty damn effective at lowering the temperature a good amount in dry climates.
Totally. It’s very surprising for people who aren’t familiar with it to experience for the first time. Especially aimed outdoors.
Live underground
I hope these cooling stations are just something they are planning to buy and run, not something they are designing. Arizona has the second worst run infrastructure teams in North America in my experience dealing with them.
