ABSTRACT
But surely, before we start moving people around, the solution to keeping comfortable in a hotter future already exists – air conditioning! S.F. Markham in 1939 realized the power of air conditioning, as he pointed out, to a world unfamiliar with it, the miracle of this new technology.1 And it was a miracle, because it enabled people, adapted to the colder climates of Europe, to colonize the world. Indigenous people had always populated most parts of the globe, as we saw in Chapter 2, from the Arctic to the Equator, from the high valleys of the Himalayas to the great below sea level basins of the Dead Sea and the Turfan Oasis in China. Intrepid European entrepreneurs and imperial armies had penetrated most of the far-flung corners of the globe by the end of the 19th century, but Markham saw that if Westerners could actually live all year in cool buildings, regardless of the climate outside, they could truly export their ‘civilization’, and their god, on a massive scale to ‘heathen’ lands, exploit economically untapped regions and capitalize on the wealth of even the most uncomfortable nations on the planet. And this is exactly what has happened, for better or worse.
