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Why homes often feel warmer than the thermostat suggests – and what to do about it

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Picture two homes on the same street: one constructed in the 1950s and the other in the 1990s. There are no trees or other shade. The air conditioning units are identical, recently replaced, and operating perfectly. Identical thermostats are set at 82 degrees Fahrenheit (27.8 Celsius).

When it’s 110 F (43.3 C) outside, the 1950s house will likely feel at least 10 F (5.6 C) warmer inside, even with the same air temperature.

Why?

The answer has to do with radiant heat. Radiant heat is what keeps you toasty warm at a campfire on a cold winter night. The fire doesn’t warm the air much; rather, like the Sun, most of the fire’s heat moves through invisible waves directly from the campfire to your body.

In the radiant heat of the Arizona sun, the surface temperature of the uninsulated post-and-beam ceilings in my house, one of 41,000 built in Tucson during the post-World War II era, can reach over 100 F (37.8 C). The single-glazed steel windows register 122 F (50 C), and the uninsulated concrete block walls aren’t much cooler.

Inside my house on triple-digit days, it can feel like I’m standing near a campfire, even with the air conditioner roaring to maintain 75 F (23.9 C). And when the system breaks – as it did during the long-running 2023 heat wave, when Phoenix hit 110 F (43.3 C) every day for weeks – temperatures rise dangerously fast. Without the AC, the hot surfaces plus the swirl of air from the ceiling fan makes the house feel like an air fryer.

Air temperature: An incomplete indicator of comfort

While people are used to thinking about how clothing, air movement, temperature and humidity affect comfort, two lesser-known measures help explain how they experience comfort indoors:

  1. Mean radiant temperature. This is the average temperature of all the surfaces that surround us: ceiling, windows, walls, floor. For radiant heat to move between an object and the human body, it needs an uninterrupted line of sight, so ceilings and unobstructed windows have an outsized influence on the radiant temperature experienced in a specific place in a house.
  2. Operative temperature. This can be approximated by averaging the mean radiant temperature and the average air temperature in a room. Other calculations of operative temperature take into account effects of air movement, humidity and additional variables. Roughly half of how you experience comfort is determined by the radiant environment.

Unfortunately, as the building scientist Robert Bean (no relation) says, “an entire industry of manufacturers, suppliers, builders and tradespeople incorrectly equate thermal comfort with air temperatures.” The result is that most people are completely oblivious to what actually makes a space feel comfortable — or uncomfortably hot.

On a hot, sunny day, good insulation and double-pane windows slow heat transfer enough for air conditioning to keep the mean radiant temperature inside the building within a few degrees of the air temperature.

However, in an under-insulated building, such as my house, or in some older public housing projects in Phoenix, the high mean radiant temperature can push the operative temperature over 90 F (32.2 C) – even with the thermostat set to 75 F (23.9 C). When the surface temperature exceeds the temperature of our skin, heat will begin to radiate from the hot surface into the body, making heat stroke more likely.

While the exact threshold where overheating becomes dangerous is debated, most people would agree that 90 F (32.2 C) is far too warm for comfort.

Hot surfaces are why smaller buildings, such as mobile homes, tiny homes, shipping containers and garages turned into apartments, often feel uncomfortable regardless of the thermostat setting. Smaller structures expose occupants to three, four or even six surfaces with the exterior exposed to the sun and hot outside air. More warm surfaces, more discomfort.

Cooler surfaces, more comfort

If you live in an under-insulated building and don’t mind using more electricity, you can set the thermostat lower. But if the mean radiant temperature is high, a 2 F (1.1 C) drop in air temperature will feel like only 1 F (0.6 C) — and those hot surfaces will still make you feel uncomfortable.

Adding insulation to your roof and replacing single-pane windows with double-pane units with low-emissivity (low-E) glass can help reduce the mean radiant temperature and your energy bills. They’re expensive improvements, but new federal tax credits and forthcoming rebates, to be administered by individual states, can help.

Trees, awnings and exterior shades can also reduce mean radiant temperatures by blocking direct sunlight. However, glass is a lousy insulator, so in very hot climates, single-pane windows completely protected from the sun can still become uncomfortably warm.

Adding a curtain inside — and keeping it closed — can help decrease mean radiant temperature because the curtain will be closer to the air temperature than the glass.

What about renters in old buildings?

Renters in older, under-insulated buildings are often less able to afford large energy bills, and landlords may be unable or unwilling to make expensive improvements. Making matters worse, older air conditioning systems use two to three times as much energy as newer units to deliver the same amount of cooling.

Since creating a comfortable operative temperature requires setting the thermostat lower, an HVAC system in an under-insulated building must work longer and harder, using more energy and further raising the cost. And the costs of discomfort are not only financial: Hot buildings also have adverse impacts on health and productivity.

Millions of Americans now live in places where cooling is the only thing preventing a mass casualty event. In Phoenix, city code requires rental units cooled by air conditioning to maintain a temperature of no more than 82 F (27.8 C), measured 3 feet above the floor in the center of the room. Unfortunately, the code does not specify whether 82 F is the operative temperature or the air temperature.

That one word makes a world of difference.

In an older, under-insulated building similar to my house — or, in what might be the worst-case scenario, a sun-fried southwest unit of the top floor of an uninsulated concrete high-rise — a seemingly safe air temperature of 82 F could easily mask dangerous operative temperatures of 96 F (35.6 C) or higher.

The key to better design

As a professor of architecture and building science, I believe today’s byzantine building codes and rental rules could be greatly improved for comfort by regulating mean radiant temperature rather than air temperature. Vast sections of code could be jettisoned by requiring that interior surfaces, which are easy to measure with an inexpensive infrared thermometer, be kept within a comfort range above 60 F (15.6 C) and below 85 F (29.4 C).

For more comfortable buildings, architects and engineers can apply simple, established principles, such as natural ventilation, shading and the right insulation and windows for the climate. Keeping heat out in the first place means we don’t have to spend so much on energy for cooling. Research shows that these measures can also make us safer by keeping buildings cooler for longer in summer power outages.

The happy result: homes and other buildings that are not only comfortable, but also safer and more affordable to operate.

^^^

Jonathan Bean, Associate Professor of Architecture, Sustainable Built Environments and Marketing, University of Arizona

This article originally appeared in The Conversation under a Creative Commons License

Feature Image by Erik Mclean via Pexels

Photo by ThisIsEngineering

Computer science can help farmers explore alternative crops and sustainable farming methods

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Humans have physically reconfigured half of the world’s land to grow just eight staple crops: maize (corn), soy, wheat, rice, cassava, sorghum, sweet potato and potato. They account for the vast majority of calories that people around the world consume. As global population rises, there’s pressure to expand production even further.

Many experts argue that further expanding modern industrialized agriculture – which relies heavily on synthetic fertilizer, chemical pesticides and high-yield seeds – isn’t the right way to feed a growing world population. In their view, this approach isn’t sustainable ecologically or economically, and farmers and scientists alike feel trapped within this system.

How can societies develop a food system that meets their needs and is also more healthy and diverse? It has proved hard to scale up alternative methods, such as organic farming, as broadly as industrial agriculture.

In a recent study, we considered this problem from our perspectives as a computer scientist and a crop scientist. We and our colleagues Bryan Runck, Adam Streed, Diane R. Wang and Patrick M. Ewing proposed a way to rethink how agricultural systems are designed and implemented, using a central idea from computer science – abstraction – that summarizes data and concepts and organizes them computationally, so we can analyze and act upon them without having to constantly examine their internal details.

Big output, big impacts

Modern agriculture intensified over just a few decades in the mid-20th century – a blink of an eye in human history. Technological improvements led the way, including the development of synthetic fertilizer and statistical methods that improved plant breeding.

These advances made it possible for farms to produce much larger quantities of food, but at the expense of the environment. Large-scale agriculture has helped drive climate change, polluted lakes and bays with nutrient runoff and accelerated species losses by turning natural landscapes into monoculture crop fields.

Many U.S. farmers and agricultural researchers would like to grow a wider range of crops and use more sustainable farming methods. But it’s hard for them to figure out what new systems could perform well, especially in a changing climate. Lower-impact farming systems often require deep local knowledge, plus an encyclopedic understanding of plants, weather and climate modeling, geology and more.

That’s where our new approach comes in.

Photo by Pixabay
Photo by Pixabay via Pexels 

Farms as state spaces

When computer scientists think about complex problems, they often use a concept called a state space. This approach mathematically represents all of the possible ways in which a system can be configured. Moving through the space entails making choices, and those choices change the state of the system, for better or worse.

As an example, consider a game of chess with a board and two players. Each configuration of the board at a moment in time is a single state of the game. When a player makes a move, it shifts the game to another state.

The whole game can be described by its “state space” – all possible states the game could be in through valid moves the players make. During the game, each player is searching for states that are better for them.

We can think of an agricultural system as a state space in a particular ecosystem. A farm and its layout of plant species at any moment in time represent one state in that state space. The farmer is searching for better states and trying to avoid bad ones.

Both humans and nature shift the farm from one state to another. On any given day, the farmer might do a dozen different things on the land, such as tilling, planting, weeding, harvesting or adding fertilizer. Nature causes minor state transitions, such as plants growing and rain falling, and much more dramatic state transitions during natural disasters such as floods or wildfires.

Finding synergies

Viewing an agricultural system as a state space makes it possible to broaden choices for farmers beyond the limited options today’s farming systems offer.

Individual farmers don’t have the time or ability to do trial and error for years on their land. But a computing system can draw on agricultural knowledge from many different environments and schools of thought to play a metaphorical chess game with nature that helps farmers identify the best options for their land.

Conventional agriculture limits farmers to a few choices of plant species, farming methods and inputs. Our framework makes it possible to consider higher-level strategies, such as growing multiple crops together or finding management techniques that are best suited to a particular piece of land. Users can search the state space to consider what mix of methods, species and locales could achieve those goals.

For example, if a scientist wants to test five crop rotations – raising planned sequences of crops on the same fields – that each last four years, growing seven plant species, that represents 721 potential rotations. Our approach could use information from long-term ecological research to help find the best potential systems to test.

One area where we see great potential is intercropping – growing different plants in a mixture or close together. Many combinations of specific plants have long been known to grow well together, with each plant helping the others in some way.

The most familiar example is the “three sisters” – maize, squash and beans – developed by Indigenous farmers of the Americas. Corn stalks act as trellises for climbing bean vines, while squash leaves shade the ground, keeping it moist and preventing weeds from sprouting. Bacteria on the bean plants’ roots provide nitrogen, an essential nutrient, to all three plants.

Cultures throughout human history have had their own favored intercropping systems with similar synergies, such as tumeric and mango or millet, cowpea and ziziphus, commonly known as red date. And new work on agrivoltaics shows that combining solar panels and farming can work surprisingly well: The panels partially shade crops that grow underneath them, and farmers earn extra income by producing renewable energy on their land.

Modeling alternative farm strategies

We are working to turn our framework into software that people can use to model agriculture as state spaces. The goal is to enable users to consider alternative designs based upon their intuition, minimizing the costly trial and error that’s now required to test out new ideas in farming.

Today’s approaches largely model and pursue optimizations of existing, often unsustainable systems of agriculture. Our framework enables discovery of new systems of agriculture and then optimization within those new systems.

Users also will be able to specify their objectives to an artificial intelligence-based agent that can perform a search of the farm state space, just as it might search the state space of a chessboard to pick winning moves.

Modern societies have access to many more plant species and much more information about how different species and environments interact than they did a century ago. In our view, agricultural systems aren’t doing enough to leverage all that knowledge. Combining it computationally could help make agriculture more productive, healthy and sustainable in a rapidly changing world.

^^^

Barath Raghavan, Associate Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Southern California and Michael Kantar, Associate Professor of Tropical Plants & Soil Sciences, University of Hawaii.

This article originally appeared in The Conversation under a Creative Commons License

Feature Image by ThisIsEngineering via Pexels

 

Photo by Damir Mijailovic

Does the direction water rotates down the drain depend on which hemisphere you’re in? Debunking the Coriolis effect in your sink

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In countries near the Earth’s equator, tourists are often dazzled by a demonstration of a mysterious physical phenomenon. A presenter will position three buckets of water – one in the Northern Hemisphere, one in the Southern Hemisphere, and one directly on the equator – and let the water drain out.

Tourists are shown that, as the water drains, the water in the northern bucket rotates in one direction, the water in the southern bucket rotates in the other direction, and the water at the equator doesn’t rotate at all.

The demonstrator might claim that this strange phenomenon is governed by physics, that it’s an example of the Coriolis effect.

The intriguing nature of the Coriolis effect has led to its frequent appearances in urban legends and popular culture, from TV shows to video games.

The Coriolis effect is based on the idea that the spinning of the Earth introduces a physical force, known as the Coriolis force, which affects the way objects appear to move to us Earthbound observers. The Coriolis force causes objects on the Earth’s surface to be deflected in different directions depending on whether they are above or below the equator. The effect is strongest near the poles and weakest at the equator.

The Coriolis effect is legitimately responsible for the behavior of some natural phenomena, like hurricanes, that meterologists and physical oceanographers like the two of us study. But in domestic settings, the spinning of the Earth actually has very little effect on how water behaves. Math can explain how this works – or doesn’t work – in a kitchen sink.

The math behind the phenomenon

Geophysicists use certain mathematical equations, known as the Navier-Stokes equations, to describe the behavior of fluids. Roughly, the Navier-Stokes equations relate the change of fluid velocity – how the fluid moves – to the forces acting on the fluid, subject to a few physical constraints. For example, the equations assume that the overall amount of fluid in the system doesn’t change over time.

But just because physicists and mathematicians can write down these equations, it doesn’t mean we can solve them. In fact, these equations are so difficult to solve that you would win a Millennium Prize and US$1 million if you could do it.

Although there is no known complete solution to Navier-Stokes equations, meteorologists and physical oceanographers can still obtain useful partial solutions. One way to obtain these partial solutions is to compare various terms in the Navier-Stokes equations to determine which ones are most important.

These comparisons are often recorded as ratios and have no associated physical unit, thereby earning them the name “dimensionless numbers.”

What happens in your sink?

In the context of the Coriolis effect, perhaps the most important dimensionless number is the Rossby number, named for the early 20th-century meteorologist Carl-Gustav Rossby. The Rossby number compares the dynamics of the fluid with the Earth’s rotation rate, taking into account how big the system is and how fast it’s moving.

A small Rossby number indicates that the Coriolis force has a strong effect on the system, while a large Rossby number signifies that the Coriolis force has a negligible effect. For example, the Rossby number for an average hurricane is of the order of 1, indicating that the dynamics of the fluid and the Earth’s rotation rate are of similar relevance. It is true that hurricanes tend to rotate clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere and counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere.

The same math that applies to large-scale phenomena like hurricanes also applies to the water in your bathroom sink. In this setting, the system is relatively small, and so the Rossby number will be much larger than 1 – more than 10,000 times larger. This observation indicates that the Coriolis force is negligible on water draining in a bathroom sink.

In fact, the Rossby number predicts that the water would need to move at an almost imperceptible speed for the Coriolis force to become significant. So even though the way water swirls down the drain may be consistent, that isn’t due to the Coriolis effect.

So what did the tourists see?

The same logic applies to the equatorial attractions. Given the size of the system, physical oceanographers can comfortably conclude that the Coriolis force is not responsible for what the tourists see in those buckets or bowls.

This conclusion is also supported by examining the same kind of presentation in different countries.

The water in the Northern Hemisphere rotates counterclockwise in one video but clockwise in another video. If the rotation were due to the Coriolis effect, the result would be the same in both videos.

Although physical oceanographers can’t deny what the tourists see, we know that the magic trick isn’t due to the Coriolis effect at such a small scale.

^^^

Francisco José Machín Jiménez, Profesor Titular de Universidad, Oceanógrafo Físico, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and Borja Aguiar González, Personal Docente e Investigador, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

This article originally appeared in The Conversation, under a Creative Commons license.

Feature Image by Damir Mijailovic via Pexels.

Photo by Alexander Grey

Glass: Neither a solid nor a liquid, this common yet complicated material is still surprising scientists

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Glass is a material of many faces: It is both ancient and modern, strong yet delicate, and able to adopt almost any shape or color. These properties of glass are why people use it to make everything from smartphone screens and fiber-optic cables to vials that hold vaccines.

Humankind has been using glass in some fashion for millennia, and researchers are still finding new uses for it today. It’s not uncommon to hear the oft-repeated factoid that glass is actually a liquid, not a solid. But the reality is much more interesting – glass does not fit neatly into either of those categories and is in many ways a state of matter all its own. As two materials scientists who study glass, we are constantly trying to improve our understanding of this unique material and discover new ways to use glass in the future.

What is glass?

The best way to understand glass is to understand how it is made.

The first step to make glass requires heating up a mixture of minerals – often soda ash, limestone and quartz sand – until they melt into a liquid at around 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit (1,480 Celsius). In this state, the minerals are freely flowing in the liquid and move in a disordered way. If this liquid cools down fast enough, instead of solidifying into an organized, crystalline structure like most solids, the mixture solidifies while maintaining the disordered structure. It is the atomically disordered structure that defines glass.

Three graphics showing atomic structure ranging from ordered to chaotic.
Cdang/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

On short timescales, glass behaves much like a solid. But the liquidlike structure of glass means that over a long enough period of time, glass undergoes a process called relaxation. Relaxation is a continuous but extremely slow process where the atoms in a piece of glass will slowly rearrange themselves into a more stable structure. Over 1 billion years, a typical piece of glass will change shape by less than 1 nanometer – about 1/70,000 the diameter of human hair. Due to the slow rate of change, the myth that old windows are thicker at the bottom due to centuries of gravity pulling on the slowly flowing glass is not true.

Colloquially, the word glass often refers to a hard, brittle, transparent substance made of fused sand, soda and lime. Yet there are many types of glass that are not transparent, and glass can be made from any combination of elements as long as the liquid mixture can be cooled fast enough to avoid crystallization.

From the Stone Age to today

A decorative, yellowish glass cup.
 MatthiasKabel/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Humans have been using glass for more than 4,000 years, with some of the earliest uses being for decorative glass beads and arrowheads. Archaeologists have also discovered evidence of 2,000-year-old glass workshops. One such ancient workshop was uncovered near Haifa in modern Israel and dates back to around 350 C.E. There, archaeologists discovered pieces of raw glass, glass-melting furnaces, utilitarian glass vessels and debris from glass-blowing.

Modern glass manufacturing began in the early 20th century with the development of mass production techniques for glass bottles and flat glass sheets. Glass became an essential part of the electronics and telecommunications industry in the latter part of the 20th century and now forms the backbone for the internet.

Glass enabling technologies of tomorrow

Today, scientists are far beyond simply using glass as the material for a cup or a mirror. At the cutting edge of research into glass is the ability to manipulate its complex atomic structure and relaxation process to achieve certain properties.

Because glass is atomically disordered and always changing, any two points on a piece of glass are likely to have slightly different properties – whether it is strength, color, conductivity or something else. Because of these differences, two similar pieces of glass that were made in the same way using the same materials can behave very differently.

To better predict how a piece of glass behaves, our team has been researching how to quantify and manipulate the chaotic and ever-changing atomic structure of glass. Recent advances in this field have had direct benefits to existing technologies.

For example, phone screens do not crack as easily as they did in 2014 in part because new processing techniques decrease the differences in atomic bond strengths to make it harder for cracks to propagate. Similarly, internet speeds have vastly improved over the last 20 years because researchers have figured out ways to make the density of glass used for optical fibers more uniform and, therefore, more efficient at transmitting data.

A deeper understanding of how to manipulate the changing, chaotic structure of glass could lead to big advancements in technology in the coming years. Researchers are currently working on a range of projects, including glass batteries that could enable faster charging speeds and improved reliability, fiberglass wind turbines that require less maintenance than existing turbines, and improved memory storage devices.

^^^

John Mauro, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Penn State and Katelyn Kirchner, PhD Candidate in Materials Science, Penn State.

This article originally appeared in The Conversation, under a Creative Commons license.

Feature Image by Alexander Grey via Pexels.

Caldwell

Alon Preiss responds to Christopher Caldwell, on the Climate Emergency: Seriously, what are you talking about?

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A perplexing column appeared in the New York Times this morning. As California awaits its next wildfires, as France suffers through 109-degree heat, and on the very day that Greenland lost 12.5 billion tons of ice in a single day, Christopher Caldwell, a senior editor at the conservative Weekly Standard till its demise, noted, “Climate activists have … changed their emphasis…. Better to use the specter of imminent self-extinction to rally the public behind actions like banning cars from city centers and halting new oil exploration. This new focus may have the virtue of conveying urgency. But it is going to bring the climate protesters into conflict with democracy, whether they realize it or not.”

Caldwell thus sets up a really difficult thesis to prove. If climate activists manage to “rally the public” behind their cause, this will “conflict with democracy.”

Are climate activists undemocratic?

Currently, even the American public is overwhelmingly concerned about climate change; and worldwide the concern is even greater. Till now, politicians have ignored the people and listened to oil companies instead. If politicians in fact hear the word of the people, that would seem exactly what democracy is for.

Well, says Caldwell, not exactly.

Democracy isn’t really about listening to the people and doing what they say, Caldwell explains. The more success that climate activists have in convincing the world that climate change is urgent, the more our democracy will be endangered.

The youth have their say

Problem number one: “The symbol of this transformation,” Caldwell wrote, “is the Swedish high school student Greta Thunberg, who describes herself to her 800,000-plus Twitter followers as a ‘16-year-old climate activist with Asperger.’ … She handed out fliers, informing adults, in crude language, that she was doing this because they were ruining her future.”

Of course, young people are the ones most impacted by climate change. While fogies like Caldwell (and me!) will be dead by the time the worst effects of climate change kick in, Greta Thunberg will not.

So this directly impacts her, and she has a perfect right to speak out. Which she has, quite effectively, to Caldwell’s chagrin. (He does not quote the “crude language” that so offends him, and a rather lengthy Google search found absolutely nothing objectionable that she has ever said. But I found just awful things that self-described conservatives have said about her. Take a look at this, for example.)

Are climate activists missing the big picture?

“Her politics rests on two things,” he writes. “First is simplification. ‘The climate crisis already has been solved,’ she said at a TED Talk in Stockholm this year. ‘We already have all the facts and solutions. All we have to do is wake up and change.’ Second is sowing panic, as she explained at the World Economic Forum in Davos last winter.”

Climate change, he complains, should not “be understood as an ‘emergency.’ ”

Second, trying to get the government to act quickly to mitigate the worst effects of climate change is, Caldwell argues, “a political, not a meteorological, goal.”

But she is exactly right. Climate activists, and those of us who sympathize, see the climate crisis as something akin to a military emergency, a foreign invasion. And using politics to achieve a goal is hardly undemocratic. He may disagree with the goal, but the rest of the world does not. There is nothing undemocratic about deciding to do something with which the editors at the Weekly Standard do not agree.

Is it undemocratic for young people to speak their minds?

“Normally Ms. Thunberg would be unqualified to debate in a democratic forum,” he continues. “Since a 16-year-old is not a legally responsible adult, she cannot be robustly criticized and, even leaving aside her self-description as autistic, Ms. Thunberg is a complicated adolescent. Intellectually, she is precocious and subtle. She reasons like a well-read but dogmatic student radical in her 20s. Physically, she is diminutive and fresh-faced, comes off as younger than her years, and frequently refers to herself as a ‘child’ — about the last thing the average 16-year-old would ever do.”

By “legally responsible adult,” he may simply mean that she is under the age of 18. Or he may mean – by curiously interposing the word “responsible” in the middle of the usual term legal adult – that, like many sensible (indeed, “responsible”) people, she is on the spectrum. In any event, it is the height of democracy (it is what democracy is all about) to allow youths, as well as the disabled, to have a voice. Everyone is “qualified to debate,” whether or not they can hold office, or even vote, or agree with the editorial board at the Weekly Standard. And it is also very odd that, while robustly criticizing Ms. Thunberg, he complains that she cannot be robustly criticized.

What kind of civilization do we want?

Caldwell then wonders “what kind of civilization we want, and at what level of technological complexity. On a planet of eight billion people, it is not just destination weddings that require considerable expenditure of energy. So does food. So does clean drinking water. So does communication.”

These are good questions, but there are answers to them. The energy required for food, drinking water, communication and, yes, destination weddings can be provided by renewables.

Are young climate activists being too mean to defenseless oil and gas companies?

Next, Caldwell trots out that old conservative bugaboo, the mean lefty. (I really hate this – when we point out the extreme anti-civility of the right, they call us “snowflakes,” while, with the other side of their lying mouths, they complain that we’re not polite enough.)

But here goes: climate activists, Caldwell worries, “demoniz[e] anyone who stands in the way.”

How? Examples, please.

Well, he sobs, the climate editor of a Dutch newspaper thinks Paris should combat climate change by “a ban on automobile traffic in Paris or by a dimming of the lights on the Eiffel Tower.”

That sounds like a policy suggestion, not demonization.

OK, we’ve heard about that terrible, unnamed climate editor of a Dutch newspaper who hurt your feelings; what other awful things have we said in this widespread demonization?

OK, here goes: “[t]he German economist Niko Paech,” Caldwell says, with great shock, “urges shaming people for booking cruises and driving S.U.V.s, too.”

Oh, Niko Paech! Will his despicable acts of barbarism never cease?

Niko, Niko, Niko. You are hurting Chris Caldwell’s feelings!

You know, I am so tired of always having to make excuses for Niko Paech. He’s like the Donald Trump of the world of German economists who believe in climate science.

This is literally the best Caldwell can do to support his gripe that those of us concerned about climate are not polite to those who disagree with us — exceedingly mild comments by the editor of a Dutch newspaper and a German economist. While the folks on his side are calling Greta Thunberg … well, just take a look at this.

Really, Christopher Caldwell, get a thicker skin.

Why don’t we just wait and see? Wouldn’t that be more democratic, after all?

Then, finally, his conclusion, this great intellectual of the right: “Democracy often calls for waiting and seeing. Patience may be democracy’s cardinal virtue. Climate change is a serious issue. But to say, ‘We can’t wait,’ is to invite a problem just as grave.”

Thus, in his view, Democracy requires three things:

  • Do not criticize those who disagree with you (or, anyway, don’t criticize conservatives who disagree with you), because this is demonization, which is undemocratic;
  • Do not express urgency, because democracy requires “waiting and seeing”;
  • Only legal adults are “qualified” to express their views.

These three points — from one of our greatest conservative thinkers, whom the New York Times editors felt deserved a place of honor on their editorial page — are all patently ridiculous.

Point 1: Christopher Caldwell, you are incorrect. Democracy is about robust debate. The climate deniers have had their say. They are wrong. And perhaps, just perhaps, we ought to demonize a political movement of phony science paid for by oil companies who value their own profits more than they value the future of the world.

Point 2: We have waited decades, and the world is on fire. What more are you waiting for? What more do you need to see?

Point 3: The youth of the world are terrified of the future that we are leaving them. They have every right to speak out.

[UPDATE, AUGUST 14, 2021: Astute readers may note that the despicable things that internet conservatives have said about Greta Thunberg, and cited in this piece, have all been taken down. But others are not difficult to find. This, for example. And in the Atlantic, Yasmeen Serhan has this piece about the right-wing global campaign against her.] 

^^^

Alon Preiss is the author of A Flash of Blue Sky (2015) and In Love With Alice (2017), which are both available from Chickadee Prince Books.

Art design by Steven S. Drachman. Photos from Mrs.Brown/Skeeze/Pixabay.