A Fringe Benefit of Air Conditioning

The Economist published a story last week on the downside of air conditioning.

In his book “Losing our Cool” Stan Cox, a polemical plant scientist, blamed it for “resource waste, climate change, ozone depletion and disorientation of the human mind and body”. In 1992 Gwyn Prins, a Cambridge University professor, called “physical addiction” to cooled air America’s “most pervasive and least noticed epidemic”.

I shared my own misgivings about artificial cooling last summer. But we have discovered an unexpected benefit to having large air-conditioning units in every room of our apartment: They're a great place to keep magnets.

Maybe not worth destroying the Earth over, but pretty handy.