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Comment by johnnyjeans | Hacker News Reader

It wasn't the lack of water that made Florida inhospitable, it was the climate. Florida's population explosion precisely coincides with the adoption of air conditioning in American households, in the post-war period[1]. Very few people want to live in a place where it's so hot and humid all the time.

> During the last ice age, only 10,000 years ago

We're still in an ice age. An ice age is simply when the earth's poles have an ice cover.

[1] - https://countrydigest.org/florida-population/

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> An ice age is simply when the earth's poles have an ice cover.

Are you sure? I'm not seeing that definition anywhere, and it looks like even in interglacial periods there's permanent ice in both hemispheres: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age#Glacials_and_interglac...

Interglacial periods are a part of ice ages. Even tells you right at the beginning of that article.

> Individual pulses of cold climate within an ice age are termed glacial periods (glacials, glaciations, glacial stages, stadials, stades, or colloquially, ice ages), and intermittent warm periods within an ice age are called interglacials or interstadials.

You can actually see the definition (albeit a little verbose) as the first sentence of that article:

> An ice age is a long period of reduction in the temperature of Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers.

On a technicality, you can get me for not mentioning the snow capped mountains part, I'd concede on that. That part is actually news to me. All the same, the earth is colder than it usually is. [1]

An interesting thing I like to bounce around in my head: Could we live in the interior of the Pangean super continent if we had to? Interesting stepping stone between Earth's current, very mild climate, and trying to live in a place like Venus. Definitely would have to live like mole people.

[1] - https://www.climate.gov/media/11332

Mmm, looks like you're right. Sorry!

No worries. It's not commonly known! For as important as it's become to talk about the climate, the brass tacks remain pretty esoteric.

> Could we live in the interior of the Pangean super continent

We already avoid living in the interior of Australia, because living at temperatures of +50°C is just not very compatible with having body temperature slightly below +37°C. Same applies to the middle of Sahara desert. It's not impossible though, because the humidity is very low there, so, given a supply of water, you can cool by evaporation. At high humidity. you'd just die; such things happen during heat waves on the Indian subcontinent, for example.

People certainly die during heat waves, on the Subcontinent and elsewhere. High heat at high humidity is dangerous to endure.

However, there is no historical record of the wet bulb temperature outdoors exceeding human body temperature, anywhere, ever. So far.

Which is what it would take for the human body to be unable to remove excess heat in any fashion.

See also: chapter one of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future.

> However, there is no historical record of the wet bulb temperature outdoors

That’s not really saying much. The historical record is vanishingly small.

The current record of 36.6 seems like it would be close enough to cause major issues.

> Individual pulses of cold climate within an ice age are termed [...] ([...] or colloquially, ice ages),

Looks like both sides are right in this case.

I will not argue about definitions of terms, but there was a recent study that I found linked on washingtonpost.com I believe (Edit: found, added).

WP article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/09/1... (https://archive.md/RM8ez)

> ...humans evolved during the coldest epoch of the Phanerozoic [the time period from 540 million years ago to the present], when global average temperatures were as low as 51.8 F (11 C).

> “We built our civilization around those geologic landscapes of an icehouse,” Judd [one of the study's authors] said.

Study (restricted): "A 485-million-year history of Earth’s surface temperature" -- https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk3705

> Partitioning the reconstruction into climate states indicates that more time was spent in warmer rather than colder climates

Look at the graph - our time is on the very right. We humans developed and are still living in unusually cold times for this planet, historically.

> Florida's population explosion precisely coincides with the adoption of air conditioning in American households

This is also the case for Arizona, Phoenix in particular.

Air conditioning is one of the great inventions of the 20th century, it’s up there with the airplane, antibiotics, transistor, and shipping container.

Especially if you include refrigeration for foods.

Absolutely agree. So far, the transistor (i.e. computation, internet, mobile, AI) has been less transformative than earlier breakthroughs like refrigeration, the automobile and the airplane.

Hard disagree. The internet has been WILDLY transformative.

I mean look at what we’re doing right now on HN.

IIRC Twitter was a big part of the Arab spring.

Politics have been warped around it as most political discourse now takes place online.

There are so many examples of society all over the world warping and changing due to comparatively unfettered access to global information.

It’s crazy to say the internet wasn’t at least as transformative as automobiles or planes.

Just because it didn’t directly change the physical world doesn’t mean is wasn’t transformative.

In my view politics is largely a sideshow compared to technological advancement as it is mostly about how to divide up the pie as opposed to growing it. While people can communicate various political ideas more freely, it actually doesn't matter than much unless the political situation gets bad enough that it leads to a dark age. Therefore technologies that merely make it easier to communicate political ideas are less impactful than technologies that directly improve life (e.g. most people would not trade their fridge for a Twitter account). Of course, I am glad that both exist.

I agree with your overall point, but I would add that technology has significantly increased leisure time, and the fact that communication platforms are how many people use that extra leisure time proves their value beyond what you might expect just looking at a hierarchy of needs.

I'm not sure that it has. The workweek remains at 40 hours and most people still work about 40 years. Furthermore, in advanced economies the per household cumulative hours worked has roughly doubled since the transistor was invented. The dishwasher and washer/dryer are the last technologies that actually increased leisure time and predated the transistor.

I'm hopeful that AI + robotics will improve the situation but so far there have been very little quality of life improvements due to the transistor (coding is very fun however).

You’re ignoring the skyrocketing productivity metrics.

If the world economies did not need to keep growing, we’d have much more leisure time and much less productivity.

That extra time just gets gobbled up by the wheel of growth.

I don't hate your argument, but the Arab Spring citation is some idealism from over a decade ago. The Arab Spring mostly failed and almost all of those countries remained autocracies?

True, but the fact that a revolutionary social movement was organized across an entire global region was enabled because of the internet was what I was trying to highlight.

Oh come on, that take is too cute by three halves. The internet was the biggest change in human society of the 20th Century, if not the millennium. And while you’re peeling that one apart, the transistor also laid the bedrock for GPS, modern medical devices like pacemakers and insulin dispensers, mass-communication/mass-media with live broadcast capable of reaching billions of people, and like 10 even bigger things my brunch-addled mind isn’t thinking of at the moment.

I know it’s a cool thought exercise to go “what if the things I like/care about actually aren’t that important in the grand scheme of things?” But at the end of that exercise you’ve got to come back to reality.

If you to choose your fridge or the internet, which one would you choose?

I love technology but 100% in camp fridge.

And the internet has been taken over by bad actors (Meta, Xitter, TikTok etc) with the result that the public is swamped by lies and thus democracy and post Cold War peace is being replaced by global war and dictatorship. So refrigerators look pretty good right now...

I don't think technology is really making things worse. The free flow of information comes with pros and cons. It is hard to imagine that unidirectional communication is net better in the final analysis.

and even more, the generalization of "air conditioning" and "refrigeration" into "heat pumps" ...

Good point, I do a lot of work with HVAC contractors and implicitly include refrigeration in my ‘air conditioning’ mental model but not everyone does.

Air conditioning was huge, but surely mosquito control and the elimination of malaria also played a major role in making Florida habitable. People drained the swamps and sprayed enough poison to kill off at least most of the mosquitos.

Coming from that part of the world, I'm relatively certain the elimination of malaria was the cause.

He does mention that:

> In Florida, a combination of development, drainage, and air conditioning created one of the most desirable cities on Earth from a previously pestilential swamp.

The problem with South Florida is that it had too much water.

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