Verily, they want us to suffer for our sins. The old puritans cautioned only that we would burn in Hell in the next life. The neo-puritans tell us we must burn on Earth in this one.

Air-conditioning and refrigeration do indeed account for a lot of energy. But then, they are technological cornerstones of modern civilisation. Much of the world as we know it would be uninhabitable without air-con. The booming growth of the American South in the past half-century, from the metropolis of Los Angeles to the space centre of Houston, has been possible only because air-con is ubiquitous there.

The UK is hardly California. But we need air-conditioning now almost regardless of the weather, as the success of domestic insulation schemes (ironically, to save energy) means that the problem is less heating up our homes than cooling them down.

Yet the belated spread of air-con over here is greeted with a hum of warnings about global warming. This heated debate typifies the doom-clouded climate. Even if we were to accept the eco-arguments, surely they highlight the need for humanity to adapt so it can thrive in a hotter world. We need to produce more and better air-con and refrigeration technologies, and more energy to power them. Instead, we get sermonising from those who seem less interested in the complex science of climate change than the simple moral parable of man-made global warming.

As far back as the world fairs of the 1930s — Chicago’s “A Century of Progress” and New York’s “Building the World of Tomorrow” — home air-con was lauded as a product of the future available today. I have just returned from a Turkish village where every apartment seems to have it. Yet in London, Olympic city of the 21st century, we are expected to swelter in our Victorian sweatboxes, and an electricity company has the cheek to claim too much air-con helped to cause yesterday’s power cut in Soho. Meanwhile, in California, the world’s air-con capital, rackety energy supplies threaten blackouts every time people turn up the dial. These shortcomings really are man-made disasters, and action to change things is needed now.

Let the neo-puritans stick their heads in a bucket of cold water. Some of us would rather put our faith in the miracle of man-made indoor climate change that is air-conditioning.

• AS I AM a veteran of antiwar marches from the Falklands to the first Gulf War, my eye was caught by home-made placards and T-shirts on the London demonstration against Israel’s attack on Lebanon. One said simply: “Yo, Blair! Do something!” Another expanded the argument to: “Yo, Blair, get Israel to stop doing this s**t.”

  These “wry, sideways” slogans captured the mood of the march — a feeling that the British Government should intervene to bring peace to the Middle East. It seems strange that almost the only people who still share Tony Blair’s egocentric belief in his own power to heal the world are members of the antiwar movement.

  Yet the lesson of history — not to mention of the Iraq war that these people so vehemently opposed — is that the Middle East is the last place in need of more international intervention, which has served to stir and sustain conflicts there for a century. Hard as it seems, sometimes it is just better to demand: “Yo, Blair, stop doing your s**t! Do nothing!”

  Mick.Hume@spiked-online.com

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