Climate Change

The modern world is full of wonderful technology to make our lives easier or better. The automobile allows us to travel long distances without exerting any significant physical effort. The computer allows us to automate menial tasks in order to exert less effort in our jobs. The internet allows us to view drawings of girls that have been horribly mutilated in a vain attempt to get sexually aroused. The list goes on and on. These technologies may or may not be leading to global climate change. None of these are relevant to this discussion though, as I am choosing to discuss a more insidious technology that is causing climate change right at this second: the thermostat.

Not what you were expecting? I'm not particularly surprised by that, but the thermostat does share much in common with global climate change. For example, everyone knows what they both are, but few people understand them. I'll get into the misunderstandings of the thermostat later, and I think the misunderstandings of the supposedly more important one are well documented. See also any United States government sponsored paper on the topic. More obviously, both affect the climate. This is a tautology in the case of global climate change, but I really wanted to at least get the list to two items. So there aren't all that many similarities in number perhaps, but both are very simple on a conceptual level, and they more or less intersect completely there.

They differ in several ways as well. Obviously, one is typically a smallish plastic box filled with electronics and a thermometer, and the other is a concept pertaining to a number of factors including but not limited to greenhouse gas production. Also, an informed person can trivially control a thermostat, while global climate change is not even necessarily caused directly or entirely by humans. That debate is for another time and probably another place.

The trouble for thermostats start with the fact that they're smallish boxes filled with electronics. Like most similar objects, most people simply don't know how to use them. Oh sure, they think they do, or are simply loathe to admit that they don't and attempt to squeak by anyway. The first issue people have is simply a matter of terminology: up versus down. People, not understanding exactly how a normal thermostat works, treat it like a temperature dial on their ovens or in their car. Perhaps instead they think it's something entirely different and the setting is actually an offset from some temperature. Of course it can't be offset from the external temperature or you'd typically be sweating constantly, but it's not my irrational belief so don't ask me to explain it. Turning the thermostat up usually means twisting the dial to the left or pushing an up button, which is fine if you want to heat up a room. Unfortunately, this is often uttered when the room is not being adequately cooled in the belief that cranking it will crank the air conditioning. In the winter, this particular mistake leads accidentally to the correct result. Turning the thermostat down has the opposite effect, causing the intended effect in the winter while freezing people in the summer. The worst part about this issue is that it's the sort of mistake you wouldn't expect someone to make repeatedly. After all, how many times do you typically have to get the same true/false question wrong before you figure out what the right answer is? If the current setting is wrong, the choices for correction are binary, but somehow repeating the wrong action in hopes that the degree of adjustment was just not enough yet is a common response.

That problem makes a certain degree of sense, though not how long it can persist. This next problem doesn't even warrant any acceptance. On more than one occasion, I've observed someone adjusting the programming of the heat, never the air conditioning for some reason, based on the external temperature. I don't mean the current setting, I mean the scheduled programming. For example, it was unseasonably warm a few days ago, so the weekend daytime temperature was set to 65 instead of the normal 68. When it's colder out, the programming will occasionally reach 70. Leaving out the efficiency issues of adjusting the regular program every time the temperature changes significantly, this betrays a massive lack of understanding of exactly what a thermostat does.

I may as well explain what they do if I'm going to keep demonizing people who fail to understand this. No matter what type of thermostat you use they will have a method of setting a temperature and a thermometer. When the temperature falls below the input temperature (in heating mode, the opposite is true for air conditioning), the thermostat sends a signal to the furnace to activate. When the temperature passes the set temperature by a small amount it sends another signal to deactivate the furnace. In so doing, you can set the average temperature of the room the thermostat is in, and by knowing the difference in temperature across a building affect the average temperature of an entire centrally heated structure to your taste. This is fascinating I'm sure.

Lowering the temperature setting in response to a heat wave is unnecessary. If the outside is so warm that the inside stays above your set temperature, the furnace simply will not activate. Raising the temperature setting in response to a chill is similarly unnecessary. If the external temperature is so low that the internal temperature drops rapidly, the furnace will activate more often and stay active longer to keep the temperature exactly where you wanted it. The interior air temperature of 68 degrees is the same whether it is 62 degrees outside or it is -13 degrees. The only difference is the amount of power required to maintain the 68 degrees. The only real difference anyway.

Upon asking why you'd do this, I was answered "Because it's cold outside." Obviously, I explaned what I just said in those previous two sentences, but that wasn't enough. "Well it seems colder inside." This is an entirely different matter, and one that can be easily remedied by overriding the program (in this case pushing the up button). Feeling cold in the room even at the temperature you want is possible if there's a drafty area that doesn't affect the area near the thermostat as quickly, or if you have strong somatic reactions, but if either was the case why answer how you originally did? Why not just skip the middleman and jump to "I'm not warm enough," and move on with your life? There are no good answers to that question, so I can't give you any. There are only irrational feelings causing somatic reactions and a total misunderstanding of how the whole process works. That's what I'm here for.