Opinion/Harold: Are Cape Cod summers getting hotter? AC could be skewing our perception.

Whether or not you spent most of the recent heat wave chilling in an air-conditioned space, your experience of the heat was conditioned by several stories.

A heat wave, according to always level-headed Wikipedia, is a spell of “excessively hot weather,” which leaves it pretty wide open to subjective interpretation. To me, 100 degrees is not a bad definition of excessive, but a lot of people, including my wife, would like it if all temperatures above 80 were made illegal.

My home thermometer, protected from the sun, came in over 90 degrees for six days in a row, one at 94. I think the paper's thermometer — located somewhere in Hyannis, it says — had a couple of those at 89.

It was almost a relief to join the rest of the world in overheated misery, after our subnormally cool spring and early summer. But in fact, this period of July, about a month after the summer solstice, is the average hottest time of the year for us. (The slow warming of the ocean after the day of most sunshine is the reason for that “seasonal lag” as I believe it's called). So these hot days are right on schedule. And if we don't get a lot more 90-plus days, this summer season will turn out more or less normal, maybe a bit below.

One of the stories we used to like to tell ourselves and tourists about the Cape is that surrounded by water, we are immune to the hot weather of the mainland. Whereas those citizens on the wrong side of the bridges suffer when deprived of air conditioning, we are “naturally air-conditioned.”

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This belief was encouraged some decades back by a daily high temperature taken, as I dimly recall, from a thermometer sitting somewhere in Chatham not far from the ocean, which in those pre-climate change days never got above the low 60s. At the time the all-time high temperature given in the Times for this hottest period of summer was a dubious mid-80s. At some point, the Times started reporting temps from another, more representative thermometer, presumably not next to the water.

That brag about natural air-conditioning was more convincing before Cape builders began automatically including all-house air conditioning in new houses. Neither we nor any of our friends and neighbors who built in the 70s and 80s considered air conditioning worth the time and money here on naturally air-conditioned Outer Cape Cod.

But at some time since then — the 1990s? — the amenity of air conditioning became de rigueur and everyone began to start talking about the HVAC system rather than the boiler.

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I somewhat obsessively keep track of the weather, especially highs and lows and my records show that in fact, the average summer highs have not noticeably risen over recent decades. Just about every summer has some temps over 90, usually a few of them. There was a day in the early 1990s when the temp hit 102, only 2 degrees hotter than Boston. (we were all stewing in the same stagnant air mass.)

My online search just now failed to turn up evidence that Cape summer temps have risen over that time.

Part of how we experience hot weather now is the climate change story. Now it's hard not to see our local heat wave as part of the general disaster of global warming from greenhouse gases, even if our heat (unlike London's recently or Seattle's last summer) is in fact more or less normal. The new story will be: "Remember when we were naturally air-conditioned, before this global warming?"

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If the advent of air conditioning on Cape Cod is not a response to actually rising temperatures, the reverse is probably true: that a big part of our experience of our normal hot weather is an effect of the prevalence of air conditioning.

As the availability of GPS has atrophied our natural sense of direction or cellphones made unbearable the idea of being off the grid, the very existence of air conditioning, the sense that any competent, civilized house will have it, has made us experience a given summer temperature as hotter than it is.

The ubiquity of air conditioning has deprived us of knowledge of how to get through summer heat without feeling like victims. We have lost the ability, learned from millennia of dealing with seasonal temperature fluctuations, to cope with hazy, hot and humid. Even to enjoy the rolling out of those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer, as in the old Nat King Cole song.

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To enjoy sweating. And the satisfaction of a well-earned thirst. Beer just tastes better when the temps get well up in the 80s, like the one I had the other day at lunch with a friend on the shady deck of a local restaurant mid-afternoon of one of those hot ones, temp 92.

The sultry nourishment of such movies as “The Long, Hot Summer,” “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” “In the Heat of the Night,” or “Body Heat” is simply not imaginable in a universe with air conditioning.

Brent Harold, a Cape Cod Times columnist and former English professor, lives in Wellfleet. Email him at kinnacum@gmail.com.

This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Opinion: Cape Cod: AC has skewed our perception of hot and very hot