For a while now, local celebrity weatherman Cliff Mass and The Stranger's Charles Mudede have been in an intense blog feud over climate change. So on a recent Tuesday, I brought the two of them up to The Stranger's recording studio so they could hash it out. It was quite an experience.

We'll be publishing extended excerpts from the Mass vs. Mudede clash of the titans in tomorrow's Stranger. We'll also be posting audio of their full hour-and-a-half debate online. It involves Mass telling Mudede what a wrong-headed failure he is when it comes to climate talk, and Mudede telling Mass that his writing on the subject is irresponsible and aimed at protecting an unsustainable middle-class way of life. (Out of respect for people who shout about spoilers, I won't tell you which one of them ends up calling the other a fascist.)

While the clock ticks toward publication, here's a little novelty: an area of agreement between Mass and Mudede! It involves air conditioners.

Seattle, it turns out, is experiencing a spike in air conditioner installation that's fueled by the current construction boom and "an amenities arms race," according to The Seattle Times.

This is so un-Seattle, and so unnecessary that it has united not only Mass and Mudede but also Crosscut's Knute Berger (who calls the trend appalling and harkens back to a more enlightened time when the view that AC was "immoral" dominated this city). It's a rare trifecta of civic scorn. But what, exactly, has caused this even rarer occurrence of a Mass / Mudede agreement?

By examining their different paths to denouncing the rise in Seattle air conditioner installations, one gets a foretaste of the profound dispositional rift between these two men.

Mudede argues that we don't need air conditioning because first of all, Seattle doesn't get very hot, and secondly, on the few occasions when it does get hot, "we in Seattle share places and spaces with conditioned air: the movie theater, the restaurant, the bus, the cars pulled by light and heavy trains." In other words: One must know the correct weather-related behavior, and then one must always live that behavior in a pro-social context.

Mass, as usual, dives into the science and statistics, takes a detour through the complex interplay of sweat and humidity, posts some maps showing heat trends across the entire United States, and then finally arrives at a fact-based answer: "The bottom line of all this is clear: Seattle is one city where A/C is a luxury that is not particularly needed." However, Mass says, given global warming projections, "You will probably want air conditioning in Seattle in the 2090s." In other words: One must first know the facts and then one must act rationally based upon those facts. At present, it is not rational to want air conditioning in Seattle. But, it might be later. If that's inconvenient for the eternal AC haters—well, those are still the facts.

Check back tomorrow for Mass and Mudede debating the many other areas of weather-related concern in which they find zero common ground.