One twisted thing about cooling and climate change: It’s all a vicious cycle. As temperatures rise, the need for cooling technologies increases. In turn, more fossil-fuel power plants are firing up to meet that demand, turning up the temperature of the planet in the process.
“Cooling degree days” are one measure of the need for additional cooling. Basically, you take a preset baseline temperature and figure out how much the temperature exceeds it. Say the baseline (above which you’d likely need to flip on a cooling device) is 21 °C (70 °F). If the average temperature for a day is 26 °C, that’s five cooling degree days on a single day. Repeat that every day for a month, and you wind up with 150 cooling degree days.
Sure, let’s just gloss over the cost of heating - which relies heavily on fossil fuels or smog-producing fuels, or both.
Datacentre thermal management (especially for AI)isn’t even in the same ballpark as cooling for homes. One produces pretty charts for management, the other keeps people alive.
It is a vicious cycle, yes, but I think it changed the world. Without A/C we would not have SOCAL, Florida, Texas, etc. or India or others.
We might not have them as you see them today, but there is building science that is centuries old that works with the environment to have architectural solutions that don’t even rely on electricity to retain heat or cool a space. There’s also the more modern passive house design. As someone born and raised in a hot climate like you mentioned, had we created a built environment like this instead of crippling ourselves to use fossil fuels and refrigerants with high global warming potential, we wouldn’t be where we are today. I agree that a/c changed the world. That change could have been a much more positive one had we taken a more practical approach!
All of those areas where populated long before A/C was a thing
Of course, but there would not be millions/billions of people at that latitude without A/C
I’m not sure “cooling degree days” are a good way to measure environmental impact. They neither represent the amount of heat pumped into the atmosphere (as the energy per degree depends on several factors such as mass and heat capacity of the cooled stuff) nor the amount of electricity used (as different A/C’s have wildly different degrees of efficiency) nor the amount of CO2 released (as that depends on how the electricity has been produced).
The power hunger of AI has already been mentioned, so I’m not going to repeat that point, though IMHO it’s by far the bigger issue than residential cooling.
Having said that, if you’re worried about the enviromental impact of your home, the power consumption of a reasonably efficient A/C can easily be offset by just a couple of medium-sized solar panels. Of course both the solar panels and the efficient A/C cost money that not everybody can afford to (or cares to) spend, so you’d have to take cheap and inefficient A/C’s off the market, thus effectively making chilled air a privilege that only the rich can afford. That’d probably lead to lots of heat strokes and other health problems amongst low-income families, so you’d have to weigh the environmental impact of inefficient A/C’s against another rich/poor gap.
The Orange R by John Clagett written back in 1978 was describing this feedback loop in its story.
In the story Nuclear radiation was poisoning the air and scrubbers all over the country were cleaning up the radiation but were using nuclear power to power them creating a huge feedback loop where more radiation was leaking and needing more scrubbers to clean it.
I won’t give away what they thought about solar power, but it’s awfully close to the same messages that certain orange people say about wind and solar power to this day.
ETA: it’s amazing that back in the '70s they thought our future would be nuclear pollution from power plants while they had polluting coal plants and now 50 plus years later we still have polluting coal plants.
Another feedback loop is that, thanks to thermodynamics, the heat being removed from homes and businesses is transferred into the environment, further raising temperatures.
All the energy from the sun becomes heat in the environment eventually.
Not exactly. Much of it radiates out into space. If all the sun’s energy remained in the atmosphere, climate change wouldn’t be a concern, as the Earth wouldn’t have been habitable for humans to even evolve.
