“For years we have known that air conditioning protects people from extreme heat, but we could only guess by how much because the available data told us who owned an air conditioner, not who could actually afford to run one,” said Kai Chen, associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health.
The strong protective effect of AC against heat-attributable mortality indicates the public health necessity of addressing urban heat by making AC affordable and greening urban spaces, the authors noted.
Ironically not open access facepalm
I’ve been thinking about getting an air-conditioning, but all air conditioning machines also produce carbon dioxide, and sometimes I wish people have had installed less air conditioning a couple of years back, then we wouldn’t be in the situation that we are in now! In addition, all air conditioning also produces hot air, which can heat up the streets of the towns that we live in. Taken together I have decided against installing air-conditioning.
Install AC along with some solar panels then
This is nonsense, your life is worth the carbon footprint of AC.
Install Air Conditioning NOW if you are even remotely at health risk, you don’t do anything for the world suffering in pain during a heatwave which if it doesn’t kill you may do permanent damage to your body.
You don’t have to use the AC but you DO need it, heatwaves without AC are terrifying please give yourself permission to treat your body kindly.
You aren’t the reason Climate Change is happening, put that burden down and keep only the self awareness and introspection part of that thought complex.
If everybody starts doing that, we get into a vicious circle of more and more carbon dioxide; And on top of that, the cities will get hotter and hotter, which endangers our lives.
You don’t have to run it all the time, or even full blast. It just needs to be available. And when the heat wave comes, just use it to him one room, and just a little.
Cooling is expensive. My in-laws run their AC at full blast all day, it’s like 65f in their house, it’s cold. And then they complainb about cooling costs 🙄
In my last apartment, it came with a big unit in the wall in the living room. We almost never used it. We kept the windows open and let it be hot. We were hardly home during the day anyway.
Instead, we put a tiny unit in the window of our small bedroom. Then we’d only run it at night, and even then we’d keep it set to a pretty warm temperature. The goal was just to cut the humidity and make it slightly cooler than “uncomfortably warm”, so we could sleep without sweating.
Your understanding of what is driving Climate Change has been successfully focused entirely on a complex of guilt and shame within you about your own carbon footprint.
This is leading you to suggest that installing a lifesaving tool that takes up some energy is not worth the thousands and thousands of lives it saves during heatwaves.
Please stop denying your own humanity and the humanity of others and focus on fighting the actual drivers of Climate Change before you end up accidentally killing yourself just because you couldn’t live in a way that perfectly minimized your impact.
This is NOT a slippery slope we all should be obsessed with, it is not that slippery and there are far scarier slippery slopes all around us that should be getting our attention.
Ultimately being against AC is just another form of ecofascism hiding in the language of personal responsibility to obscure the responsibilities of capital, industry and society.
Cities will already get hotter and hotter even if we emit zero co2 from this point on.
This is a life-saving measure. You have to treat symptoms while you work to cure the disease.
Note: that statement is completely location dependent. There is nothing in their operation that inherently produces CO2, all emissions depend on what the local electrical grid is being powered by.