“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
Don’t really want to pay full house AC money and portable ones here are shit. Would love a decent single room option that is actually energy efficient. Some level of DIY could be tempting if it was cheap enough.
Oh well, summer is over now. Maybe next year.
I got an air to air heat pump that heats and cools my living room. Heat spreads up in the winter so the top floor is also covered, the cold going down in the summer is fairly useless to me since I don’t use that part of the house much, but it’s still a thing.
Just have this thing on my wall:
And the outdoor unit too of course.
For actual heating of the whole house I’d need ground to water which isn’t as good for cooling, but that would be like 30k euros installed, this one was a bit over 2k and still helps me burn less wood in the winter too.
2k installed? Euros? Seems like a pretty good deal to me, good job.
Here in the States, unless you get a bottom of the barrel mini split, you’re looking at 1 to 2k USD for the unit alone, not counting installation. Though admittedly it looks fairly easy, minus some gotchas.
There is the problem, £2k just isn’t worth it.
Tbh I haven’t even bothered to get thermally reflective films for the windows yet. But that is mostly because I want to get new windows so it feels like a waste to get them for windows that will be gone soon.
Actually the old windows could be useful to make cold frames for growing stuff…
In the big picture isn’t the A/C causing the heat deaths?
I think what the other responses are not pointing out is that frame of thinking is blame shifting the ecological issues onto the people themselves rather than those in power making the decisions despite valid alternatives.
Blaming the people en masse leads to thinking that one can decrease their environmental footprint to the point where they will put themselves in danger for minimal societal benefit. Refrigeration and A/C when it comes to residential usage is a necessity.
The changes need to be made in a grander scheme in order to have an actual effect that is in the best interest of everyone.
It’s more like the capitalism that causes buildings to require AC to be liveable is causing the heat deaths primarily through other mechanisms.
If capitalists are going to put people in cheaply manufactured highly individualized single-family housing that is not adapted to local climate conditions with the explicit intent of fragmenting communities and making people dependent on mass consumption for basic needs, then some of those people are going to need AC to survive. The people using AC to survive are not responsible for the AC emissions, the system that made it necessary for them to use it is.
Oh cmon…
I have a house with great insulation. Thick walls, triple-glazed windows. Yeah it takes more time to heat up, but a week into a heatwave, all that material in the walls is warm. When it heats up during the day, it’s an absolute pain to cool down at night, even with ventilation (and that’s assuming the outside air is cold enough to be of any use).
A cheaply built capitalist house would at least freaking cool down at night, or between heatwaves for that matter.
Tell that to my neighbor who died of heat stroke a month ago.
I suppose the double paned glass and insulation in the walls was more expensive than the bare minimum because my government holds landlords partially reponsible for heating in winter (because they hate Russia more than they hate environmentalists).
But if “cheaply built capitalism” requires no state interference, then nothing in capitalist nations qualifies because the state interferes in everything from zoning laws to utilities to roads to police to construction material regulations to contract enforcement to coinage. There can be no capitalism without a state interfering to make it exist (though not necessarily a nation-state).
Agreed!
No that is a dangerous and incorrect mindset
Oh ok
No that would be Capitalism because Capitalism requires polluting the planet in order to make profit. A/C machines itself are not designed to be harmful to the planet as much as oil spills.
If we’re all going for technically true, all of us eating does as well.
Forgive me, I’m not going to stop that either.
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.
all air conditioning machines also produce carbon dioxide
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.