Fact-check: Is air conditioning making cities hotter?
A study found that waste heat generated by a city’s worth of air conditioners during a heatwave can raise the outside temperature by more than 2 degrees Celsius.
Huh, go figure. Anytime I've ever mentioned anything about this online, I got downvoted into oblivion with everyone basically saying 'this is a non-issue'.
I knew I wasn't crazy. Take my upvote.
What are you suggesting, that we not cool ourselves down? This is the natural result of moving heat out of a room and into the atmosphere. Of course there is waste heat put into the atmosphere too, but much of that heat, if it was produced from renewables, was itself extracted out of the atmosphere to start (solar, wind...).
It really is a non issue. Or at least, this is not an issue we can solve, because these are just the laws of thermodynamics.
The real problems lie where we ignore the natural laws of thermodynamics. Like using fossil fuels for power at large scale.
No shit, you don't say huh?
Looks like we're soon to figure out why they dug so many tunnels underneath the country we currently call Turkey that could house like 20,000 people.
Right now, humans are gradually destroying them(our)selves living in matchboxes on the land and burning all the fuel we can find.
Edit: Environmental air temperature tends to be way more stable and more comfortable underground.
Mostly because hot air rises. The entropy equation seems pretty silly when you consider the volume of outside
Hot air can only rise so far homie. Upper layers of the atmosphere are actually rather cold. Ever seen the tops of mountains and wonder why so many of them are covered in snow?
The Earth doesn't have a heatsink to transfer extra heat into outer space, so we're stuck with this conundrum of how to manage our own planet and the heat we generate.
This is kind of a non-starter. Hell the example used even says 1400 people died from the heatwave. Oh but they have some recommendations that might cool things a few degrees...at night! AC will become more and more of a necessity as we move further into global warming.
prisoner’s dilemma. you need the whole city to not be selfish and buy air conditioners in order to make the difference, but once some people cave in and purchase it, eventually everyone will need it.
I mean 2-3 degrees C is probably not a significant difference when temperatures are already in the upper 30s when talking about not using them.
That's the things, 2-3°C of average difference disturbs the current climate and creates big variations, so in daily life it might be closer to ±5-10°C, depending on the season.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A study found that waste heat generated by a city’s worth of air conditioners during a heatwave can raise the outside temperature by more than 2 degrees Celsius.
As Europe faces more frequent and more intense heatwaves, you might have considered taking the plunge and buying an air conditioning unit.
It comes from a study published in 2020 that was based on a scenario in which air conditioners are used in all buildings of a city like Paris to maintain an interior temperature of 23 degrees Celsius during a heatwave.
Temperature increases due to air conditioning (AC) use "depend on the time of day and the characteristics of the heatwave, mainly its intensity", according to the study.
They found that, after "Nine days of a heat wave similar to the one of 2003," the systematic use of AC during that time would increase air temperature "by up to 2.4°C".
And as cities are only likely to grow hotter as a result of climate change, that means that citizens are likely to demand more indoor air conditioning.
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