We Are Making the Earth Hotter (and Much Faster) With Air Conditioners
With summer rapidly approaching...which will it be? Your immediate comfort or cooking us alive?
The earth is getting hotter, and much faster than we anticipated.
Climate scientists are remarking that heat is increasing at a quicker rate than they predicted.
We are in trouble, with regard to climate change.
A hotter planet will mean things like ice caps and glaciers disappearing completely, water levels rising, cities being submerged in water, innumerable species of animals dying out (which will majorly mess up our entire environment and ecosystem), and more severe and more frequent tropical storms.
Intense heat sucks the moisture out of the soil, which leads to fewer clouds and more sun, which equals more heat and evaporation. Lake Mead, the reservoir on the Arizona-Nevada border that provides drinking water to 25 million people and generates electricity for eight million more, is at its lowest point since the 1930s.
With heat and drought comes fire. On the first day of last summer, wildfires were burning in California, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and Montana. Heat changes the movement of insects that carry diseases.
And in us humans, heat causes our heart to beat faster, shunting blood toward our skin, where it can be cooled as we sweat. If we get too hot too fast, our heart can’t keep up, the proteins in our body unfold, our gut leaks nasty stuff into our fast-warming blood, and if we don’t cool off quickly, we die.
This is a thing, people, and it’s happening now.
As the days and summers get hotter, what are people doing?
Naturally, they are cranking up their central air and air conditioners.
This offers an immediate sense of relief to the stifling, choking heat. I get it.
At the same time, your air conditioning use is ramping up the speed of our earth heating even more.
AC sucks up huge amounts of electricity, which strains the grid and increases the risk of blackouts.
More electricity also means burning fossil fuels, which means more CO2 pollution.
In addition, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), the human-made chemicals inside of air-conditioners used to cool the air, are super greenhouse gases, up to 3,000 times more potent than CO2 at trapping heat in the atmosphere.
What it comes down to is this: As we use air conditioners and central air to solve the immediate problem and make ourselves comfortable for the time being, we are making the problem way worse, and causing the earth to burn even faster.
According to Michael Wehner, a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, today’s heat waves are 3° to 5°F hotter than they would be without the additional warming from CO2 pollution, which largely comes from burning fossil fuels.
Guess what a huge contributor to this is? There are a handful of things, but one of them is air conditioners.
The more CO2 we dump into the atmosphere, the hotter it is going to get.
Meaning, the more we use air conditioning, the hotter it’s going to get, and way faster.
In trying to cool ourselves in the immediate moment, we are ultimately cooking ourselves quicker.
A small air conditioning unit cooling a single room can consume more power than running four refrigerators.
The U.S. already uses as much electricity for air conditioning each year as the UK uses in total.
The International Energy Agency projects that as the rest of the world reaches similar levels, air conditioning will use about 13 percent of all electricity worldwide, and produce 2 billion tons of CO2 a year — about the same amount as India, the world’s third-largest polluter, emits today.
Last year, the respected medical journal Lancet published a largely overlooked but worthwhile, important paper about humble technology that can do a lot to help solve the problems of extreme heat: the electric fan.
As everyone knows, fans have been used for centuries to move air around and help you feel cooler (in China, hand fans date back to the 8th century).
(Another decent solution to the heat: drinking a lot of water, and staying in the shade as much as possible).
Electric fans are not going to solve the climate crisis. But it’s good to know that there are simple ways to cool ourselves off that don’t make the crisis a lot worse.
Given everything we know about the risks we face right now and what the ultimate stakes are here (at least, the people who are paying attention and who actually care about it do), cooking ourselves to death is not our destiny. Instead, it will be a choice.
Walking around my neighborhood in Boston, I feel such anger passing the countless air conditioners cranked up high on days that are sixty or seventy degrees. This is absurd. Open your window, for God's sake! The damage this laziness and lack of thought is doing is enraging to me. We are at a point with the climate crisis right now that we cannot afford to be this thoughtless or self-centered. Everything is on the line. Everything depends on it.
You have a crucial choice to make right now, and your life, as well as the lives of everyone on this planet, hinge on what that choice is.
Your immediate comfort today or the long-term health and livability of this planet?
Sources for this article:
Cooling Your Home But Warming the Planet (Climate Institute.Org)
How to Prevent Air Conditioners from Heating the Planet (Scientific American)
Our Air-Conditioned Nightmare (Rolling Stone)