30
Can we air condition our way out of extreme heat? part 1: a primer on air conditioning
(www.theclimatebrink.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2024
30 points (100.0% liked)
Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
6511 readers
699 users here now
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
This was a great, succinct article. Here are a few key points that I noticed:
The important result here is that the efficiency of your air conditioner decreases as ∆T increases — e.g., as the outside temperature goes up.
the work required to keep your house at a fixed temperature Tc increases with the square of the temperature difference between inside and outside temperature, ΔT².
Let’s use the same numbers from the previous example: you want to keep your house at 75F. If climate change has increased the outside temperature from 96F to 100F, the energy your air conditioner consumes increases by (100-75)2/(96-75)2 = 252/212 — this is an increase in energy consumption of 42%!
Averaged over an entire day, the increase will be less than this because ∆T is smaller for much of the day (e.g., at night) But the result is robust: climate change is driving exponentially increasing energy demand for cooling.
People with financial means, who work in air-conditioned offices and live in climate-controlled homes, can handle rising temperatures by simply paying for more electricity.
However, a significant portion of the global population lives the hot life. These people live in homes without air conditioning, work outdoors or in warehouses or kitchens with no climate control.
Why don't we build a tunnel to space? Heat goes up so it'll go out to space where it's cold and some cold air would come in. Win win
Heat doesn't go up. Hot air rises because it's less dense than cold air. You know what's less dense than hot air though? Vacuum. That's a good thing, though, because we don't want to be hemorrhaging atmosphere.
Even if we could build a physical heat sink sticking out of the atmosphere somehow, it would be less protected from solar radiation than anything inside the atmosphere, so if it were facing the sun it probably wouldn't work.
Even if we had the resources and like, enough readily available materials on Earth to make some sort of retractable heat sink sticking out of the night-side of the planet, it'd probably require more energy consumption to create than would be worth it.
Probably the best way to cool things down is to quit burning so much shit and quit knocking forests down.
Are you assuming heats gender? /s