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> Every indoor place has great Air Conditioning. And all that heat has to go somewhere. And the hotter things get, the more those air conditioners will have to
by bena 5y ago
> Every indoor place has great Air Conditioning.
And all that heat has to go somewhere. And the hotter things get, the more those air conditioners will have to work: producing more heat. Implying air conditioning is the solution to climate change is kind of like suggesting we drop ice cubes in the ocean to cool it off.
> Though, I'm still not convinced climate change will be all that bad. Making cold uninhabitable places in North Canada, and Russia more habitable for humans and wild life would be great. They also found palm fossils outside Calgary. So its not like Earth is not in a climate change cycle naturally.
The problem is that we honestly don't know what the effects will be. How disrupting those ecosystems will impact other areas. We've already learned the devastating effects invasive species can have on areas, on how improperly planned damming and levee construction can fuck up our coastlines, suggesting that making Northern Canada a temperate zone is no big deal is just willfully ignoring all the knock-on effects that will bring.
Also, North Canada wasn't always in the North. So the fact that palm fossils were found there isn't proof that the North was once tropical, it's just proof that palms once grew there. That area could have been in the tropics. I don't remember all of the continental shifts caused by plate tectonics, but things have moved quite a bit in the some 4 billion years the Earth has existed.
- hinkley 5y agoIt's worth noting that thermal efficiency is dictated by the delta T, so an air conditioner pushing twice the temperature difference burns more than twice the energy and produces more than twice the heat. And the more heat we drive into urban spaces, the bigger the Heat Island Effect will be. There are twenty variables we can be tackling here and we need people tugging at all of them. More trees, better albedo on built structures, retrofitting for energy efficiency, and and and...
- dukeofdoom 5y agoSo just curious, how does it compare bringing 40 degrees Celsius down to 21 degrees, vs 0 degrees upto 21 degrees. Is heating more energy efficient than cooling? My practical experience has been that AC costs less, than heating a home. Considering that if anywhere Solor panels could work well, the Dubai desert is near tops for efficiency. This also offsets any deficit. And Dubai also has seasonal temperature variations, winter they are around 29 degrees. I wouldn't be surprised that the total energy expenditure for a home in Dubai, is less than a home in Northern Canada .
- bena 5y agoSome quick checking and Dubai is around 12,000 kwh per year per household and California is around 6000 per year per household. My point was that A/C is really just changing the equilibrium of a small area. Making a building cooler means you have to make some other area warmer.