alt Hacker NewsAir conditioning only works for things inside of buildings. Not so good for the plants and animals our lives depend on.
And it raises the heat outside of buildings. Not so good for people who have to be outside, think first responders etc.
"just turn on the AC and keep burning the world down" isn't really the answer.
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> "just turn on the AC and keep burning the world down" isn't really the answer.
This is an outdated attitude. PV solar panel output correlates really well with air conditioning demand, no need for storage. Overcool your thick-walled masonry buildings during the day as a form of energy storage.
It's just a heat transfer. Refrigerant inside the evaporator picks up heat and transfers it to the condensing unit outside.
They don't create heat. It was there in the first place, just a different location.
I have a proposal to place a small, intelligent demon in every windowsill in the UK...
That kind of thinking kills more people each year in Europe than guns do in the USA. Let that sink in.
Weirdest argument to keep letting 100k grandmas die from heat every summer I’ve ever heard.
Europeans are so unpatched, I hope they never fix this
>And it raises the heat outside of buildings.
No it doesn't. Seriously, where does this meme even come from? It should be pretty obvious just from a solar insolation map that AC is just noise vs the sun. The energy usage is tiny vs vehicles or non-heat pump heating and only electric. What changes temperature overall is the balance of thermal retention by the atmosphere vs radiation into space, hence why net increases in GHG are so dangerous. And at the ground level similarly how heat is dumped to atmosphere. Greenery, whites, shade etc is good, asphalt, mass standard glass is bad (hence many cities being heat islands). Old, leaky units sure, we absolutely should work to reduce that. But it's astonishing how people claim AC makes the outdoors hotter so consistently.