alt Hacker NewsSure. And each car is just a drop in the ocean of CO2. And each plane flight. And smoking one cigarette.
Humans have a really hard time understanding compounding risk. But there are billions of us. How many billions of drops can you handwave away?
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It is worth noting that if the Air Conditioner is powered by electricity that came from solar panels, the net heat produced compared to letting the sun heat solar panel colored ground is exactly 0.
Air Conditioners do not produce a net heating effect unless you power them by burning fossil fuels.
When you enact 0.1% changes through a population, that's still a 0.1% change.
"If we all do this little thing" thinking is utter nonsense. If all of human consumption or contribution to warming or what-have-you is 1000, applying a change that lowers that to 999 is not doing anything more than that.
This here is not even a 0.1% thing. You could probably get a better result by telling people to read ebooks rather than hardback. It's just absurd.
8 billion people running a 2000 watt AC continuously for 8 hours a day = 5 trillion watts of heat. (Only the electricity consumed by the AC is turned into new heat. The heat from inside the house would have moved outside anyway, at the same rate, since it's an equilibrium)
The sun = 175 quadrillion watts of heat.
So I would say, the heat from running ACs is not significant. It's also additive with all the other existing forms of energy use we have. Unlike greenhouse gases, which are multiplicative.