> The elderly, women, and residents of lower-income countries are impacted most
If small increases in global temperature can impact sleep enough to care about, then that is a much stronger additional argument for economic growth( to make AC, which can reduce night temperatures by a lot, affordable and universal) than it is for trading growth for some small avoidance of further temp growth. The latter is how I expect most people will read this result...
I don't see your argument at all. I see this as a powerful reason why even seemingly small changes in temperature can have a huge impact on human life. If this was the literal only issue, that could be an argument. But it's not. It's one of many.
My hope is that people will read this and say "it's not just the animals, the plants, crops, drought, it's people directly affected too". Although I apparently overlooked the "fuck the environment, fuck the poor, get AC" argument.
The study suggests that nighttime temps over 25°C are detrimental to sleep. One of the most obvious ways to get nighttime temps well under that is via AC.
It doesn’t seem outrageous nor “fuck the poor” to ask the question “is there a reasonable path to get AC more widely deployed to help more people sleep better?”
It's not about "fuck the environment". That's an extremely uncharitable interpretation to take of your neighbors. People are willing to to sacrifice, but only IF they see it as a meaningful sacrifice that actually does something. Sort of like why recycling rates are going down because more and more people realize most of winds up in the landfill anyway.
> "fuck the environment, fuck the poor, get AC" argument
Arguing that the benefits of economic growth for the poor are underrated and supported by OP more than more politically-palatable interpretations is precisely the opposite of 'fuck the poor', and given what we know about the other benefits, probably the opposite of 'fuck the environment' too.
AC heats up the planet though (just think of the thermodynamics: not only to you pull out the heat and expel it outdoors, but that takes energy, which ends up as heat exhaust as well).
People need cool air, no question, but it's not a free lunch. We need to cool the climate as well.
(BTW I do believe everybody should have access to as much energy as the OECD countries use per capita. Sadly even this is controversial)
The name heat pump explains it pretty well. It "pumps" heat from one place to another. In case of your AC from inside the building to outside. Yes, it generates additional heat from the electricity it uses.
But ...
It doesn't matter how you use energy on earth (except for mostly weird examples), because basically except for these weird examples, almost 100 % of the used energy will end up as heat anyway. It doesn't matter through what cascade of transformations the energy ends up as heat, whether you use electricity to boil water, or to power an EV, or to power a heat pump, almost 100 % of the input power will end up as heat anyway.
What are some weird examples? You convert captured solar energy into chemical energy (for example pure carbon or hydrocarbons) and store the chemicals forever, then you've prevented some of the captured energy from being turned into heat. Another would be to emit electromagnetic radiation into outer space. Or you could carry rocket fuel into space and just dump it there, unused.
That's not correct. Every transformation has efficiency loss. If you pipe the same amount of energy through a less efficient process, less useful work gets done for that amount of energy. Therefore to hit your target of useful work via an inefficient process, you'll have to send more energy through it, and thus more energy also goes to waste (heat).
> If you pipe the same amount of energy through a less efficient process, less useful work gets done for that amount of energy. Therefore to hit your target of useful work via an inefficient process, you'll have to send more energy through it, and thus more energy also goes to waste (heat).
The point in the post I was replying to wasn't about efficiency.
The question was, whether heat pumps heat up the earth. They don't.
Why?
Because the energy that's used to power heat pumps would (as I've explained) have ended up as heat anyway.
If you use fossil fuels as energy source to power heat pumps, then yes, you convert chemical energy to thermal energy. But it doesn't matter if you use that fossil energy to power a heat pump or to power an EV or a computer, the energy always ends up as heat.
So it's not the apparatus "heat pump" that's a problem, but the fact that someone is using fossil energy at all.
No, heat pumps don't heat up the earth. Using fossil fuels does.
If you were to power the heat pump using solar energy, you'd mostly leave the earth's energy balance untouched.
The main point where you then interfere with the earth's energy balance is through altering the way that radiation gets absorbed/reflected/emitted by the solar panels as opposed to no solar panels being put up.
Some processes that indeed heat up the earth are:
- radiation from the sun (and earth) gets partially trapped by the atmosphere (absorbed/reflected)
- nuclear fission processes produce energy that gets converted to heat through a cascade of processes
Not heat pumps? No idea what you're talking about. Evaporative cooling, passive cooling, cooling by ventilation, plants. You mean these?
Well at least these AC units in cars and the humming things mounted in millions to outside walls of buldings are all heat pumps. Don't know what other AC you mean then.
As to thermodynamics, apart from using the term, would you care to explain how it supposedly explains your claim?
Maybe you arbitrarily set the earth's system boundary to the outside walls of all AC'ed spaces?
A “heat pump” is a specific kind of device that can function either as a heating or cooling device depending on its mode, basically transferring heat from one side to the other.
An “air conditioner”, as traditionally defined, is basically a refrigerator: it compresses a gas and then lets it expand through a valve; it becomes cold due to Boyle’s law (I suppose you could make one like a gas powered fridge instead of using an electric pump but I’ve never seen one). You can use that to generate cooler ambient air and then radiate it outside the way a fridge does.
And in either case the thermodynamics situation is simply the second law: it takes energy to do all that work, which turns into heat. Sure, the energy from a fossil fuel was originally solar power, but that was millions of years ago. You can’t just magically claim its part of the current energy balance.
The significant contribution of air conditioning to heat islands has been widely discussed for decades.
Yeah sure, in the practical sense different terms are established for the different applications, but that doesn't change the fact that what you call a "heat pump" works by the same principle as what you call an "air conditioner".
I was more refering to the general thermodynamic principle of a heat pump and it appears that others too use the term in that general sense.
Citing from Heat Pumps in Chemical Process Industry (by Kiss, Infante Ferreira) [1]
> Notably, the term heat pump is more generic; it applies to many heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) devices used for space heating or cooling. When used for heating, a heat pump employs the same refrigeration-type cycle ...
"When used for heating" clearly indicates that the term is valid for both types of applications.
> And in either case the thermodynamics situation is simply the second law: it takes energy to do all that work, which turns into heat.
You better read up on what the second law means. What you write "takes energy .. which turns into heat" is actually linked to the first law.
> Sure, the energy from a fossil fuel was originally solar power, but that was millions of years ago. You can’t just magically claim its part of the current energy balance.
I am not making that case. The claim I am making, is that it doesn't matter for what kind of purpose you use this fossil energy (except for the weird uses I mentioned) because _all_ purposes will eventually turn it into heat.
Which is why I reject the claim that "AC heats up the planet". No, fossil energy use does, no matter what you use it for.
> The significant contribution of air conditioning to heat islands has been widely discussed for decades.
Your original claim was "AC heats up the planet though". Now you write "heat islands". Yeah, of course you have heat islands. I don't deny that. It's just something totally different from "heating up the planet". Because transferring heat from inside building to the surroundings doesn't change the planet's _thermal_ energy balance. It's the burning of fossil fuels that does so.
If small increases in global temperature can impact sleep enough to care about, then that is a much stronger additional argument for economic growth( to make AC, which can reduce night temperatures by a lot, affordable and universal) than it is for trading growth for some small avoidance of further temp growth. The latter is how I expect most people will read this result...