> Really hard to concentrate on work in this heat.

This reminds me of Singapore's founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, who said,

“Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, perhaps one of the signal inventions of history. It changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics.

Without air conditioning you can work only in the cool early-morning hours or at dusk. The first thing I did upon becoming prime minister was to install air conditioners in buildings where the civil service worked. This was key to public efficiency.” [1]

1. vox.com/2015/3/23/8278085/singapore-lee-kuan-yew-air-conditioning

I don't know how to fix the worlds problems, but I do know that everyone in Europe getting AC isn't going to be the answer to rising temperatures.

In tropical places we deal with heat by having open houses that allow breeze. But I don't know that will work in a place with winter. I offer no solutions but increasing energy consumption across Europe isn't one.

In the Netherlands we are moving from gas powered heating to heat pumps that, with adequate design of the rest of the house (so only for new buildings) can keep a house cool for the fraction of the electricity of AC. It's honestly one of the reasons we are considering buying a new home (which are massively overpriced). I think the climate will only become more extreme.

Traditional AC is heat pumps, they're the same thing and no efficiency difference.

AC powered by fossil fuels*. AC powered by renewables and nuclear isn't too bad. And heck, it might mean more people staying in their homes, consuming less resources than if they felt the need to go out to escape the heat.

Breeze? What is breeze? Air is humid and still until 1 or 2am (last June there was also a heat wave but the nights were nice at least). :-(

I spent some of my life in Hawaii and open breezy houses work great until they don't. The times where it get really hot and there is no breeze it's absolutely miserable. I survived it fine but with how hot and still the summer is where I live in the Midwest I'm glad I have AC now.

I don't suggest getting AC. It'd be crazy to spend so much money for those 2 weeks it actually gets warm. I don't, however, blame people for wanting AC in places where it's actually warm year-round.

You can use it in spring too as a heat pump, especially if you don't stay at home during the day so you only need to heat and cool the living room.

Really the main issue in Northern Europe is that houses do not even have blinds. In Italy or Greece it's not too common to have AC either, but people live just fine by shutting the blinds during the day.

Every house I know has blinds in Belgium. Are you perhaps talking more modern like Sweden?

I've almost always seen indoor blinds, which are useless in keeping heat outside the windows. In Southern Europe blinds are outdoor and keep solar radiation outside the glass, and there are separate curtains inside for privacy when the blinds are open.

Compare Antwerpen[0] or Brussels[1] with Milan[2] or Crete[3] or Barcelona[4]

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/@51.219842,4.4006387,3a,75y,64.8...

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@50.8398344,4.3562283,3a,75y,90....

[2] https://www.google.com/maps/@45.4558029,9.1837501,3a,75y,29....

[3] https://www.google.com/maps/@35.3266049,25.1255372,3a,75y,34...

[4] https://www.google.com/maps/@41.3880801,2.1358851,3a,75y,256...

I was talking about indoor blinds, my bad!

Every house I can see in my street has no blinds, here in Antwerp.

Coming from France it seems weird to me, and obviously blinds would come very handy right now, but there are obviously a lot of houses with no blinds in Belgium, I can see them from where I stand.

Unless you're talking about curtains or other things that sit inside the house, which are basically useless against heat.

I was indeed talking about the wrong, sorry! ;-)

Everyone getting AC allowed the southwest US to populate

99% Invisible made the argument that it also changed the US electoral map.

"And the ubiquity of AC has had a serious impact on how and maybe most profoundly where we live. Hot places like Arizona and Florida saw huge influxes of residents. A mass migration to the so-called “Sunbelt” changed the political map, too, as electoral college seats moved with citizens. And since a lot of these new southward migrants were conservative retirees, they voted Republican, forming a key target demographic in Reagan’s election in 1980."

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/thermal-delight/

Interesting. Can you say more about that? People have lived in hot environments like Arabia for centuries.

Why not? Is the solution that everyone boils? We have technology to tame the hot interior of buildings. To many people, it’s like Jehovah’s Witnesses and blood transfusions though — irrational religious opposition to a modern tech that solves a problem. Just suffering through the heat is becoming a martyr for no good reason.

It’s hot. Get air conditioning. Build some nuclear plants to make more clean electricity. Problem solved.

> Build some nuclear plants to make more clean electricity. Problem solved.

Funny thing - the nuclear power plant in Grohnde, Lower-Saxony will be shut down for at least the next two days, because the river ("Weser"), which is used for cooling, is too hot.

source: https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/niedersachsen-we... (only german articles, sorry)

A curious thing that people have no problem dumping endless kilowatts (and gas btu's) into their heaters all winter but a few watts of AC when its warm is environmental heresy and a sign of personal weakness. This despite the fact that heat-pump AC's use far less power.

All I can figure is people have been heating themselves for 10's of thousands of years and AC is a distinctly modern phenomenon. From Mother Earth's perspective it would be far better for humanity to live in the tropics with AC than nearer the poles with heaters.

Might I add that some countries are especially known for liking their internal temperatures more in the tropical range even when outside temperatures are around 10C/15C and just natural heat from people would be enough to make it comfortable.

AC is not a waste of electricity, quite the contrary, if it can be inverted (that is, pumping hot air in instead of out) then it's more efficient than electric heating.

Indeed, but you can also use an AC to heat a space, but the efficiency will go down as the outside temperature drops. Heat pumps work both ways.

You cannot cool down a building without making the exterior even warmer -- this is the second law of thermodynamics. The Problem is not "solved" by producing even more energy and thus generating entropy (unusable heat).

Certain institutions need air conditioning though -- hospitals, elder care, etc. so I wouldn't forbid it outright -- but using AC everywhere seems excessive (written at 33°C at 20:23 in Germany).

>You cannot cool down a building without making the exterior even warmer -- this is the second law of thermodynamics. The Problem is not "solved" by producing even more energy and thus generating entropy (unusable heat).

I don't understand why this particular total misunderstanding of physics comes up in so many contexts (a lot of anti-evolution types claimed it too in the past). The 2nd Law states that total entropy cannot decrease in a closed system. Yet a bit of reflection should reveal that somehow we manage to decrease local entropy all the time. In turn one may, once or twice, notice an enormous sphere of thermonuclear fusion in the sky that provides most of Earth's primary energy input. And at other times you may have noticed an enormous inky void into which energy can radiate away from Earth. Which should reveal that we in fact live in a locally open system, not a closed one. What controls the local general temperature is the equilibrium between energy input and what is radiated away. That's what greenhouse gasses change.

So no, you're completely and utterly off, AC does not in any way cause any trouble when it comes to the problem of global warming. The energy after all would have been transformed to entropy regardless. What matters is the greenhouse gasses that exist in the atmosphere.

"For a 2014 paper, Francisco Salamanca and colleagues at Arizona State University modeled the effects of air conditioning on surface air temps in Phoenix. They found a nighttime increase of about 2°F (and nothing much during the day)" [0].

That doesn't sound like a big issue to me.

[0]: https://www.popsci.com/ask-us-anything-does-using-ac-make-it...

Geez, 33 degrees at 20:23? That’s absolutely brutal. I hope you and yours are doing okay.

Thanks, I am fine, had a hard time concentrating at work today, but except for that I am doing well. I worry about the people with heart or circulatory conditions though -- not everyone is equipped to handle these temperatures.

> Build some nuclear plants to make more clean electricity. Problem solved.

It doesn't work that way. Aircons dump unusable waste heat into the environment. On a large enought scale, it creates global warming on it's own.

Same with solar panels, they change the albedo of the earth surface, and this will be a huge problem in the future.

> On a large enought scale, it creates global warming on it's own.

Any amount of energy we can ever generate from nuclear is trivial compared to the insolation. Average daily insolation on Earth is 6 kWh/m^2. Earth area is 5.1e+14 m^2. This means we get 3e+15 kWh daily from sun, or 1.1e+18 kWh annually. On the other hand, we produce 2e+11 kWh electricity annually. This means that solar insolation is 7 orders of magnitude larger than our electricity production.

Which is why I mentioned that it will be a problem in the future, not today. Imagine all of India airconed. And it's also why I mentioned albedo. That will drastically increase the sun insolation effect, today a lot of the suns energy is reflected back into space. This will change, especially with solar panels.

No, it won't ever become a problem. 7 orders of magnitude means we get 10 million times more energy from sun than we generate in electricity. Bringing rest of the world energy use to US/Europe standard will at worst result in 100 times more waste heat generation than now (and almost surely much less than that), which is still far cry from 10 million.

You assume that it's obvious that we can't consume 7 orders of magnitude more energy than now.

We already grew our energy consumption 4 orders of magnitude in 300 years.

http://bwp.io/blog/2014/thermodynamic-limits-of-human-energy...

Yes, it's obvious. There's no way a single person will consume as much energy as the whole country does today. These days, the energy use per capita goes down in developed countries, so the current energy consumption growth is mostly due to poorer places catching up.

You seem very sure about how humanity will look like in 500 years and how much energy it would use.

Obviously you consider the concept of Type II and Type III civilizations impossible and ridiculous, since they would use more than 20 orders of magnitude more energy than we do.

I consider talking about Type II and Type III civilizations ridiculous in the context of discussing potential increase in the use of air conditioning in India.

I see. So when you said "No, it won't ever(x) become a problem", it was like one of those ads "Unlimited(x) data", with the fine print "(x) unlimited is meant to be understood as less than 10 GB per month", or in your case "(x) ever means at most 200 years from now"

Note, that when I said "all of India being airconned" I literally meant all of India, as in the whole subcontinent being a single giant city with 100 billion people living in it. And on that scale you need energy not only for airconn, but food/water/waste disposal/... But I guess you exclude that possibility too. It's understandable through why you would just imagine that I was talking about making India into something like present day Europe. In general people find it really hard to imagine anything radically different than the status quo.

Just to add to the other comment, I suggest you look up what the temperatures of the nighttime side of Mercury are (which receives max solar radiation intensity about 10x of Earth at ~14.4 kW/m^2 vs our max of ~1.4 kW/m^2 outside of atmosphere and ~1 kW/m^2 at the surface). Now reflect on the relative importance of absolute energy input vs retention.

> Almost no places have airco so the best you can hope for is a fan.

I am wondering if there is 'windchill' is there also 'windroast'? After all if the body cools down by air streaming along it evaporating the sweat then the evaporation process will speed up but the dry skin will then be exposed to air that is hotter than the skin itself.

So if 10 below + windchill can make it feel like -20 below is it possible for 40 + windroast to make it feel like 50?

There absolutely is. A friend in Arizona has this problem, that cycling down a hill makes you hotter, not cooler.

And of course that's why your oven has a fan.

> windroast

I've been roasted by the Loo winds [0] quite regularly. Not a pleasant experience.

Also see: Heat Index [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loo_(wind)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_index

My experience in Nevada and Arizona has been that when it's 40/43 or more, the wind doesn't make it any worse in terms of how hot it feels. At least in regards to normal activity. Wind is a bit annoying - disappointing - when it's that hot, you expect the wind to feel cooling and it's not.

Up to some absurd temperature (i.e this probably isn't true if you're standing in a bunch of exhaust from a jet engine or a metal casting operation) increased airflow will make sweating more efficient enabling you to shed heat faster than the difference between static and moving air heats you up. Even before air conditioning fans were (and still are) popular in the tropics for this reason.

Feel free to go up in your attic or some other 100+deg (freedom degrees, obviously with a box fan if you don't believe me. I assure you it will be more pleasant with the box fan.

At 36 degrees Celsius of wet-bulb temperature, your body is not able to cool itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature

The maximal temperature when you can still cool down depends on humidity and is exactly 36 degrees Celsius with 100% humidity.

Today when biking downhill the warm wind against my eyes was much more annoying / irritating than 'cool wind'. Can't say if it also made me feel warmer, but definitely annoyed my eyes more.

This is why I chuckle when Europeans lament Americans and their air conditioning. In Texas, this is called “summer.” I am in Rome right now and it’s pretty hot, but luckily there is air conditioning in most places.

The bike-to-work crowd suggests that everywhere should use bikes instead of cars, however, what you experience in Belgium now — imagine that everyday in traditionally hot climate. It can be nice to bike to work in most California cities, but in the midst of a hot summer in hot and humid climates, it’s unnecessarily third-world to do that when we have cars with air conditioning.

Absolutely, biking to work is great in Belgium because the weather is 'okay'. Texas gets pretty warm but you don't notice it that much to be honest. Don't think I've been to a restaurant there that didn't have airco. Likewise my in-laws (San Antonio) have airco at home so it's pretty great.

I don't blame anyone for using air conditioning with that climate :)

Yeah, not sure why you're downvoted. Hitting 100 F in July is a pretty regular occurrence here, and in the suburb I grew up in (west of Chicago), the average is usually high 80s, not mid 70s as the article says about London.

Where I am gets quite hot in the summer (at least for me!). This can be offset by having shower facilities at work. Gets rid of the sweat, and turn it colder to lower your body temperature back to normal.

Absolutely! Most places I have worked offered showers but it's not always the best experience. (Busy, not comfortable with lenses, ..)