Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to the United Nations, everyone has the right to air conditioned comfort powered by magic.
Keeping cool in the face of climate change
As global temperatures reach record highs, providing cooling systems which are effective, sustainable and which do not harm the environment is increasingly essential for everyday life. That’s according to Rachel Kyte, Chief Executive Officer of Sustainable Energy for All, and Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General for Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL).From the cold chain systems that maintain uninterrupted refrigeration during the delivery of food and vaccines, to protection from extreme heat waves globally – access to cooling is a fundamental issue of equity, and as temperatures hit record levels, for some, it can mean the difference between life and death.
UN News asked Rachel Kyte why she is so passionate about cooling.
What is sustainable cooling?Cooling is essential to human health and prosperity. As the world rapidly urbanizes, warms and populations grow, cooling is an urgent development challenge that has important ramifications for our climate. It requires fast action to protect the most vulnerable, and is vital for economic productivity by allowing workers, farmers and students to work in comfortable environments.
Yet as cooling needs rise, we must meet these challenges in an energy-efficient way, or the risks to life, health and the planet will be significant. At the same time, they provide equally important business opportunities for companies or entrepreneurs who can design and produce hyper-efficient cooling devices at affordable prices for this rapidly growing market.
…
A clean energy transition is already underway globally that can provide affordable, safe and sustainable energy for all. We must now incorporate cooling for all needs within this transition, while keeping us on track to reach our global climate and energy goals.
…
Read more: https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/06/1041201
While I applaud the idea of air conditioned comfort for everyone, I suspect the 800 million or so people who don’t get enough to eat probably have other priorities.
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“While I applaud the idea of air conditioned comfort for everyone, I suspect the 800 million or so people who don’t get enough to eat probably have other priorities.”
OUCH !
Maybe food
Maybe clean water
Maybe improved sanitation
OUCH!!!!! …….. is right.
Excerpt from: “Keeping cool in the face of climate change”
WHAT!!!!!!! ……. Uninterrupted (commercial) refrigeration will prevent dead biomass (human food) from rotting away ……. but natural (wintertime) refrigeration exacerbates the rotting away of (outdoors) dead biomass.
AMAZING!!!!! …….. simply AMAZING!!!!
Yes, and all this (+ many many more?) from UN wonderland.
The term “sustainable” probably means paying off the wind and solar lobby, then building a real power plant anyway.
‘Rachel Kyte, Chief Executive Officer of Sustainable Energy for All, and Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General for Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL)’. Wow, she must have an extremely large ID badge.
Over one billion people have no access to electricity whatsoever, many of those that do have electricity can’t afford to heat their homes and more people die of cold than heat. Ms Kyte must be living on a different planet.
She must also have a hat size to match that badge.
Consider that there are likely thousands of other drones like her at the UN, all with ridiculous titles and UN-invented portfolios, with aims to suck and destroy ever more wealth from producers. Makes one wonder why the US continues to fund almost 1/4 of the UN’s budget.
“Cooling is essential to human health and prosperity. ”
Yes, of course, and that is precisely why almost everyone in the north flies to the south for their vacation. Clearly they want to be cooler!
I used to work in the US government (FAA), and one thing I observed is that the lower you are in the chain of command, the longer your title. It’s almost as if they are deliberately trying to make less important people feel more important than they are.
That is nuts. I actually have a solar powered air conditioner, so I have an idea what is practical. I have 2kw of panels powering a 1kw air conditioner. This is an off grid system using four 100 amp hour batteries. This system produces 10kwh on a good day and I get about 10 hours of air conditioning. The batteries are only to stabilize the syatem when clouds pass by. At night I switch to utility power. The roof area covered solar panels are equal to about one third of the living space. That makes such a system practical on a one or two story house only. If this were a grid tie system it would eventually pay for itself. But the inclusion of batteries guarantees that it will never do more than break even.
I am interested in how the UN proposes to air condition the tents of 130,000 homeless squatters in Los Angeles?
🎵Here come those Santa Anna winds again…🎶
Send them to Greenland. There the air conditioning is free.
So all we need is a really long vent conduit?
Kamala Harris may be onto something … with her proposed “busing” plan … we just need to re-target her intended demographic …
By sending millions of US dollars the UN. UN will employ millions of new UN officials. Who will then say America has failed to meet its cooling target. The main stream media will then say that America is bad and demand America sends more money.
Everyone should have a punkah wallah.
“Sustainable” cooling? Move to Alaska maybe?
There is no “clean energy transition is already underway globally” as fossil fuel use keeps increasing. The only thing ‘transitioning’ is Western industrial economies into the 19th century.
And it is becoming clear that is the objective.
That would require a green blight with renewable unsustainable periods.
Mr Worrall responds to this issue with a false dichotomy: people with too little to eat have other concerns than extreme heat. That is, if the world’s people have problems in addition to extreme heat, extreme heat isn’t such a problem, or doesn’t demand attention, or something — at any rate, we don’t have to thing about it. But extreme heat kills people. We’ve seen it. It’s happening. It even kills people with too little to eat. But it is the position of this web site that global warming is a hoax, or if it is real, is somehow, anyhow, not a problem. Which is what makes this website asinine.
The majority of the warming we have measured the last 150 years has been in the northern or polar regions of the NH, and at night, to give a total increase in global average of .8 C since 1880. While we know we have been warming out of the LIA the last 150 years, we have no way of knowing how much was natural variation and how much caused by humans.
In any event, the daytime maximum temps around most of the world are not that much different from what they were 50 to 100 years ago. They had identical hot weather back then, so I don’t see your connection that extreme heat is killing people, other than now there is multiples of times more people now living in hot area’s. Which is similar to the argument that we have more damages now due to extreme weather than we did 50 years ago. Well, we have a lot more people everywhere, and a lot more housing and infrastructure to get demolished every time there is an extreme weather event.
The 2003 heat wave that killed 70,000 people in Europe was described by meteorologists as an extreme statistical anomaly. It would have been such an anomaly regardless of the population of Europe. 2019 is shaping up to be an even greater catastrophe for Europe.
Of course, you can argue that the heat waves in Europe were deadly because people didn’t have air conditioning. Exactly — and the reason that they didn’t is because in the past, they haven’t needed them.
And heat waves such as the one in Europe in 2003 are deadly because it doesn’t cool off enough at night. This is new. Charles Doughty, in his classic « Travels in Arabia Deserta » describes how it got chilly in the desert at night after the sun went down. That was toward the end of the 19th century, when there was a lot less CO2 in the atmosphere. Now, with an historically high amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, temperatures can stay in the 80s at night, giving the elderly and the sick little respite from heat stress.
And in fact, temperatures are higher world wide. Records are falling everywhere. The extra heat in the atmosphere is not evenly distributed; where it collects, it can kill. India is ripe for catastrophe such as we have never seen.
You are confusing the Urban Heat Island with CO2 warming, but I am not surprised since you are willing to say that the temps are now in the 80’s at night, when historically in the past there were no hot weather events because CO2 levels were lower. If you haven’t heard of the UHI causing much higher urban temps at night where the majority of the population live, then I am wasting my breath.
I can see having any type of discussion with you about the real science of CO2 warming would be about as effective as having a discussion with with a cult member waiting for the comet to come and pick them up.
The 2003 heat wave was not an example of UHI — it was a heat wave, and one that covered almost all of Europe. During this heat wave, the nighttime temperatures were much higher than normal — that is largely why the mortality during the heat wave was 70,000 in excess of the normal for that time of year.
I still have my purple shroud ready for the return of Hale Bopp in year 4385. I was late for the last exit party, but next time I won’t be. It’s gonna be awesome.
“””And in fact, temperatures are higher world wide. Records are falling everywhere.”””
Yes, and temperatures are higher because 1920-40 data is wiped out from history. Without this data manipulation we would be exactly in same level of warming. Distorted data won´t make this AGW BS true.
Really? I’m eager to hear where you read that all that data was wiped out. But even if the data from 1920 – 1940 is lost, we still have data from the last 79 years, which shows rising temperatures.
In the meanwhile, the fact that glaciers and the polar ice caps are melting rapidly, I would suggest that temperatures are in fact rising.
Hm, global temperatures are not rising. They did so in the 1920s and 1930s, then dropped slowly but surely from the mid 1940s till the mid 1970s (Ice age scare). Then from 1978 on you can really start claiming something scientific globally with the launch of the first global weather/temperature satellites. And those numbers have been adjusted time and time again, while pushing up artificially the most recent decade and down with older decades, because even it’s not there, global warming has to appear somehow to proof the AGW church dogma and ideology is right. It’s a big FRAUD and FAKE. Shame on you and those crypto scientists from the AGW church. It feels Galilei and Kopernik all over again! In the Netherlands past heatwaves have « disappeared »:
principia-scientific.org/dutch-climate-experts-cant-be-bothered-to-explain-fake-data/
Or they move the official central KNMI thermometer miles away so it boosts all mesured temps with about 1 F, here discussed before at wattsupwiththat:
wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/24/ooops-dutch-meteorological-institute-caught-in-weather-station-siting-failure-moved-station-and-told-nobody/
The Australian BOM is upping their records:
dailycaller.com/2017/07/31/australia-weather-bureau-caught-tampering-with-climate-numbers/
And those before mentioned satellite data sets « adjustments », especially GISS but also others like RSS:
thsresearch.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/ef-gast-data-research-report-062717.pdf
Why, then, are glaciers around the world melting, and the polar ice caps, too? Why are the oceans getting warmer?
You contend that temperature records have been fudged. All of them? Everywhere? And they all have been fudged the same amount? Who is the maestro who is conducting this operation?
And weren’t some of those temperature records published, which would make it hard to mfudg them without getting caught?
Well, Jesse. That’s the problem. There are everywhere false claims, like the polar bear cover on Nat.Geo. I immediately cancelled my membership, those lying bastards. You probably don’t know either that Antarctica had the largest sea ice cover EVER registered in march 2014. Nor do you probably know that this planet has registered the coldest temperature EVER in 2013, also in Antarctica, -93 C or -136 F, breaking the 1983 record with 4 C! If they keep on « adjusting » the numbers, we will never have a clear picture, not even a direction to where global temperatures go. And if we are stupid enough to follow all your IPCC Paris COP24 AGW church’ recommandations, and all 173 signatures are respected to it’s fullest by every country (-95% CO2 emissions by 2050), the effect is still almost nil, a lean 0.05 C or 0.09 F « cooling » on those 1.50-2.00 C they claim the warming up will be. Then where the heck is the other 1.45-1.95 C warming up coming from if it’s not CO2?? Meanwhile it’ll cost 100s of trillions of $$. This whole circus is ridiculous!
What I know is that CO2 is a major greenhouse gas; that we have been adding millions of tons of it to the atmosphere every year; that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere is now higher than it’s ever been before in the history of mankind; that nights are staying warmer worldwide (as predicted); that the most rapid rise in temperature is occurring in the high northern latitudes (as predicted); that the northern polar ice cap and Greenland ice cover are melting rapidly (more rapidly than predicted); that permafrost is melting everywhere in the high northern latitudes; that the forests in Alaska are being decimated by warm weather pests; that the frozen body of a stone age man was recently revealed in Switzerland as the glaciers there continue to melt; that the Atlantic lobster is no longer present in numbers to support commercial fishing in Long Island sound or anywhere south of Cape Cod, owing to the warming of the Atlantic Ocean; that the ocean is becoming more acidic as it absorbs more CO2; and that the rhododendron in our front yard is now blooming in May which is a month earlier than it was blooming when we bought our house in 1991.
I also know that all the phenomena that I list above are reasonably explained as consequences of the addition of CO2 to the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels; and that it is vanishingly unlikely that the above changes occurred randomly; and that there is no known cycle of nature of the right size and shape to account for the totality of these changes.
Jesse,
It is a fact, climatic conditions when they become unbearable kill people. It is also a fact that more people die every year in the UK from cold than die from heat. That medical fact is also true for all countries that experience winters where the temperature falls below freezing.
At 288.8 deg K the world’s average temperature is below optimal. At 412 PPM the level of CO2 in the atmosphere is far below optimal. At world population levels above 7.5 billion the human race is over represented as a species on Earth. The good news is, as we gain wealth and reliable energy the population stabilises (always) and the ever increasing population declines.
With those simple facts in mind, I sleep easy at night knowing, we do not have a run away problem that nature/human ingenuity won’t solve.
NB. I am also still looking for that research paper that proves a link between human induced/evolved/released atmospheric Co2 and climate change. If you know of one please leave a link. Thanks
Jesse, I just want you to know that I feel at least as strongly about this as you and SEAforAll CEO Rachel do. Summer has arrived hereabouts and I must tell you that I lack the refrigerated air you’ve acknowledged is my human right. This intolerable inequity continues as I count the days until you deliver the goods. So make it snappy, bub! You know you’ll feel so much better once you’ve redeemed that pledge of yours. And thanks in advance for your personal generosity.
A very silly response to a serious issue. In the summer of 2003, a heat wave killed 70,000 people in Europe. This year’s heat wave may exceed that total. India is poised for catastrophe that will dwarf any yet seen.
Providing every on the planet who needs protection from extreme heat with a solar powered air conditioner or the like is to be sure an extremely amibitious goal. At the same time, both air conditioners and solar panels are rapidly becoming more efficient. Whose to say great advances will not soon be made.
The argument that because we can’t safe everyone, there’s no point to saving anyone, does not appeal to me.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/weather/2015/05/20/cold-weather-deaths/27657269/
20 times as many people die of cold than heat.
Stop reading UN propaganda.
Jesse, Please stop it with the feelings. You are free to invest your wealth in air-conditioners and send them where ever you wish. No one is stopping you. Save all that you can.
Jesse Cold kills more people than heat by a factor of ten at the very least. To say that an extra degree or so of heat is a drastic problem is what is really asinine.
I’m with you Jesse but I need the motivation and leadership of the true believers holding the reins of power to repent my wicked ways. I’m just waiting for my PM to proudly announce that forthwith no publicly paid official will remain airconditioned on his watch to the rousing cheers of those impacted. Coming out in solidarity with all those who work in the great outdoors and under the iron rooves of our factories and workshops. Back to the future like the grandparents’ day all for the sake of the grandkiddies.
What say you to such noble leading from the front to set the shining example for all we weak sinners and deplorables Jesse?
Hear, hear.
+42
Can I have a puff of what she’s smoking?
Does she actually know the minute percentage of the world’s energy needs that have “transitioned”?
Clearly the extent of her science education is to learn the word “hyper-efficient. (Is that a real word?)
The lady wants to not only meet unattainable renewable energy goals for the world’s current energy needs, but also make sure that farmers around the globe work in air conditioned comfort.
Hey! I have an idea. Give everyone a shovel and they can dig down to where the ambient temperature is around 55°F at around 6′ depth. And if many of the 800 million or so people who don’t have enough to eat……….I guess that solves 2 problems at once.
It’s funny that you mention the temperature of holes in the ground. If all the money wasted on wind turbines and solar panels were instead directed at simple geothermal heat pumps, we could have saved millions of tons of CO2 emissions. Not that I think that CO2 is the monster molecule which the climate alarmists think it is, but the energy savings from converting to geothermal space heating and cooling would have been amazing!
She can go fly a Kyte . Less hot air and more productive .
😉
Why is it that UN bureaucrats remind me of immature adults living off their rich parents?
Well, they are. And we all are their rich parents. Everybody have to adjust their life to match their income. I don´t know (and don´t want to know) UN`s income, but it must be humungous, because they have time to find all kinds of BS to “save” the world. They must make themselves very important to justify their “work”.
Then similarly, everyone ought to have the right to heating which they can afford to prevent freezing to death.
Bingo! For the majority of the population, heat is far more critical than air conditioning.
There is no money in heat. Can’t tax carbon if it is the solution and not the problem.
Dear Rachel Kyte,
I sincerely hope you read this and consequently publicly and officially renounce to all, inclusive air travel.
You’d hate to know how we keep you fresh on board nor where the cool air you’re so happy to breathe has been just moments before.
Air conditioning is NOT limited to hot environments. Without it, you’ll freeze solid while en-route to your next UN climate junket. It’s cold outside, think -50C even in summer.
In other words, unless high-level ignorance is a primary asset in your trade, just keep it low and concentrate on your duty-free shopping list.
A/C of any kind not cheap, either to install or to run.
Pretending anyone is going to give you “hyper-efficient” “sustainable” a/c at an affordable price is plain, simple deception. A load of political bull that will never happen.
Yes, so that must mean that all 240 Democrats running for president pledge to provide it for free to as many illegal aliens, er unauthorized Americans, as we can coax over the border to become unauthorized Democrat voters.
They can have their cake and refrigerate it too if they build state-of-the-art nuclear plants. Should the west be doing that instead of just giving money to dictators?
Sustainable cooling…tiny wind turbines that actually work in reverse to harness the owner of electricity to generate wind.
I propose a pipe from the bottom of the deep ocean to a chiller in my attack, and a return run to whereeverhellIdoncare.
You should get you one too.
Off they go. So everyone must have free cooling. Of course provided by us. Only bad people would deny the poor free air conditioning.
These white western liberals see them selves as the good white folk. They also expect all other white folk to aspire to their goodness. They represent the spirit of whiteness, the soul of whiteness. White people being so superior to all other races must of course take leadership in solving all the worlds problem. As a white person they are the soul of whiteness. As a white person they see themselves as OUR SOULS.
The west has allowed OUR SOULS to take power.
Abolishing the UN is essential to human health and prosperity.
At least drop all US participation in anything UN. That includes all monetary interaction.
Preferably jettison anything UN from the USA, outlaw any UN activity in perpetuity.
Enact an audit of the UN residue for the purpose of determining waste, fraud and abuse.
Anything left is billed for repayment to the US treasury.
The fantasies get bigger and bigger as the insanity grows.
No brain no problem: Become an EU Bureaucrat.
But wait, there’s more …
Having banned inexpensive and safe CFC-based refrigerants because they were destroying the ozone, we now use less cheap HFC refrigerants which are powerful greenhouse gases. So now the EPA demands we phase out HFC refrigerants for other substitutes which among their other desirable properties (a) force you to pay more money, and (b) create more demand for bureaucrats. Actually, one of the potential substitutes is CO2 (oh, the ironing!).
So how are we going to provide A/C for all to compensate for global warming without causing yet more global warming?
Maybe I missed it, but this is surely one Obama-era EPA mandate that should be scrubbed.
Another fascist collusion between government, corporate, and environmental special interests?
The people I know in the 3rd world that do have electricity sure can’t afford to buy an A/C unit, let alone pay the .25 cents/Kw/h it takes to run it. And that is the majority of the 2+ billion poor people who already have the electricity hooked up. What about the hundreds of millions of people around the world that don’t even have any electricity? And we are going to deny them the ability to get affordable fossil fuelled energy to bring them up to the same speed we enjoyed 50 years ago? Ensuring they only have renewables is going to doom them to energy poverty, especially the poor folk who are only ever going to scrape by without hardly enough to eat.
Earthling2: That is why, when they talk about “affordable”, “they” never mention the income level at which something becomes affordable. Do they start at 500,000 U.S. dollars, a million, 10 to the 9th power ?
My A/C unit just died over the weekend. Will the U.N. pay for the repair parts and labor? A/C is my right…
Sorry, yours isn’t sustainable.
You should have never admitted having one, then a free one would be your right.
Long ago, back when a peanut farmer was President of the United States, I remember thinking that it sure would be nice to have AC. You see, I lived in El Cajon, Ca at the time and, while it’s only a dozen or so miles from the coast here in San Diego County, it tended toward sweltering heat being on the eastern side of the coastal hills. I often wondered what moron would build a house where it got so, damned, hot during the summer. Being fairly young and not knowing the history of the area, I didn’t know or realize that, well, when the house was built in 1951, every street in the city was lined with giant carob trees and, where there weren’t houses, there were citrus and olive groves. Who needed AC when there was a tree throwing shade in every direction? Times change and the groves gave way to more housing and some fool decided that the trees did too much damage to the sidewalks and streets and they were all cut down leading to my lament, in the era of the peanut farmer, that it was too damned hot to not have AC. The saving grace, at the time, was that summer usually didn’t arrive, in all it’s 90+F at 9AM glory, until mid to late July and only hung around until early to mid September and, a nice beach was only 30 minutes away and an air conditioned mall was only a mile, as the crow flies. Being, to put it bluntly, dirt poor at the time, spending money on something I was only going to get use out of for a couple months of the year, and then, have to pay to run it to boot, didn’t make much sense to me. If it’d been there already? I’d have made judicious use of a wall unit if I thought I could afford to run it and, chances are, I wouldn’t have been able to.
So, here we are, 40 or so years later, and I still reside in San Diego County in a city that’s a bit inland from the coast where having AC is a good idea in the summer and, by golly, I have AC. Thankfully, I’m not dirt poor, but, for reasons entirely outside my control, I may as well not have AC because I can’t really afford to run it.
Somewhere in my little diatribe/walk down memory lane, there’s a lesson to be learned about land use changes, short sighted municipalities and blatantly idiotic power generation schemes. I have a solid, middle class, income with very little debt and I’m still looking at sweating my A$$ off this summer, to avoid a $1500 a month electric bill. Just five years ago I could run AC 24/7 for about $300-$400 a month. Renewables have come to the rescue and saved me from the evils of AC I guess. Or, maybe I’m just too cheap.
Cheers
Max
Gosh (not my first choice of words), $1500/month for electricity? You can buy a nice house for that in many parts.
Max, you didn’t mention that all the store fronts along the main street had shade over the side walks provided by extended roofs. I suppose that this was to replace the shade provided by the carob trees after they were removed.
Why not ask that renewable energy infrastructure be built using renewable energy?