Be Honest, Popular Mechanics, Air Conditioning Saves Lives with No Threat of Doom

From ClimateREALISM

By H. Sterling Burnett

Popular Mechanics published an article titled “Air Conditioning Saves Lives. Scientists Think It Also Might Doom Us All.” The first part of the title is absolutely true, air conditioning does save lives. The second half is absolutely false, a bit of eye catching hyperbole, which even Popular Mechanics admits in a subhead, “Well, maybe not ‘doom.’ But a new study argues that air conditioning should be a last-ditch solution.” Air conditioning saves lives, full stop! It should be a first resort for preventing deaths, not a last ditch solution. In addition, research shows air conditioning has a minimal influence on climate change.

Popular Mechanics cites a study that claims while air conditioning will always be in use, its use should be limited because of its downstream climate impacts. Popular Mechanics writes:

In the very worst situations, air conditioners can save lives. But their electricity-hungry nature only exacerbates climate change.

A new study suggests that a combination of technologies can decrease A/C demand by up to 80 percent and drop ambient temperatures by more than 4 ºC.

While the air conditioners will always have a place in helping humans stay cool, the study argues that they should be seen as a last-ditch cooling method rather than the go-to option.

As the planet continues to inch past the 1.5 ºC increase in global temperature—a threshold originally reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] as critical to avoiding catastrophic climate impacts—this same dedication to convenience dominates the conversation about how we’re going to keep ourselves cool. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), air conditioners and electric fans already account for 10 percent of global electricity consumption, and that number is only expected to rise as summers reach sweltering temperatures around the world.

Parsing this article’s claims, it only gets a few things right. Others are built on false premises or assumptions. Air conditioning does save lives. That claim is 100 percent correct. In addition, the IPCC does argue that holding temperatures below 1.5℃ is critical to avoiding catastrophic climate impacts. The IEA does estimate that cooling technologies account for 10 percent of electricity use, and a new study suggests that much of the need for air conditioning could be avoided with a slate of new technologies and building designs. Popular Mechanics should have checked some of the assertions or assumptions built into or suggested by the IPCC and IEA. In addition, Popular Mechanics should have undertaken some analysis or at least sought the views of some outside experts on the real-world relative costs, benefits, and feasibility of the rapid deployment of technologies and designs of the programs endorsed in study it cites before going to print.

First, the IPCC’s claim of a pending climate disaster if emissions are not reduced is completely false. This is grounded in flawed computer model scenarios and forecasts that the organization recently admitted were implausible and no longer to be used. Real world data demonstrates that none of the purported disastrous extreme weather trends that are supposed to have flowed from rising emissions and slight increases in temperature have arisen or are likely to come to pass under any plausible emissions regime in the future. In addition, the 1.5℃ threshold the IPCC is so worried about was chosen for political, not scientific reasons. There is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that exceeding pre-industrial temperatures by 1.5℃ will result in a cascading climate catastrophe – there is no scientifically known climate change tipping point.

Concerning the IEA’s claim about air conditioning electric power use, that may be true, but electric power use doesn’t directly or necessarily correlate to emissions in power generation. And even in areas where emissions, because of the make-up of the local power supply, do result from air conditioning, those emissions have at best a marginal impact on global average temperatures.

The implication that air conditioning use is a significant driver of global warming is simply false. Air conditioning use, at most, results in about three percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Even under the direst scenarios, emissions tied to air conditioning will contribute at most 0.07℃ to global temperatures by 2050. In addition, recent research cited in previous climate realism posts, here and here, indicates that “if all low‑income regions gained the same access to air-conditioning as rich regions, related global emissions would . . . add 0.003–0.05 °C of warming by 2050.” Negligible warming to save tens of thousands of lives from heat related mortality annually is a great trade off. Indeed, it would be morally reprehensible and economically idiotic to prevent the wider expansion of air conditioning use when lives are in the balance and no perceptible warming or follow on extreme weather will result.

About that new study, positing technological and design changes to limit the need for air conditioning. Many of the suggestions discussed by the researchers to reduce ambient temperature, like building with cross ventilation and insulation were staples of construction in the past and remain so today. Yet people felt the relief they gave from the heat just wasn’t enough once air conditioning became available and affordable.

The new green building designs and materials they propose may have some virtues but they come at a high cost. For example, California’s roof-top solar mandate for new homes is estimated to add as much as $10,000 to the cost of a new home taking between one and two decades to pay off, by which time, if not before, the solar panels will need to be replaced. And the U.S. Department of Energy has estimated that adopting the 2024 International Energy Conservation Code standards for building standards and appliances could add $14,000 to the price of a residential home, once again taking two decades or more to pay back the added cost. And that’s for new homes, these estimates don’t even touch on the cost of retrofitting billions of existing homes, businesses, and structures with the suggested technologies and adaptations, like green roofing choices, or heat pumps in place of air conditioning units, or electric appliances where gas is currently used.

This study reminds me of multiple studies from more than a decade ago produced by academics with no real-world experience claiming that the world could become carbon neutral in a short time with a radical replacement of fossil fuels with different wedges of technologies. These studies made pie-in-the sky claims about the effectiveness of each wedge and how easily they could adopted to replace fossil fuels – more than 85 percent of current primary power use. The scholars acted as if the “wedge” technologies would fall like mana from heaven, seamlessly replacing fossil fuels at little or no costs, or at costs that were worth it to prevent the nowhere-in-evidence catastrophic climate change. But the costs of such a transition would be massive, tens of trillions of dollars, and the evidence so far suggests that the technologies and designs promoted replacement wedges don’t work as well as promised or come with their own unaccounted for environmental impacts and negative externalities. Academics who earn enough to barely be buffeted by the economic storm that their experiments in master planning would impose on average people can hardly be considered a credible source on the acceptable impacts of their grandiose plans, or what their plans’ long-term impacts will be on the climate.

In the end, Popular Mechanics should have stuck to what multiple studies have shown, air conditioning is among the most most effective, relatively inexpensive, life saving measures on the planet. In every country where it is widely available, thousands of premature deaths from heat related health problems are prevented each year. As air conditioner use rises in a country, its heat deaths fall, climate change be damned.

Contrary to the misleading but eye-catching headline, air conditioner use isn’t dooming the planet. Anyone and any publication advocating reduced air conditioner use or efforts to prevent or minimize its wider adoption are dooming real people to death. That is not justified by any calculation, unless one is misanthropic, as many environmental scolds are, and just want more deaths and fewer people. Suppressing air conditioning is a deadly policy that only the members of the Voluntary Extinction Movement or the Church of Euthanasia, for example, could love.

H. Sterling Burnett

H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News. In addition to directing The Heartland Institute’s Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, Burnett puts Environment & Climate News together, is the editor of Heartland’s Climate Change Weekly email, and the host of the Environment & Climate News Podcast.