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Wow! Be impressed, very impressed!
One thing we humans certainly value is setting records. Sports, for instance, would be almost meaningless without them. And as it happens, we're now on a record-setting streak when it comes to the weather. Globally, the month of May just came in as the Babe Ruth of all Mays, the hottest ever and that means we can now experience the full power of record-setting. (Let me just suggest that you get into a short-sleeved shirt and shorts before you read the rest of this!) One after another, the last 12 months globally have been the hottest 12 in human history (and undoubtedly way before that as well!). And May was the 11th straight month when temperatures also breached the 1.5C threshold set as the limit for temperature rise at the 2015 Paris climate accords.
Oh, and in case you're not living in the American Southwest where temperatures have been soaring lately (117 degrees in an ongoing heat wave scorching South Texas) or in South Asia -- India's capital, Delhi, only recently experienced a temperature of 127 (no, that is not a misprint!), as did part of Pakistan -- just know that, thanks to the never-ending burning of fossil fuels, this planet is getting ever hotter. That means the air conditioning will be going on ever more often (if, of course, you can even afford to have it). If you're confined in a Texas prison without air conditioning, as J. David Goodman recently reported in the New York Times, then you may be desperately out of luck:
"In more than a dozen interviews this week, current and former inmates, as well as their relatives and friends, described an elemental effort at survival going on inside the prisons, with inmates relying on warm water, wet towels and fans that push hot air. Some flooded their cells with water from their combination sink-toilets, lying on the wet concrete for relief. Others, desperate for the guards' attention, lit fires or took to screaming in unison for water or for help with an inmate who had passed out."
As it happens, TomDispatch regular Stan Cox is something of an expert on air conditioning (he even wrote a book on the subject), both what it does to save us from extreme heat and to cause yet more of it" sigh" but let him explain. Tom
Air Conditioning
Can't Live With It, Can't Live Without It
By Stan Cox
The odds are that the entire continental United States will swelter through a hotter-than-normal summer this year. And no surprise there. It seems as if that's been the forecast every spring for years now. But this summer promises to eclipse even the summer of 2023, which, in the Northern Hemisphere, was the hottest since at least the year 1 AD, according to tree-ring analysis. You read that correctly: this summer may be hotter than any summer in the last 2,024 years (and undoubtedly many tens of thousands before that, since tree rings can take the data back only so far).
The world's hot future has already arrived in parts of the Global South, thanks largely to past greenhouse gas emissions mainly from the Global North. On May 29th, in Delhi, India, residents suffered under record-melting 127-degree heat. Earlier in May, deadly heat descended on Southeast Asia. The heat index (the "feels like" temperature that takes humidity into account) exceeded 125 degrees in both Manila and Bangkok this spring, thereby "rewriting climatic history," according to experts.
And here's the simple truth: when it comes to a sweltering planet, that's only the start and no one is safe anymore. Last year, 3.8 billion people globally suffered dangerous heat for at least a short period of time and that number will only continue to rise. In fact, heat deaths are forecast to skyrocket by a staggering 370% over the next 25 years.
In so many places experiencing extreme heat, air conditioning will become nothing short of a protective survival tool, but (all too sadly) it's also a prodigious generator of -- yes, of course! -- greenhouse gases. The climate impact of air conditioning and refrigeration, which together already account for more than 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions from all sources, is expected to double in the next 25 years. If that happens, the world's nations will be thrown even further off track when it comes to fulfilling their pledges to meet U.N. climate goals.
The question is: Can we somehow work ourselves free of such a dependence on industrial cooling, or have we already passed the point of no return?
For an AC Critic, Life's Complicated These Days
Between 2005 and 2015, I wrote a lot of pieces (as well as a book) about air conditioning and talked a lot about it, too. I've long focused on how a technology designed to keep us comfortable in hot weather simultaneously ensures even hotter future summers. Consider it the feedback loop from hell in which the greenhouse gas emissions air conditioning releases ensure that even more cooling will be required as time passes, dragging humanity into yet another intensifying feedback loop of heat. The question of how to break that cycle has always been a vexing one and will only become more so as the cycle spins ever faster.
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