Great write up - I particularly appreciate the fact that it puts some numbers on the intuition I had about space cooling : a lot less energy hungry than heating and a potentially life saving technology.
The conclusion of the article is equally interesting, as it seems to suggest that not much progress has been made on cooling technologies, and that this domain is somehow overlooked by climate tech companies? Would you be able to share resources that elaborate on that point?
Tremendous progress has been made on cooling technologies. Heat pumps go both ways, heating & cooling vastly more efficiently than AC or resistance heating or fossil fuels; other technologies have progressed as well.
Heat pumps are not more efficient than A/C units. They are essentially A/C units that run in reverse to heat your house and cool the outdoors. Any improvement that cna be made to the cooling cycle can also be made to an A/C unit.
Great article. One crucial implication is that to save lives our absolute priority should be to ensure that poor countries get access to cheap and reliable electricity as a matter of urgency, so that they can install operate air-conditioners as well as heat their homes in winter. Currently policies of multinational institutions are preventing this by primarily financing intermittant renewable energy while avoiding financing of large hydro, fossil fuels and nuclear energy. Our experience in the west is that intermittant renewables do no provide cheap and reliable electricity because of the costs of dealing with intermittency and their highly dispersed nature. Instead of favouring certain types of electricity generation we should encourage countries to invest in whatever provides the cheapest electricity.
Fossil fuels kill 10 million people every year & sicken a hundred million more while killing uncountable others, & devastating ecosystems, & destroying the biosphere through climate catastrophe. Nukes are nothing but more problems, while also being the most expensive energy.
The cheapest energy is provided by efficiency, wiser lives, solar & wind.
Renewable energy is more reliable than fossil & fissile fuels; everywhere it’s added to a grid the grid gets more reliable & electricity gets cheaper, or because of the fossil fuel extortion & nuclear reactor terrorism resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, its price rises less than fueled grids.
As always, it’s great to see you and Our World in Data offering clarity amid all the contention on this kind of issue. One thing worth pointing out is that, in many situations there are policies and practices that cut both cold and heat risk at the same time. https://revkin.substack.com/p/as-global-warming-stokes-local-heat-22-07-27 Keep up the great work.
This is very well researched as usual thank you. A great concern of mine is the rest of the species on the planet. While humans can aim to get greater amounts of air conditioning, what happens to all the plants and animals that face a sudden rise in extreme heat without time to adapt and evolve?
Thank you for highlighting how cold deaths are the important issue and how air conditioning abundance is the appropriate means to reduce heat deaths, even in Europe. If all the money being spent now to reduce carbon in the atmosphere resulting in less than one degree of temperature change 50 years from now were instead spent on improving air conditioning supply in Europe and electricity to run it to South Asia and Africa the world could have the nice safe, flat temperature/death curve that Austin Texas has now.
We’re 1.5° over preindustrial temperature now & the results are already devastating. We’re headed for 2° in a decade or less & almost certainly 3° after that; we are almost certainly not going to avoid it, & tipping points are very likely to bring us to 4—end-of-civilization territory. The only way for civilization & millions of species to survive the next century is to stop emitting greenhouse gases as fast as possible, & sequester as much as possible through organic permaculture. Denial of that now, more than 50 years after it was perfectly clear, is quite irrational, & very serious, & those suffering such delusions should seek psychotherapy. Please find some. along with new sources of information.
The mortality curves as shown will also evolve in time because of foolishness. At the moment the US and Europe are engaged in a headlong dash toward widespread solar and wind for baseload power, without the necessary improvements to transmission or the grid and without any plan to sustain power during long wind droughts, especially in winter. The "answer" seems to be supplementary natural gas, but at what capital cost (and who pays)?
Here in Michigan, the Dems in power are also doing everything they can to curtail gas and oil (FYI I am NOT Republican either.) So maybe we don't end up with supplementary power but just let more people die. How many? And will there never be a political backlash?
Michigan gets more than 85% of its electricity from supposedly reliable baseload gas, coal, & nukes. Hundreds of thousands “suffered blackout conditions during a massive winter cyclone” there in January 2023. Iowa generates 65.3% of its electricity with renewables; its grid did just fine thank you.
The 3 most reliable grids are Nebraska, South Dakota, and Illinois, all of which have higher penetration of renewable energy than Michigan. Rounding out the top 10 most reliable states is Iowa, which has the highest renewable percentage of any state. [Well, no. Highest VARIABLE renewable energy]
With more than 85% gas, coal, and nuclear, purportedly the most reliable sources of energy in fossil fuel talking points, Michigan’s grid reliability rates a sad 43rd.
All of the [high renewable] states mentioned above, by the way, according to the US Energy Information Agency, have lower electric rates than Michigan.
Wind & solar added to a grid make it more reliable. Dozens of studies & the experience of a hundred countries show we can provide all the power the world needs with renewable energy. I’ll be happy to point them out & discuss this but please stop spreading nonsense about energy.
As to how using gas as a backup is unacceptable to you I don’t get. It certainly is to me, but it’s what is used for back up & peak generation now. It’s being reduced now & will continue to.
I disagree but clearly there is no point in arguing. Any readers not committed to the worldview just described might consider this item from the Substack publication of Isaac Orr and Mitch Rollings:
"One of the most severe wind droughts we have found in our research occurred in the Midcontinent Independent Systems Operator (MISO) region in January 2020.
As we noted in our 2022 report, the region experienced an 82-hour wind drought during which all of the installed wind capacity on the 15-state MISO grid—22,040 megawatts (MW)—generated less than 10 percent of its potential output during this timeframe. Of those 82 hours, 42 straight hours saw wind capacity factors below 1.5 percent ...."
As an american I find it shocking that Air Conditioning is considered a luxury or even a bad thing....of course, I live in Florida where it is a necessity
Yes, I found this surprising. Not having air conditioning is like, an embarrassing thing, like not owning a car, something that maybe when you’re a financially struggling student is okay but once you get a real job you should be moving past.
Air conditioners ARE a luxury almost everywhere they have been assumed as a base entitlement. That’s the problem. Building with the assumption of AC is what begets people to basically not acclimate, even refuse to acclimate, to the seasons. If you cannot survive in a locale without AC, maybe you shouldn’t be living there. Hello I am looking at you, Dubai, and Phoenix, and Texas, and lots of overdeveloped urban places. (Maybe no one should be living there, except in winter months, if ever!) If you cannot live without AC at home for comfort, maybe you should at least try. Maybe these machines should be locked at no lower than 24º.
And there is the cultural problem. This is why I’m not down with the “this is a right, not a luxury!” talk around this issue. Who says? The people who benefit from a population invested and captive to a hostile location, or a hostile or incompetent building culture, or a rapacious real estate investment bubble? It’s only a right when you live inescapably at 35º (and here, completely obliviously, your bosses insist you wear full suits because it’s professional decorum). AC is a status good. It should be always be a backstop of pure necessity, and otherwise thought of as a déclassé inability to cope.
I use AC only three days a year, when hostile circumstances require it (heat spell combined with festival noise). I see a lot of people in my northern city turning it on in June simply because it’s assumed rite of summer, just as they do in February in Texas when, frankly, no one needs it but a hospital or a data centre. It’s because the apartments they build are airless and dank.
A/C is a luxury for many and possibly a necessity for some. I think you would find healthy middle aged adults are not dying of heat without it in Canada. Those at risk are perhaps the very young but more so the elderly. At 48 I've only now had A/C for2 summers. One 16 years ago when we bought a house that had it until it broke the second year and now with a heat pump I've had for one summer. If heat fails in the winter my house becomes unlivable and damaged if I don't drain the pipes. I would die if I didn't find somewhere else to live. If my A/C stops working I don't sleep as well and I'm a little more uncomfortable in the hottest summer days.
Outside of the elderly people working doing manual labour outside in the heat are at risk. To suggest it's a necessity for those of us outside but somehow people can still be outside doing this work much of it that can't be done in winter months just might make us indoor workers look really soft.
A/C is a luxury I now enjoy. Someday a much bigger part of the population will have access to it, let's hope the energy supply can keep up. For reference in Ontario we have our biggest spikes in power demand in the summer.
Wonderful write up! Going off of the 'final note,' for anyone curious about a company developing new technology to increase AC efficiency (and drastically reduce emissions), Transaera is an incredible example—definitely worth a google!
Very interesting article, thank you. This is a great concise summary of your other four articles.
There’s one part that I find very unintuitive, which is the strict U shape of mortality-temperature curves even at small changes in temperature. What’s the mechanism? If people in Vancouver are acclimatized to an ideal temperature of 17C, how do any more of them actually end up dying at 16C or 18C? I would have thought the curves would be flat for a bit in either direction before having steeper inclines at less tolerable temperatures.
I found one paper where the curves are constructed with regression models that might not have the expressiveness (in their specification) to even have the flat sections that I’m imagining. But I haven’t investigated deeper across more papers. Can you shed any light on a causal mechanism that leads to more deaths at small temperature perturbations?
I was born in a trailer park where the Mousennow resides in Florida, in the early 1950s. I did not live in a home, WV, College in Cambridge, married and old home in Mass, until I was 49. Iike outdoor air. We retired to Tucson, but have nighttime air when it gete down to the high 70s outside.
Physics me says GigaGeoThermal is the solution. Make the EarthHVAC.
So much thermal energy. So little needed.Do it nanolocal.
Great write up - I particularly appreciate the fact that it puts some numbers on the intuition I had about space cooling : a lot less energy hungry than heating and a potentially life saving technology.
The conclusion of the article is equally interesting, as it seems to suggest that not much progress has been made on cooling technologies, and that this domain is somehow overlooked by climate tech companies? Would you be able to share resources that elaborate on that point?
Tremendous progress has been made on cooling technologies. Heat pumps go both ways, heating & cooling vastly more efficiently than AC or resistance heating or fossil fuels; other technologies have progressed as well.
Heat pumps are not more efficient than A/C units. They are essentially A/C units that run in reverse to heat your house and cool the outdoors. Any improvement that cna be made to the cooling cycle can also be made to an A/C unit.
Great article. One crucial implication is that to save lives our absolute priority should be to ensure that poor countries get access to cheap and reliable electricity as a matter of urgency, so that they can install operate air-conditioners as well as heat their homes in winter. Currently policies of multinational institutions are preventing this by primarily financing intermittant renewable energy while avoiding financing of large hydro, fossil fuels and nuclear energy. Our experience in the west is that intermittant renewables do no provide cheap and reliable electricity because of the costs of dealing with intermittency and their highly dispersed nature. Instead of favouring certain types of electricity generation we should encourage countries to invest in whatever provides the cheapest electricity.
Fossil fuels kill 10 million people every year & sicken a hundred million more while killing uncountable others, & devastating ecosystems, & destroying the biosphere through climate catastrophe. Nukes are nothing but more problems, while also being the most expensive energy.
The cheapest energy is provided by efficiency, wiser lives, solar & wind.
Renewable energy is more reliable than fossil & fissile fuels; everywhere it’s added to a grid the grid gets more reliable & electricity gets cheaper, or because of the fossil fuel extortion & nuclear reactor terrorism resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, its price rises less than fueled grids.
Not AC, heat pumps.
As always, it’s great to see you and Our World in Data offering clarity amid all the contention on this kind of issue. One thing worth pointing out is that, in many situations there are policies and practices that cut both cold and heat risk at the same time. https://revkin.substack.com/p/as-global-warming-stokes-local-heat-22-07-27 Keep up the great work.
This is very well researched as usual thank you. A great concern of mine is the rest of the species on the planet. While humans can aim to get greater amounts of air conditioning, what happens to all the plants and animals that face a sudden rise in extreme heat without time to adapt and evolve?
Thank you for highlighting how cold deaths are the important issue and how air conditioning abundance is the appropriate means to reduce heat deaths, even in Europe. If all the money being spent now to reduce carbon in the atmosphere resulting in less than one degree of temperature change 50 years from now were instead spent on improving air conditioning supply in Europe and electricity to run it to South Asia and Africa the world could have the nice safe, flat temperature/death curve that Austin Texas has now.
We’re 1.5° over preindustrial temperature now & the results are already devastating. We’re headed for 2° in a decade or less & almost certainly 3° after that; we are almost certainly not going to avoid it, & tipping points are very likely to bring us to 4—end-of-civilization territory. The only way for civilization & millions of species to survive the next century is to stop emitting greenhouse gases as fast as possible, & sequester as much as possible through organic permaculture. Denial of that now, more than 50 years after it was perfectly clear, is quite irrational, & very serious, & those suffering such delusions should seek psychotherapy. Please find some. along with new sources of information.
The mortality curves as shown will also evolve in time because of foolishness. At the moment the US and Europe are engaged in a headlong dash toward widespread solar and wind for baseload power, without the necessary improvements to transmission or the grid and without any plan to sustain power during long wind droughts, especially in winter. The "answer" seems to be supplementary natural gas, but at what capital cost (and who pays)?
Here in Michigan, the Dems in power are also doing everything they can to curtail gas and oil (FYI I am NOT Republican either.) So maybe we don't end up with supplementary power but just let more people die. How many? And will there never be a political backlash?
MICHIGAN, 2024
Michigan gets more than 85% of its electricity from supposedly reliable baseload gas, coal, & nukes. Hundreds of thousands “suffered blackout conditions during a massive winter cyclone” there in January 2023. Iowa generates 65.3% of its electricity with renewables; its grid did just fine thank you.
The 3 most reliable grids are Nebraska, South Dakota, and Illinois, all of which have higher penetration of renewable energy than Michigan. Rounding out the top 10 most reliable states is Iowa, which has the highest renewable percentage of any state. [Well, no. Highest VARIABLE renewable energy]
With more than 85% gas, coal, and nuclear, purportedly the most reliable sources of energy in fossil fuel talking points, Michigan’s grid reliability rates a sad 43rd.
All of the [high renewable] states mentioned above, by the way, according to the US Energy Information Agency, have lower electric rates than Michigan.
Wind & solar added to a grid make it more reliable. Dozens of studies & the experience of a hundred countries show we can provide all the power the world needs with renewable energy. I’ll be happy to point them out & discuss this but please stop spreading nonsense about energy.
As to how using gas as a backup is unacceptable to you I don’t get. It certainly is to me, but it’s what is used for back up & peak generation now. It’s being reduced now & will continue to.
I disagree but clearly there is no point in arguing. Any readers not committed to the worldview just described might consider this item from the Substack publication of Isaac Orr and Mitch Rollings:
"One of the most severe wind droughts we have found in our research occurred in the Midcontinent Independent Systems Operator (MISO) region in January 2020.
As we noted in our 2022 report, the region experienced an 82-hour wind drought during which all of the installed wind capacity on the 15-state MISO grid—22,040 megawatts (MW)—generated less than 10 percent of its potential output during this timeframe. Of those 82 hours, 42 straight hours saw wind capacity factors below 1.5 percent ...."
As an american I find it shocking that Air Conditioning is considered a luxury or even a bad thing....of course, I live in Florida where it is a necessity
Yes, I found this surprising. Not having air conditioning is like, an embarrassing thing, like not owning a car, something that maybe when you’re a financially struggling student is okay but once you get a real job you should be moving past.
I don’t have AC. Or a car. By choice.
Great article
Air conditioners ARE a luxury almost everywhere they have been assumed as a base entitlement. That’s the problem. Building with the assumption of AC is what begets people to basically not acclimate, even refuse to acclimate, to the seasons. If you cannot survive in a locale without AC, maybe you shouldn’t be living there. Hello I am looking at you, Dubai, and Phoenix, and Texas, and lots of overdeveloped urban places. (Maybe no one should be living there, except in winter months, if ever!) If you cannot live without AC at home for comfort, maybe you should at least try. Maybe these machines should be locked at no lower than 24º.
And there is the cultural problem. This is why I’m not down with the “this is a right, not a luxury!” talk around this issue. Who says? The people who benefit from a population invested and captive to a hostile location, or a hostile or incompetent building culture, or a rapacious real estate investment bubble? It’s only a right when you live inescapably at 35º (and here, completely obliviously, your bosses insist you wear full suits because it’s professional decorum). AC is a status good. It should be always be a backstop of pure necessity, and otherwise thought of as a déclassé inability to cope.
I use AC only three days a year, when hostile circumstances require it (heat spell combined with festival noise). I see a lot of people in my northern city turning it on in June simply because it’s assumed rite of summer, just as they do in February in Texas when, frankly, no one needs it but a hospital or a data centre. It’s because the apartments they build are airless and dank.
A/C is a luxury for many and possibly a necessity for some. I think you would find healthy middle aged adults are not dying of heat without it in Canada. Those at risk are perhaps the very young but more so the elderly. At 48 I've only now had A/C for2 summers. One 16 years ago when we bought a house that had it until it broke the second year and now with a heat pump I've had for one summer. If heat fails in the winter my house becomes unlivable and damaged if I don't drain the pipes. I would die if I didn't find somewhere else to live. If my A/C stops working I don't sleep as well and I'm a little more uncomfortable in the hottest summer days.
Outside of the elderly people working doing manual labour outside in the heat are at risk. To suggest it's a necessity for those of us outside but somehow people can still be outside doing this work much of it that can't be done in winter months just might make us indoor workers look really soft.
A/C is a luxury I now enjoy. Someday a much bigger part of the population will have access to it, let's hope the energy supply can keep up. For reference in Ontario we have our biggest spikes in power demand in the summer.
Wonderful write up! Going off of the 'final note,' for anyone curious about a company developing new technology to increase AC efficiency (and drastically reduce emissions), Transaera is an incredible example—definitely worth a google!
Very interesting article, thank you. This is a great concise summary of your other four articles.
There’s one part that I find very unintuitive, which is the strict U shape of mortality-temperature curves even at small changes in temperature. What’s the mechanism? If people in Vancouver are acclimatized to an ideal temperature of 17C, how do any more of them actually end up dying at 16C or 18C? I would have thought the curves would be flat for a bit in either direction before having steeper inclines at less tolerable temperatures.
I found one paper where the curves are constructed with regression models that might not have the expressiveness (in their specification) to even have the flat sections that I’m imagining. But I haven’t investigated deeper across more papers. Can you shed any light on a causal mechanism that leads to more deaths at small temperature perturbations?
I was born in a trailer park where the Mousennow resides in Florida, in the early 1950s. I did not live in a home, WV, College in Cambridge, married and old home in Mass, until I was 49. Iike outdoor air. We retired to Tucson, but have nighttime air when it gete down to the high 70s outside.
Physics me says GigaGeoThermal is the solution. Make the EarthHVAC.
So much thermal energy. So little needed.Do it nanolocal.
Are we missing the benefits of cooling from green plants?
As always, Hannah cuts through the lies and propaganda!
Development is the only key to climate resiliency.
https://www.mattball.org/2022/11/is-west-saying-africa-should-remain.html
We need to care about helping people, not hurting them.
"blaring" sun or glaring?! </style-police>