“For years we have known that air conditioning protects people from extreme heat, but we could only guess by how much because the available data told us who owned an air conditioner, not who could actually afford to run one,” said Kai Chen, associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health.
The strong protective effect of AC against heat-attributable mortality indicates the public health necessity of addressing urban heat by making AC affordable and greening urban spaces, the authors noted.
Ironically not open access facepalm
The big thing is public spaces that are conditioned and available.
I’m afraid that’s not how heat exhaustion works. When you need air conditioning the most, you will be most unwilling to move.
you kinda go to the centers before that. you don’t just turn on public ac when its lethal you start when its uncomfortable.
That is not how humans work. People will continue as normal until severe symptoms emerge. That is why an 80-90% preventable cause of death, cornary artery disease, is the leading killer in the developed world. People do not eat the diet and obtain the exercise necessary to prevent it even though they know how.
In addition, most people do not have the wealth or luxury of not going to work to seek shelter from heat. They have to feed themselves and their families. They will stay in the heat until it is too late.
thats all well and good but having an option is better than not.
I don’t think anyone is disputing that. It’s simply not going to be effective enough to prevent the majority of deaths.
I think that type of thing already has. Chicago had a lot of heat deaths in heat waves long ago and heating centers are a big reason we have not since. we learned our lesson like with the blizzard of 79. I certainly think it prevents more deaths than occur and that would be the majority. Its combined with messaging telling people not to wait and to get to cooling centers. There is a lot good public policy can do.
In the big picture isn’t the A/C causing the heat deaths?
No that is a dangerous and incorrect mindset
Oh ok
It’s more like the capitalism that causes buildings to require AC to be liveable is causing the heat deaths primarily through other mechanisms.
If capitalists are going to put people in cheaply manufactured highly individualized single-family housing that is not adapted to local climate conditions with the explicit intent of fragmenting communities and making people dependent on mass consumption for basic needs, then some of those people are going to need AC to survive. The people using AC to survive are not responsible for the AC emissions, the system that made it necessary for them to use it is.
Agreed!
Oh cmon…
I have a house with great insulation. Thick walls, triple-glazed windows. Yeah it takes more time to heat up, but a week into a heatwave, all that material in the walls is warm. When it heats up during the day, it’s an absolute pain to cool down at night, even with ventilation (and that’s assuming the outside air is cold enough to be of any use).
A cheaply built capitalist house would at least freaking cool down at night, or between heatwaves for that matter.
Tell that to my neighbor who died of heat stroke a month ago.
I suppose the double paned glass and insulation in the walls was more expensive than the bare minimum because my government holds landlords partially reponsible for heating in winter (because they hate Russia more than they hate environmentalists).
But if “cheaply built capitalism” requires no state interference, then nothing in capitalist nations qualifies because the state interferes in everything from zoning laws to utilities to roads to police to construction material regulations to contract enforcement to coinage. There can be no capitalism without a state interfering to make it exist (though not necessarily a nation-state).
No that would be Capitalism because Capitalism requires polluting the planet in order to make profit. A/C machines itself are not designed to be harmful to the planet as much as oil spills.
Depends on how the electricity is produced.
I think what the other responses are not pointing out is that frame of thinking is blame shifting the ecological issues onto the people themselves rather than those in power making the decisions despite valid alternatives.
Blaming the people en masse leads to thinking that one can decrease their environmental footprint to the point where they will put themselves in danger for minimal societal benefit. Refrigeration and A/C when it comes to residential usage is a necessity.
The changes need to be made in a grander scheme in order to have an actual effect that is in the best interest of everyone.
people have replied but heat causes way more than ac. many heat source directly make greenhouse gases and those that don’t use more electricity if your in a cold climate than ac does in a hot climate. So like I live in an area that is cold in the winter and can be very hot in the summer. I have electric heat and a/c. heating on a day where the air temp is freezing is way more expensive than cooling in a day where you can fry an egg on the sidewalk. and that fry and egg day is way less often than freezing days. so you should stop using heat before stopping ac.
Don’t really want to pay full house AC money and portable ones here are shit. Would love a decent single room option that is actually energy efficient. Some level of DIY could be tempting if it was cheap enough.
Oh well, summer is over now. Maybe next year.
I got an air to air heat pump that heats and cools my living room. Heat spreads up in the winter so the top floor is also covered, the cold going down in the summer is fairly useless to me since I don’t use that part of the house much, but it’s still a thing.
Just have this thing on my wall:
And the outdoor unit too of course.
For actual heating of the whole house I’d need ground to water which isn’t as good for cooling, but that would be like 30k euros installed, this one was a bit over 2k and still helps me burn less wood in the winter too.
There is the problem, £2k just isn’t worth it.
Tbh I haven’t even bothered to get thermally reflective films for the windows yet. But that is mostly because I want to get new windows so it feels like a waste to get them for windows that will be gone soon.
Actually the old windows could be useful to make cold frames for growing stuff…