If temperatures are getting hotter, and more people start using air conditioners more, which continue to make their external environmental temperatures hotter, is their any realistic hope of the overall temperatures coming back down?
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I think you have a misunderstanding of how air conditioners work…
They do not make the outside hotter. They simply move the heat from inside your house to outside your house.
It’s a net 0 as far as outdoor temperatures go. Remember, heat travels from hot to cold. So the heat you just pumped out will find its way back in.
Using air conditioners basically takes heat from in your house and puts it outside.
But, it takes some energy to move that heat. The source of that energy makes a big difference to our climate.
Is your AC – or your local power grid that it’s plugged into – powered by fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, coal)? If so, a gas called carbon dioxide is released when it runs, and running that AC more leads to more carbon burning.
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is like a blanket. Just as we give off heat, so does the earth’s surface. A lot of that heat escapes to space, but a lot of things can trap some of that heat before it leaves: carbon dioxide especially.
There’s always been some carbon in the air, letting us have a big blanket and keeping nice temperatures. But we’ve been adding another blanket on top by releasing carbon.
Now let’s get back to your AC. It moves heat from inside your house to outside of it, keeping the average temperature in say your whole town including your house about the same. But the carbon added to the atmosphere makes a bigger difference.
If it’s running on cleaner forms of energy like wind or solar, great!
(This is ELI5, not ELI15, so I won’t go into things like “efficiency” and “laws of thermodynamics,” which mean the AC can’t perfectly transfer all of that heat.)
Far more energy is used globally for heating than for cooling so a shift to higher temperatures actually reduces energy demand. Not saying global warming us good, but your specific assumption here is wrong.
The sun is transferring energy to the atmosphere and the atmosphere is holding on to that energy because of the greenhouse gases.
That is whats driving up the temperature which is leading to more extreme weather patterns.
The greenhouse gases have to be removed from the atmosphere to lower the temperature
Air conditioners don’t contribute to it being hotter outside, any more than taking a piss off the side of a fishing boat makes ocean levels rise. The increase in temperatures is a function of the increasing proportion of the Earth’s atmosphere of gases that absorb and re-radiate heat energy instead of allowing to pass out into space.
The energy humanity as a whole emits is negligible in the grand scheme of things and makes no difference when it comes to global warming.
It’s the retention of the sun’s energy caused by the gasses like CO2 that we emit that is the problem.
Your question is wrong but hear me out, i ll explain.
Right now about 70% of energy is generated by (any) form of steam powered turbines, lets average efficiency at 40% for all those sources.
Humans produce around 29 000 TWh of electicity yearly, for sake of simplicity let’s assume that all of it is perfectly transfered to heat.
Now let’s take 70% of that amd take a 60% more for waste heat and figure out how much heat was emmited to get that electricity in powerplants – 32 000TWh
So humans produce around 52 000 TWh of electricity what’s around **2*10^20 J**
Now let’s figure out how much heat earth gets from sun, according to [this](https://www.energy.gov/articles/top-6-things-you-didnt-know-about-solar-energy) around **4*10^20 J IN AN HOUR** 2 times of all energy generated by all electricity used globally through whole year just in one hour
That’s why your question is wrong it’s like asking “if i take a grain of sand from my favorite beach is there a chance that it wont destroy it?” Scale is so absurdly big that the question doesn’t make sense.
That’s also why fosil fuels are so bad, they accualy change how much of solar power is getting trapped by earth and as you see it’s not a small value. And that makes hudge impact and is reason why we have to take actions against CO2 emissions.
Broadly speaking, yes. By switching from fossil fuel power to zero carbon sources like nuclear, solar and wind and simple things like changing cattle feed the emission of greenhouse gasses by humans can be massively reduced.
After that atmospheric greenhouse gas levels will naturally decrease over time, returning to the historic average over the course of a few centuries. Aggressive carbon capture schemes and geo engineering could do this much faster, but run the risk of dangerous unintended consequences. (Let’s save iron seeding the oceans for if we really need to).
Normally, we could expect the water cycle to balance things out. More heat->more evaporation->less heat. However, deforestation and CO2 emissions is slowly overwhelming Earth’s ability to balance it out. What we’re really worried about isn’t the AC but the power plant that’s generating electricity for Air Conditioning. If that power plant generates a lot of carbon dioxide then that CO2 is going to make the air turn sunlight into heat.
My advice is to grow plants, especially trees. Even on hot days plants are cool to the touch. Having some around your house will provide cooling shade, absorb CO2, and evaporate water to keep the air cool.
yes it is called a carbon tax. Until corporations are held to a better standard nothing will change, no matter how much work regular folk put in.
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