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?
In: 5
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.)
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