In the '90s I survived summers in Egypt with no AC. How would it feel now?
npr.org
npr.org
For example, we enlarged windows and doors, to the point were, standing behind one that's been cooking in the sun for a couple of hours, you feel the radiant heat a meter away from it. All the older houses around the Mediterranean have smaller windows and doors, to limit the sun (and by extension the heat) from coming in.
We've cut down so many trees in the cities and poured so much concrete that some places are radiating heat for hours after sundown, making the night a couple of degrees hotter than it should really be.
Those are just a couple examples of poor architectural and city planning, but there are dozens of simple yet efficient techniques and tricks that we should reuse to make our cities more livable. Our ancestors didn't have all the new materials and knowledge we now have, but they were logical and lived with their environment.
Tldr forest coverage peaked 8k years ago, stayed more or less there till Romans, went down some couple dozen percent, paused after the Romans, then was decimated (heh) in the medieval era and modern times before now starting to recover.
Source: https://efi.int/forestquestions/q15#:~:text=Forest%20resourc....
Seen some HN comments about that recently.
Or perhaps get windows with low-emissivity ("low-e") coatings that block certain wavelengths of light:
* https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/E-coating
* https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/window-types-and-technolo...
There are window films that can block most of the light in frequencies which carries the energy and let the light from visible spectrum in, barely dimming the brightness and almost doesn't change the color.
I recently installed such a filter, I'm amazed everyday how the hot bright sun is so tamed once inside the house. Sometimes I open a window to let the full spectrum in just so I can put my feet on the spot of the unfiltered light and then on the filtered one and compare how hot it gets where the sun shines in full power and can barely heat once filtered. It feels like magic, like a winter sun that is bright but doesn't heat. The filter itself heats up like crazy, it even gets too hot to touch but heat transfer by convection doesn't do much.
My grandma lives in an old house built with thick stone walls with tiny windows. It stays naturally cool but I really like large windows. IMHO, the humanity has advanced enough to have large windows and still keep it cool. It's also good for the mood, some people like me really really like the sun and even the heat up to a point.
It doesn't seem to be a real brand, Bauhaus sells it and its made in Taiwan. I'm sure there are similar or better films out there.
These photos shows how much the film dims the visible light: https://dropover.cloud/999162
The photo of the wall shows two areas, one area illuminated by the light passing through the filter and another small area illuminated by direct sunlight through the opening.
It's a window in a small room. The window has a top-open position which provides enough ventilation to take away heat that still manages to get in. Previously, this room was getting unbearably hot and now is much better(still hot on days with no wind though).
The difference this summer has been striking. In our bedrooms which are on the second floor, the sun feels hot through the windows. In the living room I can barely feel it.
We're up north so our home is well insulated, hence the summer sun tended to overheat the inside.
On the flip side, the glass we replaced was some 20+ year old two layer glass while the new were thick 3 layer stuff. They're vastly better insulating (heat and sound), so that alone was a huge plus compared to the old.
Have you found one that does not do this or do you have any comments about this risk?
However, if you simply don't want to be seen by people looking in from the outside, there are still some options:
If the inside is much darker than the outside, light from inside is overwhelmed by light from outside getting reflected back (the operating principle of "one-way" mirrors).
If the window is covered with a grid that only has small gaps (e.g. window blinds), it's hard to recognize objects on the other side unless your eye is close enough to look through a single gap.
If the glass has a rough surface (i.e. frosted glass), light that makes it through is scattered in different directions, blurring objects that aren't very close to the window.
Various combinations seem possible. (Frosted glass window blinds?)
I suspect it's difficult to build houses that are good in all weathers. I think the most adaptable I've seen was in Malta; they have relatively cold winters and sometimes very hot summers. Many apartments are narrow/deep and the areas exposed to the outside have big windows/doors at the front and back (leading to balconies) with one side usually facing the sea breeze. Because they're narrow, they don't have much surface area exposed to the outside which provides great insulation during the winter - For the summer, you keep cool by opening the windows on both sides so the wind flows through the whole apartment. It's also fine in terms of natural light; for modern apartments, the entire external wall may be glass so at least the living room gets plenty of sunlight. Bedrooms are a bit darker but that's usually a good thing; especially since many people like to sleep in on weekends.
In other parts of Europe (e.g. Berlin) they more typically have some apartments facing the outside and others facing an internal courtyard. They don't let the wind flow through and each person has a different experience.
This one drives me absolutely bonkers because it's so clearly a CULTURAL CHOICE. Some places (Netherlands, Germany), make an effort to plant trees on streets, and frequent small parks and lawns.
But France doesn't - Paris being the worst. I don't know how Parisians own dogs. I find I have to walk for blocks to find a strip of grass for my pooch to go. Seems like they choose to just eradicate nature everywhere instead.
Japan is like this too inside the cities!
Note: I understand that both have massive beautiful green PARKS. But I'm referring to small patches of nature or grass between those, on neighborhoods, trees on side streets, etc.
I'm always amazed the US doesn't have these. It's not exactly "peak" technology (I've had these my whole life) and so freaking useful. Having no AC, they're like the only reason I can keep my apartment cool during the summer. I know it because I didn't have them 2 summers ago and I almost ended up buying an AC. This summer I didn't even use my fan because I could keep my house cool.
What good alternatives are there to AC, however? The comic gives:
* Building buildings with less reflective materials.. there's almost none here and it's still damn hot. Obviously the concrete traps heat but I don't really see us not using concrete anymore.
* Planting trees for shade. Plenty of trees here, doesn't stop it from being hot as hell inside.
* A system for getting out of the way of a heat wave.. which from experience, no one would actually use. The biggest deaths from heat waves here happen since older people insist on going to stores etc. during the day, and predictably faint on the street and die. This is completely preventable already -- they're not gonna use the system.
* Growing plants on top of buildings. Maybe this will help? I don't know enough to say.
Create a natural flow by opening windows and doors, so at least you get a breeze. Cool lots of ice during the night and use it for cold drinks during the day. If you have any outdoor space, have a little temporary pool that is always in shadow.
(I chose mosquito since at least I can sleep with them buzzing around.)
edit: planning on getting insect screens soon. Thanks for comments pushing me to.
That may not help once air temperatures hit 35C (95F):
* https://www.health.ny.gov/publications/6594/
* https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-hot-is-too-ho...
* https://newhampshirebulletin.com/2022/07/15/how-hot-is-too-h...
* https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/hypothermia/s...
> "This is completely preventable already"
Sorry, but some people in some place have no other choice but to go to the store while it's open or face starvation, and when you live in a place where nobody gives a rat's ass if you live or die (because we all know that everyone over 30 should just die because they're worthless, right?), you have to go to the store.
As to "completely preventable", sure. But the problem is that people don't want to prevent jack-shit. They want the world to burn and everyone to die, and sadly, I'm starting to agree with them at this point in my life.
Eagerly awaiting my downvotes, because I already know that nobody wants to hear truth.
I'd also clarify that by "older" I mean retirement age. Not 30 year olds who definitely won't die on their way to the store if they don't have a severe underlying condition. Also, I've never met anyone who thinks 30 year olds are old and should die that wasn't a teenager.
Do these places not offer grocery delivery?
It's pretty rare for shops selling staples to open later than 9am, at least here in Australia. Most supermarkets open around 7am. There's plenty of time to get your shopping done before the day gets over 25c/80f in most towns, and shops in places like Marble Bar (which is very slightly cooler than Death Valley) open earlier.
For hot/dry there's usually high day/night variation so the trick is often thick materials that don't let heat penetrate for hours. Stone and mud brick are traditional concrete can be good too. Soil does this also. You then want small openings to prevent heat escape and plants or water for evaporative cooling. Traditional middle eastern and north African buildings are great for this.
Hot/wet climates are much harder. Generally you can't keep the temperature out, you can just put up a very broad roof and then encourage wind flow to your body (windows, electric or manual fans). Construction is usually much lighter (timber and steel)
Below is an example of climate analysis with passive strategies overlaid
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Aasem-Alabdullatief/pub...
The modern American house usually lacks such thought.
The fact that it was done through cooling was merely a by-product.
As for the architecture, one ancient trick is to paint houses white.
In Northeastern Brazil, that has a hot and dry climate for most of the year, a very popular solution is to sleep in hammocks in the hot season. Most houses are equipped with hooks in the walls of each room, to set them. They don't bake your underside at night like mattresses, and fans cool both your topside and underside while you're in a hammock. The hooks must be well spaced, so you can avoid back pain in the morning, by laying almost straight in a diagonal position, in relation to a imaginary axis that goes through both hooks.
Frankly, (IMO) there isn't. You can mitigate via materials, or use regional venacular only so much. And we shouldn't even try too hard with design outside of suburban density. Can't control what gets built next in dense enviroments that will interact with urban fabric to fuck up passive designs. So many sustainable projects have ended up dramatically underperforming / duds, and they've already benefit from kids of attention/engineering 99% of buildings won't. There are some ways to standardize cost efficient, sensible designs. But better off figuring out how to get power cheaper to fuel those ACs.
Why the bias against cooling technology?
No one seems to complain about the environmental impact of home heating in cold climates.
Plus there's the San Francisco factor. AC is simply not necessary there most of the time for most people. Even when it is hot, it is usually hot/dry, and tends to cool down at night. Thus there are many people here who think AC is a needless luxury everywhere because they personally do not need it.
I think this is huge. Extreme heat kills more Americans than hurricanes, tornadoes, or extreme cold. However, the people it kills tend to be poor and far away from the political and cultural power centers in the US.
It's worth noting that refrigeration is over a century old now.
Maybe you'll find a lone crazy to validate the persection complex that compels such a mendacious post, and you'll definitely get a little mild "do you really need it at 66F in June?" rhetoric and I'm sure that hits conspicuous consumers right in the feels that definitely matter just as much as reality does--but on the other hand, it is also precisely the folks who care about such things who push for cooling stations and other ways to symptomatically address the worsening heat waves in urban areas, because heat kills and it kills the poor and the old preferentially.
It isn't those awful hippies who have a problem with air conditioning--it's the people who wish that those people (and poor people! lest we forget!) would conveniently disappear. For other people, of course. Those positing that people should just Tough It Out aren't doing so themselves.
FWIW, I've seen a lot of material promoting heat pumps in colder climates.
You are correct that Heating in cold climates probably is worse. AC has the advantage that the load matches sunny summer weather. At least in Europe - Asia and Eastern USA the humidity at night is an extra problem.
Different techniques are needed for hot climates, but I sure as heck don’t see a disproportionate attention on AC vs heating. It all falls under building energy usage, which is a substantial consumer of primary energy worldwide.
If you’re in the southeast us, traditionally buildings would have awnings, good airflow, etc. Now, cookie cutter commercial construction is a sealed box that relies on HVAC for temperature and moisture control.
Ditto in the north - until energy prices started climbing buildings like hotels were built as large footprint 1-2 story buildings to save capital costs. (Less structural costs, no elevator) Those buildings are impossible to afford heat nowadays, so you’re seeing more multi-story hotels and apartments.
I live in Southern Italy, I've had 40 degrees C last month, I still don't use an AC (but I might some day).
Then there's places that hardly get 30C and they blast ac non stop, that makes me mad.
In the day I was mowing the lawn and after 10 minutes sweat was dripping from my forehead (I'm not that unfit). Then I took a cold shower, and after 30 minutes I was swsaty again from the humidity. When I went to bed I switched on the AC...
I find 35C+ in dry regions much more comfortable than this, especially if you have an old stone building that acts as big thermal mass to keep the inside comfortable during the hottest parts of the day.
Plus, if there's a power outage but you live in a house that's naturally cool, the heat won't reach unlivable levels. Hot weather can set off cascading failures in infrastructure: demand rises as everyone's AC kicks in, equipment fails in the heat, fires start, workers at power plants find it difficult to cope with the heat, etc. Passive cooling increases the resilience of the population.
Humans chose to migrate to those climates tens of thousands of years ago when they had no other choice. They arrived to escape conflict, tension, or in search of more resources.
Then they survived in those climates with literal stone age technology, and struggled, but persevered for thousands of years. Finally, in the last 100 years they managed to get comfortable with modern technology.
Asking them to move is asking them to give up hundreds of generations of genetic adaptation, and cultural integration with their location.
On the other hand, the places that people are critical of are those that have expanded dramatically in population only in the last 50 years - places that have never supported significant human populations, but suddenly were able to due to:
* Air conditioning technology
* A sudden, but now expiring, era of cheap fossil fuels.
We're talking about places like Saudi Arabia, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and so on.
These places never supported significant human populations the way that "Northern Europe" has, and is only now able to BECAUSE of AC technology.
If you use an air conditioner, you pump the heat in your house outside, and you add extra heat outside while pumping it.
Its that "extra bit" that multiplied by millions is what causes wide area effects.
If you live in a low-humidity climate (looking at you, intermountain west) an evaporative cooler is like magic! It cools down the room noticeably with very little power.
And it adds some MUCH needed humidity into the air during the dry summer months.
Some people button their place up thinking they want to keep the hot air out, but the evaporative cooler becomes ineffective once the air is too humid, and you start getting sticky. Do that enough year after year and you'll get mold in the walls.
I was a little bit surprised by that callout in the story, so I went looking for info on the refrigerants themselves. If you're old enough to remember the worries about the ozone hole over Antarctica, you might remember that we agreed to phase out CFCs as a refrigerant. They were replaced by HCFCs which are less dangerous to atmospheric ozone (yay) but have a very high impact as a greenhouse gas per unit mass (boo) [2].
Ultimately the HCFCs will be replaced with ammonia, propane, and other alternatives which have a lower greenhouse gas effect, on the same order of magnitude as CO2 [3].
[1] https://www.iea.org/countries/egypt
[2] https://unfccc.int/process/transparency-and-reporting/greenh...
[3] https://climate.ec.europa.eu/eu-action/fluorinated-greenhous...
Did you happen to notice whether HCFCs had worse greenhouse gas effects than CFCs?
The mechanism of release for refrigerants to the atmosphere seems to mainly be escape during servicing and decomissioning as well as microscopic leaks in aircon piping that develop over the working life of the unit.
I haven't done the math on total amount of refrigerant emission to understand whether it's negligible in the big picture or actually a serious problem once CO2 emissions approach net zero. Is that why you're curious about HCFC vs CFC?
Given how they're constantly referred to as transition chemicals in reference to the banning of CFCs, I would expect that the warming potential of HCFCs is regarded as dangerous but necessary, and therefore a bad outcome but less bad than continued degradation of the ozone layer.
FWIW, this document indicates that failing to abate the emission of methane, black carbon aerosols, ozone, and HFCs (note, a bigger class of gases than merely HCFCs) will result in an extra 0.5 degree C of warming by 2100. But I'm not sure what proportion of that belongs to each substance individually.
In my country during summer, at basically every large supermarket there are stands where you can have the AC refilled in your car.
If you're not comfortable sharing the specific country, which continent are you on?
I hope the irony of this man's job is not lost on anybody.
However, only a very small number of people live right on the coast with its constant 70 degress.
San Diego has 4 microclimes--Coastal, Inland, Mountain, and Desert. Inland, Mountain, and Desert get hot.
I always used to say that people in San Diego were in "weather denial". Most of them live in the shitty microclimes but still wouldn't buy an air conditioner.
Most of the people in San Diego live inland. When you look at the coastal areas where the ocean moderates things, you’ll find a lot of multi-million dollar houses which are totally out of range for the median county income.
I grew up in Canberra (which is inland and sits in a valley) it was like living in a giant clay bowl all the heat settles in and is absolutely stagnant not much of a breeze to speak about at all. Summer there was pretty miserable (and winter as well).
I now live on the South Coast of NSW - I can get away with a ceiling fan and opening my windows, we get a regular afternoon sea breeze which cools everything down.
Mosquitos murdered me daily when I slept with the window open.
Nobody tries to live in central Texas without Air Conditioning.
I lived in Vietnam and most people there don't have A/C. Temperatures are often 33C-35C during the day and with the humidity it feels like 38C-40C.
Hell, there are construction workers in heavy clothing working outside all day in those temperatures.
This attitude is what causes deaths due to heat exhaustion. It really ought to be a criminal offense for landlords / builders to NOT install AC in such regions. Not having AC is literally a death sentence in places with wet bulb events, including countries like Vietnam, as well as cities in the US like Seattle, Houston, and Miami.
Check your privilege, as they say.
https://www.washington.edu/news/2023/04/06/washington-states...
Hell, when I lived in Singapore (3 degree from the equator), most homes had A/C, but many, many people never used it because the electricity was something they didn't want to spend their money on.
People have been living in that region for thousands of years, of which only the last 50 years has A/C been an option.
A substantial and growing portion of the planet is inhospitable to human life without AC.
Doesn't matter if they'll die without it, doesn't matter if you feel they should be forced to have one. The reality doesn't care about your feelings.
Empirically it has not. Just because Americans who aren't acclimatized to high temperatures "need" A/C, doesn't mean it's a necessity, considering people living in far hotter climates do without.
You can acclimatise. 40C+ heat is harsh at first, but it's very survivable and you do get used to it. Worst I had was working in a furniture factory which was just a big tin shed with no A/C in a 45c+ heatwave in Australia. It was pretty brutal, I've never sweated so much in my life, but no harm done.
The cold, however, is worse. Living in cold countries with no (or bad) heating is horrible, and much more dangerous. People sleep outdoors in SE Asia with no problem. People die in their homes by the thousands every winter in Europe.
When the humidty is high your sweat has no cooling effect and your body heats up to the point of collapse.
I find that hard to believe. Do you have a source? Preferably one that doesn't include zone of wars.
tldr: 200,000+ annual excess deaths in Europe due to cold. 20,000+ due to heat. Literally 10 times as many people die from cold as from heat.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
tldr; "An estimated 13,400 more deaths occurred in the winter period (December 2021 to March 2022) compared with the average of the non-winter periods; this was the second-lowest figure since 1950 to 1951 and was affected by the larger number of deaths in the non-winter months (August 2021 to November 2021 and April 2022 to July 2022)."
Is that enough sources?
You clearly can acclimatize.
https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...
"Between 1979 and 2018, the death rate as a direct result of exposure to heat (underlying cause of death) generally hovered between 0.5 and 2 deaths per million people, with spikes in certain years (see Figure 1). Overall, a total of more than 11,000 Americans have died from heat-related causes since 1979, according to death certificates."
(same site, different page) https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...
"Between 1979 and 2016, the death rate as a direct result of exposure to cold (underlying cause of death) generally ranged from 1 to 2.5 deaths per million people, with year-to-year fluctuations (see Figure 1). Overall, a total of more than 19,000 Americans have died from cold-related causes since 1979, according to death certificates."
A lot smaller difference than Europe, and there's the 1995 heatwave thing in Chicago which throws it all out of whack, but there's still more people dying from cold than heat, even in the USA.
Outdoors like that you'll usually encounter large evaporative coolers which are basically a blower combined with water mister. If it's hot and dry, the mist vanishes by the time the air reaches you, but the air is cooler.
That's a nice way to put it. And yeah evaporative water coolers and plain fans go a long way in hot climates.
In Minneapolis, there used to be outdoor heating for restaurants in the middle of the winter. They used to be pretty warm enough for people to sit outside, no idea how costly it was.
They are on offer at the Bezos Bazaar (here, e.g.: https://www.amazon.com/-/dp/B0BTD6VPLG), and with a margarita in hand it's the height of decadence.
Given sunlight is approximately 1kW/sqm, simply reflecting it back instead of absorbing it seems like it would add up to big savings pretty quickly, and something like white paint is significantly superior to what you'd get with most other finishes.
On a climate level, reflecting more heat out from earth is technically good too, I suppose :).
Car, sure. I live in a city in a country where window or ground units don't exist though. Most apartments are already way over ground, shops and other services mount the external units on the roofs. This is not an innate property of AC but a method US implements it.
Absolutely. If you bring the temperature down even a couple of degrees it's a huge relief comparatively.
People are extremely sensitive to temperature changes above 37C/99F for obvious reasons. The higher the ambient vs. core body temp, the more you must sweat and hydrate to not overheat. If it's too humid for sweating to work, it's a miserable way to die.
https://www.dw.com/en/termite-air-conditioning-runs-on-smart...