Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Air Conditioning

According to a new paper in Geophysical Research Letters, global warming implies more need for A/C than it does reduced heating needs:
"...increases in carbon emissions from higher air conditioning needs more than offset decreases in carbon emissions from reduced heating needs."
If I had to guess, I would have guessed that way (I think). It seems to me more people live closer to the equator than farther away from it.

Source: Hadley et al., Geophysical Research Letters paper 10.1029/2006GL026652, 2006.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

david,

with a modest warming in the higher lattitudes the population will shift. people now live near the equator because it's warmer there.

Anonymous said...

Yeah David... we can always relocate?

C'mon.

Let's see... Well start with:

Mexico City (pop = 22,800,000)
Calcutta (pop = 15,650,000)
Rio de Janeiro (pop 12,150,000)
Jakarta (pop = 16,550,000)

No problems with crime or poverty or ethnic conflict in those places, right?

Great! Next we'll do:

Manila (pop = 14,950,000)
Cairo (pop = 15,600,000)
Dacca (pop = 13,250,000)

and so on....

Duncan Young said...

Half the earth's surface area lies between 30 and -30 degrees latitude. 70% between the 45th parallels.

There just isn't that much room toward the poles. Spherical geometry is a bitch.

Anonymous said...

Is global warming just a natural process, a volcano eruption can produce from emmissions in an hour than all the countries cars and businesses and air conditioning units can in a year, so is this a govermental issue to raise taxes and control populations ?