Comment by aaronbrethorst

In case you don't know, there is a meme in the US that Europe don't know/don't have A/C. We do, but in some coutries there are laws banning A/C below 25°C (77°F) in public places, so (US) tourist don't get the cold air hit when entering a building like a musseum, leaving with the impression we don't know A/C.

No general A/C might be the case in regions that never needed it before (mild summers, cold winters), but their presence is increasing.

That's an uncharitable interpretation of the initial comment.

It can also be read as health-sensible reminder given the climate warnings. AC units demand is already up 26% year over year in my country (according to our biggest online retailer, a month ago). Will be a highly profitable year for manufacturers.

The thing is that both sides have a point. European countries (notably France) have known for at least 30 years that this was coming, but was ideologically insisting not to install proper AC or even ventilation in public spaces and transport. This does not contradict the wider angle about Americans ignoring climate change.

There's a lot to criticise of every country, but we're trying. The US is not trying (*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement#/media/File:Pa...

* Not aimed at all the wonderful, sane and reasonable people of the USA.

> if Europe immediately stopped using coal, drastically reduced airline usage, quit building gasoline cars

we (the EU, not Europe) are indeed phasing out coal (most countries are already done) and EVs are at 24% of the market (June 26) which is about 4x the US EV marketshare and rising fast.

> Europe mostly shifted their dirty work to Asia and North America

There is a carbon tariff (CBAM) for some imports, will be gradually expanded in the next few years.

That' not marginally better, that's way way better.

We literally destroyed our car industry to try to steer the incoming catastrophe a bit, what the fuck do you want more. Germany tried to be the leader of solar but that was stolen err migrated to China, whole world profits now.

While US, China and rest of the world did nothing similar, just stood and let shit hit the fan hard. Gotta milk those petrodollars till the last cent because thats all that counts, fuck our children right. Yeah we are not going to burn ourselves further to the cinder to prove some anonymous yostrovs something he anyway refuses to see.

This. Add to the list: consuming huge amounts of meat while depriving themselves of AC "for the planet".

Insulation is actually helpul against heat too!

But since modern buildings usually have huge windows, we're letting in about 1kw of heat from sunlight per square meter of window. That's 6kw for a 3x2m bay window, or about the equivalent of 6 electric heaters at full power.

Block that heat ouside of your house with all kind of shade you can get: trees, blinds, adjustable shades, rolling shutters...

Also, close every openings during the day, vent at night.

One way insulation does not exist. If your house is insulated to keep the heat inside, it is also very good at keeping the heat outside / cold inside.

Also tangentially many Europeans seem to be confusing insulation with inertia, saying their house is correctly insulated against the heat when in fact it’s just a stone building that is taking more time to heat up. At the extreme you have European churches buildings that are very badly insulated but stay cold most of summer because of all the stone mass.

One thing Europeans have yet to realize is that good insulation only works when the nights are cold enough to evacuate the heat before it reaches the inside, and that during a strong heatwave there is no adaptation possible, AC is needed.

I'd try hanging long sheets of aluminum foil in too-large windows. I imagine someone in academia has studied this.

Also windows that go down to the floor has been considered bad architecture for decades.

Wall-to-wall windows are great.

Floor-to-ceiling windows are stunning when you walk into an empty place that you're thinking about buying or renting, but when you're actually living there, windows that go down to the floor create a few feet of dead space. You can't really put any furniture there without feeling guilty about blocking the view you're paying for, and it's uncomfortable to walk up to the edge and look down - it makes you feel uneasy like you're standing on a cliff with your toes at the edge. It's much better for the window to end around waist high.

They're psychologically fine if both the floor and the ceiling extend beyond the window (e.g. it's on the ground floor, and the roof overhangs), but when they're used on every floor in a high rise apartment building, killing limited square footage and driving up energy bills, it's absolute madness.

Obviously, Mediterranean, Spanish or Adobe type buildings would have been better, and not the northern European style of architecture.

> you'd be out of business.

Correct. And we'd be "out of business" too as a country if we decided alone to fix emissions. Other economies would have passed ours because burning oil is so damn useful.

Thing is, I don't feel we are changing much in this respect. Now the best idea we come up with is burning more fuel for aircon...

...or not ? As el Nino would say: Porque no los dos ?

> Uncomfortable heat has nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with air humidity

That is not correct. Heat, wind and humidity all contribute.

In a dry air with no wind, your body creates a "hot and humid" bubble around it if you are not moving. A fan helps.

Humid but neither cold nor hot air may not feel great, but not that bad.

Hot and humid air with no wind, now that's bad.

Edit: I know because I added shades and fans.

The problem is, if you feed cold water into your normal heating pipes, all the piping and radiators will get wet from condensation. So you would have to have a regulator that measures air moisture and temperature in all your rooms and only feeds water with a temperature above the dew point. This is possible, but inefficient and (especially on hot+wet days) doesn't cool very well.

The possible real fixes are either to section off your water circuits in summer, and only run the properly cold water through FCUs, wall or ceiling loops.

Or to get a multisplit heat pump, use a normal refrigerant-air indoor unit to cool and a refrigerant-water indoor unit to heat the water loops.

Fan coil units work just fine, you’ll need to install a condensate drain but other than that it works like a mini-split evaporator/fan air handler.

You just have the added equipment and maintenance for the water/glycol loop vs an air to air system that only pipes refrigerant around. Fan coil units or VAV boxes are the usual terminal units for commercial HVAC systems that have a chilled and hot water loop, VAVs are used in a system with ducted AHUs and FCUs are used for apartments (stacked FCUs with vertical supply/return risers) or spaces not served by ducted air handlers for whatever reason.

Your take is too fatalistic because any reduction in Co2 emissions is helpful. It isn't an all or nothing thing.

The cost estimates for eliminating Co2 emissions are also not very high. In the range of 1-2x total GDP. Would be doable if 3-5% of GDP is spent over the next 20-30 years.

I agree that all oil will be dug up and sold but there is a caveat: not at any price. If solar and wind continue their trajectory their dominance is inevitable.

Would please install adjustable shades and ceiling fans first? And also plant a few trees if you can?

This is an incorrect way to frame the impacts of temperature increases. 1.5, 2, 3C makes extreme events like the one you stated significantly more likely in a probabilistic sense. The ability of adapt is in part driven by frequency of extreme events as much as it is adaptability to specific thresholds. We are already experiencing deadly heat bulb events at current warming levels, the impacted areas and frequency of these events will strictly increase.

Bad? Things are already fucking bad.

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Does that matter? The only thing that can be done, is for oil producers to stop digging up fossil fuels. And not even Norway is willing to do that, to say nothing about Russia or China, even this year. And that, not digging up the fossil fuel is the only way. If it's dug up, it will be burned. Guaranteed.

Oh and it effectively doesn't matter: to merely stop global warming we need 99.7% less fossil fuel production (and that needs to include everything from Saudi oil to Japanese coal)

So why would it matter? Because we feel it? We are not willing to implement real policy when we feel it. We are not willing to implement real policy when we don't feel it.

And geoengineering ... while it at least has the possibility for someone to just do that without the agreement of everyone ... so at least there's the realistic option to do something, so many nations, so many people, have their lives utterly dependent on climate change continuing. So nobody's making serious plans for that either (because, realistically, it'll mean war if something like that is implemented. Which is still better than doing nothing imho)

Well they seem to have switched to releasing stored heat. Isn't that basically the El Nino / La Nina cycle?

Metaphorically relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limnic_eruption

To vaporize 10^21 kg of seawater from ~4 °C to 100 °C would require ~10^27 joules, around 16 trillion Hiroshimas or ~2.5 seconds of the sun's output.

the oceans can adsorb a great deal more heat, but all the ice will melt, while the deap ocean water expands, from it's rather odd temperature ,that keeps it at the highest density possible, about .5% more than if it were just a bit warmer, so more warming will cause very significsnt sea level rise through several different mechanisms related to heat.