Can air conditioning save you?

AuthorCox, Stan
PositionThe Heat Is On

So far, this has been the century of escalating heat waves, hurricanes, droughts, "snowmageddons," and floods. But the most direct impact of global warming is seen in, well, the warming. 2010 was the hottest year on record globally; in this country, heat waves made larger-than-normal headlines because they hit the East Coast hard. Then in 2011, a wide swath of the Great Plains, from my home in Salina, Kansas down through Texas, lived under Phoenix-like conditions for much of the summer. Phoenix, I understand, was worse than Phoenix.

There is always a silver lining to be found in heat waves: the knowledge that there is an end in sight. As your brain broils, you can cling to the 10-day forecast and that happy day when the next cool front will arrive and end the misery. But as greenhouse emissions accumulate in coming years, heat waves could start sticking around not for days but for weeks and months. What once was considered hot summer weather could start turning up on the first day of spring.

Noah Diffenbaugh, assistant professor at Stanford University and lead author of a new report on climate extremes, predicts that "large areas of the globe are likely to warm up so quickly that, by the middle of this century, even the coolest summers will be hotter than the hottest summers of the past 50 years."

Previous research by Diffenbaugh and his colleagues suggested that here in this country, summer-long heat alerts may become the rule even sooner, within just a few years. They projected that across much of the United States, location by location, 4 out of the next 10 years could feature summers hotter than the most torrid summer of the 1950-2000 era. By the 2030s, we'll see such extreme summers even more often: maybe every other year on average, maybe 4 years out of 5, depending on where you live.

And if recent history tells us anything, it's that further heating of the outdoors will prompt a lot more indoor cooling. Since global warming became a national concern two decades ago, we have more than doubled our energy use for home air conditioning. If climate scientists have their forecasts right, we will see an even more rapid increase in air conditioning use in the next few decades. Emissions from power plants responding to that increased summer demand would, in turn, add to the Earth's blanket of greenhouse gases, forcing air conditioning systems to run even harder. But how significant might that climate impact be?

There is no way to predict with...

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