From a spammer (possible copyright violation as a crude cut-and-paste, so no attribution needs be made):
The rest is my doing, so this should remain should the spammer be 'excised'. Moderator, I will not be offended if the material above in the quote is itself excised. Just preserve my material -- please!
Yesterday the temperature reached 91 F less than a week before the autumnal equinox, which isn't abnormal in a place like Dallas. It's the end of summer, so we can take it here... in southern Michigan. One effect of global warming is extended summers, and 91 F in mid-September isn't too bad because we are used to it after July and August. It may be odd to see leaves changing colors during such weather, but that is one of the anomalies that can happen. But if the extension is on the other side, as in April, then it is really troublesome. Where I live April is our spring, because March is still wintry and May is practically summer.
People who expect to solve the problems of global warming by using air conditioners or turning them on earlier and using them more often and later may not be thinking of one of the side-effects of air-conditioning: waste heat that goes into the atmosphere. I have gone outside on a hot day in Greater Dallas and walked past the exhaust from an air conditioner, only to experience a veritable inferno.
Any mechanical process has waste heat as a consequence, and air conditioning units are no exception. Air conditioners take heat out of a house while cooling it from what might otherwise be 95F to perhaps 75F (if you are thrifty enough) or 68F or so (as in a place that needs cool temperatures, as in a nursing home) and puts it into the atmosphere. The waste heat cannot do work that has been paid for, most likely through the consumption of fossil fuels. If not fossil fuels -- let us say, hydroelectric power or solar energy -- then the waste heat still goes into the atmosphere. This explains the heat islands (although there are plenty of other causes of waste heat such as vehicle use, industrial processes, and even the setting of cement) in and around large cities.
The first city in Michigan to go from a Dfa climate (hot summers, precipitation all year, and cold enough for persistent winter snow) to a Cfa climate (long hot summers and winters too warm for persistent snow) will be Detroit due to a heat island effect and not some community such as Niles, Sturgis, or Morenci practically on the state line. The climatic divide went through New York City during the last half century and is going through Providence and Boston about now. Heat strokes will become more commonplace in Detroit, Kalamazoo, and Lansing as summer temperatures go from unpleasantly hot to dangerously hot.
Let's remember something about grain production, which has much to do with climate: good crop yields from Ohio to the Dakotas depend upon real winters with real blizzards that cover the soil with snow that protects the soil from evaporation of ground water under winter winds and then melts in the spring just as crops are germinating and really need soil moisture. High crop yields keep food prices from soaring and causing economic distress for people who must work cheaply if the plutocratic economy is to supply us with cheap stuff. Winter blizzards may not be pleasant, but farmers need those for good crop yields. You need them for inexpensive food.
OK, New York City isn't much of a crop-growing area, and neither is southern New England. But Michigan is. Agriculture is big in Michigan, and it is becoming more important to the economy as the auto industry loses its bloom and gets dispersed elsewhere. See also Ohio and Indiana, in which other industries once dominant a century ago are in decline. Agriculture increases as a share of the economy by default.
Turning up the air conditioner will devour more energy and release more waste heat. It is like having a drink to solve a hangover.
Quote:On a sweltering Thursday evening in Manhattan last month, people across New York City were preparing for what meteorologists predicted would be the hottest weekend of the year. Over the past two decades, every record for peak electricity use in the city has occurred during a heatwave, as millions of people turn on their air conditioning units at the same time. And so, at the midtown headquarters of Con Edison, the company that supplies more than 10 million people in the New York area with electricity, employees were busy turning a conference room on the 19th floor into an emergency command centre.
Inside the conference room, close to 80 engineers and company executives, joined by representatives of the city’s emergency management department, monitored the status of the city power grid, directed ground crews and watched a set of dials displaying each borough’s electricity use tick upward. “It’s like the bridge in Star Trek in there,” Anthony Suozzo, a former senior system operator with the company, told me. “You’ve got all hands on deck, they’re telling Scotty to fix things, the system is running at max capacity.”
Power grids are measured by the amount of electricity that can pass through them at any one time. Con Edison’s grid, with 62 power substations and more than 130,000 miles of power lines and cables across New York City and Westchester County, can deliver 13,400MW every second. This is roughly equivalent to 18m horsepower.
On a regular day, New York City demands around 10,000MW every second; during a heatwave, that figure can exceed 13,000MW. “Do the math, whatever that gap is, is the AC,” Michael Clendenin, a company spokesman, told me. The combination of high demand and extreme temperature can cause parts of the system to overheat and fail, leading to blackouts. In 2006, equipment failure left 175,000 people in Queens without power for a week, during a heatwave that killed 40 people.
This year, by the evening of Sunday 21 July, with temperatures above 36C (97F) and demand at more than 12,000MW every second, Con Edison cut power to 50,000 customers in Brooklyn and Queens for 24 hours, afraid that parts of the nearby grid were close to collapse, which could have left hundreds of thousands of people without power for days. The state had to send in police to help residents, and Con Edison crews dispensed dry ice for people to cool their homes.
As the world gets hotter, scenes like these will become increasingly common. Buying a VRF air conditioner is perhaps the most popular individual response to climate change, and air conditioners are almost uniquely power-hungry appliances: a small unit cooling a single room, on average, consumes more power than running four fridges, while a central unit cooling an average house uses more power than 15. “Last year in Beijing, during a heatwave, 50% of the power capacity was going to air conditioning,” says John Dulac, an analyst at the International Energy Agency (IEA). “These are ‘oh shit’ moments.”
The rest is my doing, so this should remain should the spammer be 'excised'. Moderator, I will not be offended if the material above in the quote is itself excised. Just preserve my material -- please!
Yesterday the temperature reached 91 F less than a week before the autumnal equinox, which isn't abnormal in a place like Dallas. It's the end of summer, so we can take it here... in southern Michigan. One effect of global warming is extended summers, and 91 F in mid-September isn't too bad because we are used to it after July and August. It may be odd to see leaves changing colors during such weather, but that is one of the anomalies that can happen. But if the extension is on the other side, as in April, then it is really troublesome. Where I live April is our spring, because March is still wintry and May is practically summer.
People who expect to solve the problems of global warming by using air conditioners or turning them on earlier and using them more often and later may not be thinking of one of the side-effects of air-conditioning: waste heat that goes into the atmosphere. I have gone outside on a hot day in Greater Dallas and walked past the exhaust from an air conditioner, only to experience a veritable inferno.
Any mechanical process has waste heat as a consequence, and air conditioning units are no exception. Air conditioners take heat out of a house while cooling it from what might otherwise be 95F to perhaps 75F (if you are thrifty enough) or 68F or so (as in a place that needs cool temperatures, as in a nursing home) and puts it into the atmosphere. The waste heat cannot do work that has been paid for, most likely through the consumption of fossil fuels. If not fossil fuels -- let us say, hydroelectric power or solar energy -- then the waste heat still goes into the atmosphere. This explains the heat islands (although there are plenty of other causes of waste heat such as vehicle use, industrial processes, and even the setting of cement) in and around large cities.
The first city in Michigan to go from a Dfa climate (hot summers, precipitation all year, and cold enough for persistent winter snow) to a Cfa climate (long hot summers and winters too warm for persistent snow) will be Detroit due to a heat island effect and not some community such as Niles, Sturgis, or Morenci practically on the state line. The climatic divide went through New York City during the last half century and is going through Providence and Boston about now. Heat strokes will become more commonplace in Detroit, Kalamazoo, and Lansing as summer temperatures go from unpleasantly hot to dangerously hot.
Let's remember something about grain production, which has much to do with climate: good crop yields from Ohio to the Dakotas depend upon real winters with real blizzards that cover the soil with snow that protects the soil from evaporation of ground water under winter winds and then melts in the spring just as crops are germinating and really need soil moisture. High crop yields keep food prices from soaring and causing economic distress for people who must work cheaply if the plutocratic economy is to supply us with cheap stuff. Winter blizzards may not be pleasant, but farmers need those for good crop yields. You need them for inexpensive food.
OK, New York City isn't much of a crop-growing area, and neither is southern New England. But Michigan is. Agriculture is big in Michigan, and it is becoming more important to the economy as the auto industry loses its bloom and gets dispersed elsewhere. See also Ohio and Indiana, in which other industries once dominant a century ago are in decline. Agriculture increases as a share of the economy by default.
Turning up the air conditioner will devour more energy and release more waste heat. It is like having a drink to solve a hangover.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.