Sorry, I can't embed this on the page .. Video: Scientist says global warming could make you sick .. this is a Stanford Univ scientist trying to say that air conditioning is the solution to global warming. And here I thought they only hired brilliant people for Stanford.
She says something like "Humans are smart enough to go inside, to the air conditioning, when it's hot" and then goes on to say that in many places the infrastructure isn't good enough to support air conditioning. Conditions are very primitive in many places on the earth, they don't have the electricity supply, or the electricity isn't stable, or they don't have air conditioners available etc. So in those places there's going to be more disease when it's hot and therefore global warming will make "us" more sick.
Oh.. sheesh.. she's probably right to some degree .. but air conditioning just makes global warming worse. First what air conditioning does is shift heat from inside a building to outside a building. So the air in the immediate surrounding of the building is hotter than it would be if there were not an air conditioner in that building. Have a city full of buildings all having air conditioning, and you have a mass transfer of heat from inside buildings to outside. This is no doubt part of what forms the heat bubble around cities where it's hotter in a city than out in the countryside. I wrote a little about this last year: Air Conditioning: "We're cooking our planet to refrigerate the diminishing part that's still habitable"
Second, the electricity to drive the air conditioner usually is derived from a generator that causes global warming gasses to be emitted.
Finally, air conditioning is just a bandaid over the real problem.
