Still not convinced adding air conditioning everywhere is a good idea for combating a rise in temperatures globally.
Sounds like a feedback loop to me, you know, like wooooooeeeeeeeoooooowwwee etc.
@mxtthxw AC just moves heat from *here* to *there*, and it does so by adding its own waste heat (and other wastes) to the environment. This creates greater thermal instability by creating pockets of hot and cold that will push to mix together to lower overall entropy.
So definitely not good for combatting global warming.
The thermodynamics are more complicated than that, though.
For example, concentrated heat may be more effectively bled off into space, as thermal radiation increases at the fourth power.
No, I'm not saying this is the solution to it all, but only that it's more complicated than just moving heat.
@volkris @mxtthxw You still can't escape the Laws of Thermodynamics. The heat that AC takes from your home has to go somewhere. All the heat from all the buildings with AC is going into the environment.
How much heat this includes and what the impact of adding it is, that's a matter for the maths to determine.
Right, and through thermodynamics that heat can go all sorts of places ranging from effective sequestration on the planet through (most importantly) being shipped offworld into space through radiation.
And it can be moved around in ways to make that heat rejection more efficient.
Thermodynamics says this heat WANTS to get up into the cold of space, and there are ways we can move it around to help it get there faster!
@volkris @mxtthxw
It can be moved around how, exactly?
Yes, heat "wants" to get to the cold spots, but it does so at only a certain rate dictated by the properties of the materials through which it passes. Generating heat faster than the system can move it around will lead to buildup and Very Bad Things.
If nothing else, heat pumps are the common way of actively moving heat around.
But there are all kinds of clever ways to move heat around, ranging from taking advantage of natural phenomena like flowing rivers through chemical reactions and radiative cooling.
But again, it's not so simple as a rate dictated by the properties of materials. Other factors, particular temperature gradients, play huge roles.
The simplest example is that heat conduction is proportional to the difference in temperatures, so the rate of heat conduction varies depending on temperatures on each end for the same material.
@volkris @mxtthxw
Ok. Design me a system that collects, say, all the excess heat currently in the Earth's oceans and vents it all into space - actual space, not just the atmosphere.
Take your time. I'll wait.