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.
Excuse the double-response, but I was passing some commercial cooling towers today and thought they'd be a great example to answer your question.
In many commercial and industrial settings they've realized that by transporting heat to centralized plants they're able to deal with it more efficiently, creating less additional heat for the same amount of end-use cooling.
Those sites could line up minisplit systems for every office to handle the same amount of heat, but carrying it away in a single evaporative cooling tower handles the same amount of heat more efficiently and effectively.
Still not gonna stop global warming. Any time you create a gradient - like putting the heat that's in a building outside the building - you have to consume energy. That consumption creates heat. And the heat you've moved into the atmosphere could take thousands of years to vent to space.
Again it's more complicated than that. The math is just more complicated.
If you expend energy, heat energy yes, to change to a more effective way of managing heat, basically sometimes that investment leads to a net gain in heat ejection.
Or to put it practically, the relatively small amount of heat that water pumps produce might pay off in enormously more effective rejection of heat into space.
Stopping global warming is a completely different question. There's no panacea here. However, the point is that the math is a little more complicated, and sometimes spending a little extra heat energy will pay off by better managing the base load that is a given.
