It can also be read as health-sensible reminder given the climate warnings. AC units demand is already up 26% year over year in my country (according to our biggest online retailer, a month ago). Will be a highly profitable year for manufacturers.
This is not supported by facts. People won't spend money on equipment they don't need. Most places in France do not need air conditioning (or did not need it).
It makes no sense that a building owner or transit agency would spend limited funds on something that they do not need.
One may argue that the government of France should have imposed some mandate that people install air conditioning, similar to how Texas failed to mandate insulation for its natural gas infrastructure.
Such mandates would not have been popular unless they were funded. And even then I doubt they would have been popular but they also would have come with considerable cost to the taxpayer.
There is additionally a cultural feeling in some parts of Europe (Germany) that conditioned air is stale and unhealthy. This is not "ideology" but it will certainly contribute to the idea that mass spending on rarely used equipment is wasteful.
Finally, the entire world is unprepared for global warning, Including the USA.
If the next massive climate disaster hits the US, say a drought or mega storm will the message be that "US climate denial ideology caused this" or will it be "nobody could have predicted this; random act of God; thoughts and prayers; nothing to be learned?"
No general A/C might be the case in regions that never needed it before (mild summers, cold winters), but their presence is increasing.
* Not aimed at all the wonderful, sane and reasonable people of the USA.
While US, China and rest of the world did nothing similar, just stood and let shit hit the fan hard. Gotta milk those petrodollars till the last cent because thats all that counts, fuck our children right. Yeah we are not going to burn ourselves further to the cinder to prove some anonymous yostrovs something he anyway refuses to see.
Seems pretty short-sighted to me.
Also, it overheated instantly.
But since modern buildings usually have huge windows, we're letting in about 1kw of heat from sunlight per square meter of window. That's 6kw for a 3x2m bay window, or about the equivalent of 6 electric heaters at full power.
Block that heat ouside of your house with all kind of shade you can get: trees, blinds, adjustable shades, rolling shutters...
Also, close every openings during the day, vent at night.
It'd be better to block the sun before it hits the window though, so that the window itself does not get hot and heat the inside.
Edit: people generally use emergency blankets, fyi. You can stick them to the glass with water.
Edit: We cannot blame people for buildings things that worked when we had a stable climate but are no long suitable for all these extremes. We needed to fix the emissions issue 30-50 year ago to avoid this. We knew it and we collectively ignored it. I get your point, we could've "planned ahead" but if you build something that wasn't suitable / cost effective for the time it was built, you'd be out of business.
50 years ago no one was going to pay extra for a building that might be important in 100 years because we didn't stop burning fossil fuels in time.
Correct. And we'd be "out of business" too as a country if we decided alone to fix emissions. Other economies would have passed ours because burning oil is so damn useful.
Thing is, I don't feel we are changing much in this respect. Now the best idea we come up with is burning more fuel for aircon...
I mean really what else is there? We can't undo the warming, we can't rebuild every building in Europe (even if we could, would it work? Winter will still happen too). We can install solar panels and air conditioners, though.
We can update building regulations so that new building are better.
We can plant trees. It brings shade in summer but lets sun through in winter.
We can stop taking the plane.
I mean, there really are tons of things to do!
Before you do that, do the cost effective thing: shadow and wind. Then you can add an aircon iff thats not enough.
For shadow, reftrofitting adjustable sunshade is pretty effective. Sunlight brings about 1kw per square meter of window. That like having your heater at full power when its already hot.
For wind: fans, preferably ceiling fans. Lowers perceived temperature by about 3.5 °C.
That is not correct. Heat, wind and humidity all contribute.
In a dry air with no wind, your body creates a "hot and humid" bubble around it if you are not moving. A fan helps.
Humid but neither cold nor hot air may not feel great, but not that bad.
Hot and humid air with no wind, now that's bad.
Edit: I know because I added shades and fans.
Edit: you can still use an AC or dehumidifier on top of it. You will consume less energy with shades.
Letting the sun in is like letting your heaters on. You would not turn on both heaters and aircon in summer, would you?
Most heat pump installations in Europe are air-to-water systems fitted to use the existing piping in old homes and is used only for heating. Such installations can, in theory, be used for cooling, but very inefficiently.
I'm not sure thats true.
Most aircon in "warm" europe is standard split aircon
The "heatpump" shit that the UK is sorta looking at is as you describe. However its half the price to install "aircon" over heatpumps (because grants, amongst other things)
Like most recently refurbished offices will use normal aircon (certainly all the one I have worked in)
I've been doing some research into this, because I would ideally like to get this system so I can make use of the existing radiators in my old house, but I do also want to have the option of cooling my home. It does seem like Fan Coil Units (FCUs) are an option for this. Anyone have experience with these? Are they really inefficient compared to standard air-to-air units?
The possible real fixes are either to section off your water circuits in summer, and only run the properly cold water through FCUs, wall or ceiling loops.
Or to get a multisplit heat pump, use a normal refrigerant-air indoor unit to cool and a refrigerant-water indoor unit to heat the water loops.
In that scenario, are FPUs a good option? Are there other drawbacks?
Even then, there is a fair limit in cooling and efficiency you can get from them because of the lack of phase changes occurring.
If you have a balanced mechanical ventilation (both inlet and outlet) that would be one of the best options to condition the whole house without putting air conditioning units everywhere. Having said that, we turn on the air conditioning in the attic during hot days which removes the biggest heat and moisture from the house. Next up is installing more sun blinds to prevent the heat from entering in the first place.
You just have the added equipment and maintenance for the water/glycol loop vs an air to air system that only pipes refrigerant around. Fan coil units or VAV boxes are the usual terminal units for commercial HVAC systems that have a chilled and hot water loop, VAVs are used in a system with ducted AHUs and FCUs are used for apartments (stacked FCUs with vertical supply/return risers) or spaces not served by ducted air handlers for whatever reason.
That's the neat part, you don't.
Europe has saved on CO2 emissions by moving production to China, and more recently to India and Southern Asia, moving energy generation for factories onto coal power, significantly INCREASING the rate at which climate change occurs.
China and India have made it very clear that, first, they will continue to do this. Also adding solar power, but not lowering coal power. They added that it is "inappropriate" to even ask them to do so (that was China).
Oh and thanks to reliance on Russian gas, and the Ukraine war, the EU is forced to move to coal and LNG supplies, which are even worse than coal. Plus, of course, that means that it's not just coal plants getting worse for climate change but almost all power plants in Europe.
To do something about it, due to Jevon's paradox the only countries that can lower CO2 emissions are the ones digging up fossil fuels. Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela, US, Norway, the Netherlands, Britain. You have zero chance to convince any of them to stop doing it, burning and selling oil, not even Norway is doing that. And any oil or gas dug up and sold will be burned.
There never was any serious intent, not even on the part of the greens (at least not in Germany, I mean, they even published an article on the subject: eliminating nuclear power was more important than climate change in 2003). And if even they weren't willing to make it a priority, who exactly are you supposing will do it?
Even in 2026, even Germany, increased it's reliance on coal (they're keeping 10GW of additional coal power at the ready, on top of the 20% of Germany's power that's constantly using coal), similar measures have been taken in Japan, Italy, and India has even delayed maintenance on existing coal power plants to increase electricity production from them.
And of course, there's the basic physics part. Aside from a small rounding error climate change is cumulative. Which means once fossil fuels are burned the temperature will rise accordingly. Even if we stopped burning it won't get better.
To merely stop climate change from getting worse, just that, nothing more, we have to cut CO2 emissions worldwide by 99.7 (and some models say 99.97%, there's a surprising range there). That will just stop it from getting worse. It won't make it better. Anything less is not "a good effort" it simply makes things worse.
All policies taken so far to stop climate change have not just made things worse, but increased the rate at which it's getting worse. Doing nothing at all would have been a lot better (because it would have kept factories in the EU going, on much cleaner power).
Oh, and by the way, this was all perfectly clear and known 10 years ago, and nobody changed course. So ...
There is no remotely realistic solution in the current policy directions.
And geoengineering ... is not really allowed to be discussed. Or this argument is being put forward at the UN. Any (successful) geoengineering will have dramatic negative consequences for some states and people. And since that is considered unacceptable, because large portions of the human race are currently dependent on global warming continuing. We won't do that either. People's lives, jobs, work and so on depend on things continuing and we cannot demand they change.
So yeah, I'd get some solar panels and an air conditioner.
Please bring some shade and save energy.
Edit: also, without wind there is a hot and humid bubble around our own body. Fans help a lot with that by bringing fresh dry air right onto the sweat so it can evaporate.
Have an AC if you need to. But please dont have only an AC. Shading and fans pay for themselve in energy savings.
Remember that 1.5 degrees Celsius is a nearly end-of-the-world scenario and we're currently about 1.1 degrees.
All that warming that we caused but didn't actually happen? Turns out the ocean saves it up.
No, it's not end of the world. 3C is where things start getting bad. 1.5C is the target for the 2015 Paris climate agreement to try and avoid hitting 2C.
We are looking at more severe droughts, flash floods, and rising oceans where we are at, but not the worst of it like mass 40C wet bulb heat domes which wipe out all life underneath them.
That's the sort of event that becomes much more likely if not inevitable as the temperatures increase.
I should have said "land life" as the ocean temperature doesn't shift that much with the above ocean temps.
And I'm sure there's some random bacteria and fungus that can survive and thrive at 40C web bulb.
What doesn't tend to do so well is the likes of humans, birds, cattle, horses, mice, rats, insects, many crops, native animal life that didn't evolve to handle high heat temperatures.
The last time earth will have been as hot as the 3C temperature was prehistorically.
Average temperature moves in cycles. By confusing single-year temperatures with the 1.5C target, you're just going to make people think "crisis averted" once 2028 turns out to be cold.
Oh and it effectively doesn't matter: to merely stop global warming we need 99.7% less fossil fuel production (and that needs to include everything from Saudi oil to Japanese coal)
So why would it matter? Because we feel it? We are not willing to implement real policy when we feel it. We are not willing to implement real policy when we don't feel it.
And geoengineering ... while it at least has the possibility for someone to just do that without the agreement of everyone ... so at least there's the realistic option to do something, so many nations, so many people, have their lives utterly dependent on climate change continuing. So nobody's making serious plans for that either (because, realistically, it'll mean war if something like that is implemented. Which is still better than doing nothing imho)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVlRompc1yE
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcxQZ8ub54Y
These are the conversations that get translated into policy. They are literally about directly satisfying people's emotions. No detours. Accuracy? I hope you're joking.
AND there's the problem that the policy the "pro-global-warming" camp wants will not even help. Global CO2 emission reduction is not realistic.
I'm working in AI and hoping that will help. If I had the realistic option (I have a family to support), I'd love to work in Chemistry to make it at least possible, maybe even easy, to do something about that (of course, even Chemistry products are being designed with AI, so ...). Achieving anything in policy seems to me beyond absurd. In fact I find it very hard to defend the viewpoint that even the policymakers pushing global warming action even want to help. Technological solutions at least might achieve something.
Metaphorically relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limnic_eruption