In a Warming World Air Conditioning Only Makes Things Worse

In a special edition of the journal Public Library of Science (PLOS) Medicine dedicated to climate change, a team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison makes some dire predictions. They forecast that air conditioning used to cool our buildings will further add to air pollution, causing as many as a thousand additional deaths annually in the Eastern United States alone.

“What we found is that air pollution will get worse,” explains David Abel, the lead author of the new report and a UW-Madison graduate student in the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies’ Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment. “There are consequences for adapting to future climate change.”

It’s a good example of a feedback loop: greenhouse gas emissions cause summer temperatures to get hotter and hotter. People want to cool themselves, so they turn on the AC, which uses more energy and causes more emissions.

Read more at In a Warming World Air Conditioning Only Makes Things Worse