Rolling Stone: We’re In An Air Conditioned Nightmare Or Something

Remember when Rolling Stone used to focus on music and stuff? How they were counter-culture like rock and roll, sticking it to the man, not taking the side of Government? Boy howdy, that’s changed quite a bit. What surely hasn’t changed is how the office of Rolling Stone, along with all the employees at their homes, are still air conditioned to a very comfortable temperature (you can read the whole thing here at Yahoo News)

Our Air-Conditioned Nightmare

Heat is entropy. Heat is chaos. The hotter something gets, the more kinetic energy it has: molecules vibrate, relationships change, life overheats, things die.

You can see that out west right now. Last week, a heat dome formed over the Great Plains all the way out to the California coast. Salt Lake City boiled at 107°F, the hottest temperature ever recorded there. In Las Vegas, it was more than 100 degrees at night. Phoenix hit at least 115°F five days in a row, setting a new record for the city. The health impacts of heat waves are difficult to track in real time, but public-health officials in the Phoenix area are already investigating the heat-related deaths of nine people in a single day (June 17th). More heat is forecast for this week, this summer, and, as long as the world keeps burning fossil fuels, many years to come. Brutal as it seems, this is just heat bootcamp compared to what we will be facing in the not-so-distant future.

Interestingly, we’re told that cold weather records are either meaningless or actually support the climate crisis (scam).

But long before that, the most obvious impact of extreme heat is that it pushes people to turn on – and turn up – their air-conditioning. With cool air, you can feel the chaos within you subsiding. But it comes at a cost: AC sucks up huge amounts of electricity, which strains the grid and increases the risk of blackouts. More electricity also means burning fossil fuels, which means more CO2 pollution (President Biden has promised a 100 percent clean electricity grid by 2035, but that’s still a long way off). In addition, hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), the human-made chemicals inside of air-conditioners used to cool the air, are super greenhouse gases, up to 3,000 times more potent than CO2 at trapping heat in the atmosphere. What it comes down to is this: By cooling ourselves off, we risk cooking ourselves to death.

It wouldn’t strain the grid if we weren’t replacing viable, dependable, affordable energy sources with unreliable, undependable, more expensive sources. We rarely have issues with energy here in North Carolina during high temperature spells. You would think areas, such as Nevada and Arizona, would build a power supply and grid that supports an area that gets hot, and is seeing a lot of people moving there.

And it’s pretty much a given that as the planet heats up, the demand for air-conditioning will grow fast, especially in the developing world, where air-conditioning is still a luxury that few people can afford. There are just over 1 billion single-room air conditioning units in the world right now – about one for every seven people on Earth. By 2050, there are likely to be more than 4.5 billion units, making them as common as cellphones today.

Rolling Stone is upset that those black and brown people in other countries will start using the same AC that Rolling Stone uses

What’s the solution to this cascade of heat-driven chaos? The most obvious one: Stop burning fossil fuels. For all intents and purposes, when carbon emissions reach zero, warming will stop and the temperature in the atmosphere will level-out (they will stay at that level until CO2 levels fall, which, barring the massive deployment of some new technology that can suck CO2 out of the atmosphere, will take many hundreds of years). But since we are obviously not going to be living in a zero-carbon world anytime soon, increasing the efficiency of AC units can help, as can developing and commercializing new technologies to cool the air without destroying the planet (in the U.S., new efficiency standards for AC units will take effect in 2023). In some places, heat pumps, which both heat and cool buildings, can be a smart option. And earlier this year, the winners of a $1 million Global Cooling Prize were announced, showcasing new technology that promises to have five times less climate impact than traditional AC units.

What if warming doesn’t stop? What if most warming is caused by natural processes? What then? Has Rolling Stone given up it’s own use of fossil fuels? How about the readership who’s agreeing with the article?

But there are simpler solutions, too. Last week, the respected medical journal Lancet published a largely overlooked paper about humble technology that can do a lot to help solve the problems of extreme heat: the electric fan.

Will you give up your use of AC and start using fans instead? How about you, all your Warmists? No takers? RS spends their next eight paragraphs telling us that fans are awesome, but, doesn’t have a photo of fans all over the RS office with the AC turned off. Weird, right?