It’s mid-July and air-conditioners are humming around the country.
It’s mid-July and air-conditioners are humming around the country. But what will happen to air-conditioning costs—and the energy required to power it—when climate change causes it to feel like July for many more months of the year?
Many of the consequences of climate change are well reported in the press: rising seas, more severe storms, droughts and floods, and increasing numbers of heat-related illness and deaths. Now Ian Sue Wing, a Boston University College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of earth and environment, Bas van Ruijven, a former visiting scholar at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, and Enrica De Cian, a professor at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in Italy, project another troubling outcome: a significant increase in global energy needs, largely anticipated to arise from cooling and air-conditioning usage.
In a new paper published in Nature Communications, Sue Wing, De Cian, and van Ruijven (now a scientist at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg, Austria), warn that by 2050, even a modest warming of our climate could increase the world’s energy needs by as much as 25 percent. And if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated, we could demand up to 58 percent more energy than would be needed in a stable climate.
Anthony Janetos, chair of BU’s Climate Action Plan Task Force and a CAS professor of earth and environment, says the findings underscore the need for rapidly deploying zero-carbon options for generating energy, so that climate change itself—and all the air-conditioning that will be used to cool a warmer world—doesn’t end up accelerating the demand for more fossil fuel–generated electricity.
Read more at Boston University
Photo Credit: Bru-nO via Pixabay
