When Rutam Vora was growing up in Vadodara, a city of about 2 million people near the western coast of India, his parents kept cool each summer by drenching bedsheets in water and hanging them in the windows of their house. When the scorching westerly wind known as the loo swept in and hit the sheets, the evaporating water absorbed the brunt of the heat. White chalk spread on the roof reflected the sun and dropped the temperature further. They were old methods of coping with the heat, like drinking lassis or chaas when “struck by the loo,” and they were effective.
But the weather, already hot, has been getting hotter. In the summer of 2015, it hit 114 degrees Fahrenheit in nearby Ahmedabad, where Vora works as a correspondent for The Hindu. The next summer, it passed 122 degrees, a record. It’s not uncommon for people to wrap their faces in wet cloth when venturing onto the furnace-like streets, and the wind is so hot it feels heavy. “For about a decade, the temperature has been going up,” Vora said. “But now, the last couple summers have been extreme, going beyond normal, bearable conditions.”
Earlier this year, Vora’s mother came down with a bacterial infection, and part of the doctor’s prescription was to stay cool. When the meteorological department warned of yet another punishing summer on the way, Vora decided it was time to buy an air conditioner.
Across India, millions of people are making similar calculations. The share of Indians with air conditioning is still small, roughly 5 percent, but it’s growing fast. Rising incomes are making air conditioners more attainable while rising temperatures are making them a necessity. “There are hundreds of millions of people for whom air conditioning doesn't seem like a luxury good,” said Michael Greenstone, director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. “It can mean the difference between life and death.”
The cooling industry has found a ready market in Ahmedabad, the largest city in the state of Gujarat. The city bakes each summer until the monsoon comes, at which point temperatures drop into the 90s and the humidity rises to stifling levels. Above the city’s winding streets, crowded with fleets of auto rickshaws and mopeds, billboards declare that every home deserves Hitachi cooling. Elsewhere, Panasonic ads extol the speed at which its “life conditioners” can cool a room. Apartment ads list AC first among amenities offered, and restaurants promise relief from the heat. Appliance shops along the roadside display the industry’s major players in big letters on their windows: Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Blue Star, Panasonic, General - the King of Cool, etched in the glass with a crown - Daikin, Carrier.
The world is on track to add 700 million new ACs by 2030, and 1.6 billion by 2050, largely in hot, developing countries like India and Indonesia. But the AC boom threatens to worsen the crisis it’s responding to, and widen the divide between those who can afford to stay cool and those left out in the heat.
Air conditioners use refrigerants, and some of the most common types -hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs - are powerful greenhouse gases, with thousands of times the warming potential of carbon dioxide. If HFC use continues to grow at its current pace, these chemicals could make up as much as 19 percent of emissions by 2050. International initiatives are set to phase down the worst offenders, but air conditioners contribute to climate change in a second way: they consume a tremendous amount of electricity. Handling the growing load will require adding thousands of new power plants to the grid.
Air conditioners may be a double-edged tool, but some way of adapting to the rising heat will have to be found. High temperatures are already interfering with people’s ability to work, making people sick, and outright killing thousands. If heating is considered a basic requirement in Western countries, said Satish Kumar, executive chairman of the New Delhi-based Alliance for an Energy-Efficient Economy, it’s time to start thinking about cooling the same way. “We are saying that a basic level of thermal comfort in order to be productive, in order to sit comfortably in your home during the night, it should not be a question. Everybody should have access to that level of comfort.”
Vora recalls the first time his family turned on their AC. His father announced that “from now onwards, the summer has gone from our life.” His mother asked the mechanic what temperature to keep it at to minimize electricity bills. “We survived so many decades, my father, and the people of his age, they would have hardly used AC,” Vora said. “But mine, and I imagine the next generation, they can’t live without it.”
One of the dangerous things about heat is the way it can sneak up on you. We deal with hot days all the time, and generally, they’re uncomfortable at worst. We wear light clothes, stand in the shade, fan ourselves, and commiserate. Our bodies work to stay at around 98.6 degrees: blood vessels dilate to move heat to the skin where it can be radiated into the air. If that’s not enough, we produce sweat, and heat gets absorbed turning it to vapor. But the effects of heat are nonlinear, and the line between discomfort and danger can be hard to detect. When the air becomes hotter than the body, skin stops radiating heat and starts to absorb it. If humidity is high, sweat can’t evaporate into the already saturated air. If you exert yourself, your core temperature will start to climb, and your body will struggle to bring it down.
Discomfort turns into fatigue, nausea, disorientation - symptoms of a fever, which is what it is. Skin turns bright red and sweat pours out as the body’s cooling systems go into overdrive. The heart starts to pound as it struggles to pump thickening blood, muscles spasm, sweat runs dry. At that point, the body is uncontrollably overheating. If its temperature isn’t brought down by ice baths and intravenous fluids, the cells’ mitochondria start to break down, organs fail, and death follows.
Seemingly small increases in global average temperatures hide a crucial shift in the extremes. What were uncomfortably hot days are becoming dangerously hot, dangerously hot days are becoming deadly ones. This shift is already perceptible in India: the mean summer temperature has risen less than a degree since 1960, but heat waves that kill more than a hundred people have become more than twice as likely. Read more...
But the weather, already hot, has been getting hotter. In the summer of 2015, it hit 114 degrees Fahrenheit in nearby Ahmedabad, where Vora works as a correspondent for The Hindu. The next summer, it passed 122 degrees, a record. It’s not uncommon for people to wrap their faces in wet cloth when venturing onto the furnace-like streets, and the wind is so hot it feels heavy. “For about a decade, the temperature has been going up,” Vora said. “But now, the last couple summers have been extreme, going beyond normal, bearable conditions.”
Earlier this year, Vora’s mother came down with a bacterial infection, and part of the doctor’s prescription was to stay cool. When the meteorological department warned of yet another punishing summer on the way, Vora decided it was time to buy an air conditioner.
Across India, millions of people are making similar calculations. The share of Indians with air conditioning is still small, roughly 5 percent, but it’s growing fast. Rising incomes are making air conditioners more attainable while rising temperatures are making them a necessity. “There are hundreds of millions of people for whom air conditioning doesn't seem like a luxury good,” said Michael Greenstone, director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. “It can mean the difference between life and death.”
The cooling industry has found a ready market in Ahmedabad, the largest city in the state of Gujarat. The city bakes each summer until the monsoon comes, at which point temperatures drop into the 90s and the humidity rises to stifling levels. Above the city’s winding streets, crowded with fleets of auto rickshaws and mopeds, billboards declare that every home deserves Hitachi cooling. Elsewhere, Panasonic ads extol the speed at which its “life conditioners” can cool a room. Apartment ads list AC first among amenities offered, and restaurants promise relief from the heat. Appliance shops along the roadside display the industry’s major players in big letters on their windows: Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Blue Star, Panasonic, General - the King of Cool, etched in the glass with a crown - Daikin, Carrier.
The world is on track to add 700 million new ACs by 2030, and 1.6 billion by 2050, largely in hot, developing countries like India and Indonesia. But the AC boom threatens to worsen the crisis it’s responding to, and widen the divide between those who can afford to stay cool and those left out in the heat.
Air conditioners use refrigerants, and some of the most common types -hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs - are powerful greenhouse gases, with thousands of times the warming potential of carbon dioxide. If HFC use continues to grow at its current pace, these chemicals could make up as much as 19 percent of emissions by 2050. International initiatives are set to phase down the worst offenders, but air conditioners contribute to climate change in a second way: they consume a tremendous amount of electricity. Handling the growing load will require adding thousands of new power plants to the grid.
Air conditioners may be a double-edged tool, but some way of adapting to the rising heat will have to be found. High temperatures are already interfering with people’s ability to work, making people sick, and outright killing thousands. If heating is considered a basic requirement in Western countries, said Satish Kumar, executive chairman of the New Delhi-based Alliance for an Energy-Efficient Economy, it’s time to start thinking about cooling the same way. “We are saying that a basic level of thermal comfort in order to be productive, in order to sit comfortably in your home during the night, it should not be a question. Everybody should have access to that level of comfort.”
Vora recalls the first time his family turned on their AC. His father announced that “from now onwards, the summer has gone from our life.” His mother asked the mechanic what temperature to keep it at to minimize electricity bills. “We survived so many decades, my father, and the people of his age, they would have hardly used AC,” Vora said. “But mine, and I imagine the next generation, they can’t live without it.”
One of the dangerous things about heat is the way it can sneak up on you. We deal with hot days all the time, and generally, they’re uncomfortable at worst. We wear light clothes, stand in the shade, fan ourselves, and commiserate. Our bodies work to stay at around 98.6 degrees: blood vessels dilate to move heat to the skin where it can be radiated into the air. If that’s not enough, we produce sweat, and heat gets absorbed turning it to vapor. But the effects of heat are nonlinear, and the line between discomfort and danger can be hard to detect. When the air becomes hotter than the body, skin stops radiating heat and starts to absorb it. If humidity is high, sweat can’t evaporate into the already saturated air. If you exert yourself, your core temperature will start to climb, and your body will struggle to bring it down.
Discomfort turns into fatigue, nausea, disorientation - symptoms of a fever, which is what it is. Skin turns bright red and sweat pours out as the body’s cooling systems go into overdrive. The heart starts to pound as it struggles to pump thickening blood, muscles spasm, sweat runs dry. At that point, the body is uncontrollably overheating. If its temperature isn’t brought down by ice baths and intravenous fluids, the cells’ mitochondria start to break down, organs fail, and death follows.
Seemingly small increases in global average temperatures hide a crucial shift in the extremes. What were uncomfortably hot days are becoming dangerously hot, dangerously hot days are becoming deadly ones. This shift is already perceptible in India: the mean summer temperature has risen less than a degree since 1960, but heat waves that kill more than a hundred people have become more than twice as likely. Read more...