Impacts of Temperature
As taken from the comments section. EMichael’s commentary on temperature and its impact.
Interesting.
“Air conditioning has changed demographics, too. It’s hard to imagine the rise of cities like Dubai or Singapore without it.
As residential units spread rapidly across America in the second half of the 20th century, the population in the “sun belt” – the warmer south of the country, from Florida to California – boomed from 28% of Americans to 40%.
As retirees in particular moved from north to south, they also changed the region’s political balance. The author Steven Johnson has plausibly argued that air conditioning elected Ronald Reagan.
Reagan came to power in 1980, a time when America used more than half the world’s air conditioning.
Emerging economies have since caught up quickly: China will soon become the global leader. The proportion of air-conditioned homes in Chinese cities jumped from under a tenth to more than two-thirds in just 10 years.
In countries like India, Brazil and Indonesia, the market for air conditioners is expanding at double-digit rates. And there’s plenty more room for growth: 11 of the world’s 30 largest cities are in the tropics.
The boom in air conditioning is good news for many reasons.
Studies show that it lowers mortality during heat waves. Heat makes prison inmates fractious – air conditioning pays for itself by reducing fights.
When the temperature exceeds 21C or 22C in exam halls, students start to score lower in math tests.
In offices, air conditioning makes us more productive: according to one early study, it made US government typists do 24% more work.
Economists have since confirmed that relationship between productivity and keeping cool.
William Nordhaus divided the world into cells, by lines of latitude and longitude, and plotted each one’s climate, output and population. The hotter the average temperature, he found, the less productive the people.
According to Geoffrey Heal and Jisung Park, a hotter-than-average year is bad for productivity in hot countries, but good in cold ones. They conclude that human productivity peaks at between 18C and 22C.”
“ How air conditioning changed the world”
And the math on the study of Nordhaus is way, way beyond my pay grade.
“ Geography and macroeconomics: New data and new findings”
Abstract: The linkage between economic activity and geography is obvious: Populations cluster mainly on coasts and rarely on ice sheets. Past studies of the relationships between economic activity and geography have been hampered by limited spatial data on economic activity. The present study introduces data on global economic activity, the G-Econ database, which measures economic activity for all large countries, measured at a 1° latitude by 1° longitude scale. The methodologies for the study are described. Three applications of the data are investigated.
First, the puzzling “climate-output reversal” is detected, whereby the relationship between temperature and output is negative when measured on a per capita basis and strongly positive on a per area basis.
Second, the database allows better resolution of the impact of geographic attributes on African poverty, finding geography is an important source of income differences relative to high-income regions.
Finally, we use the G-Econ data to provide estimates of the economic impact of greenhouse warming, with larger estimates of warming damages than past studies.
Run, the link to the paper is broken.
Other than that the paper is rather long in the tooth, relying on IPCC AR3 level model output/scenarios. From the paper: ” The scenarios are drawn from the multimodel assessments in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment Report (19), Chapter 9, figures 9.10 and 9.11. ”
The IPCC is in the middle of developing the sixth assessment report. We’re already seeing some comments on the preliminary organization and drafting goals.
This article used 3.0C temperature impact by 2100 from AR3. 3.0C is a mid-range estimate from the the AR which ranged from 1.1 low to 6.4C.
The AR6 rumors concerned what estimate should be used as the for temperature impact by 2100 from the more recent studies, which are much closer to what AR3 used as its low. From memory the new studies have ranged in the 0.75C to 1.8C on the low range range and peaking <4C.
I doubt that the new AR will show temperature impact in that low, but it will definitely be lowered from AR5.
Every time I C&P a post, I have to redo the quote marks. The address was ok, the quote marks were not.
Air conditioning also locks people in their houses and keeps them away from their neighbors.
so the answer to global warming is more air conditioning?
(just so you know, you can live without air conditioning. even in Florida.)
i’ve often wondered how much global warming could be attributed to air conditioning…it has certainly been responsible for a lot of the expansion of our electric generating capacity, since the periods of peak electric demand are always when air conditioning use is highest…up until recently, the lion’s share of that electricity came from burning coal, but even switching to natural gas for power hasn’t on net reduced the greenhouse effect resulting from power generation, as enough methane escapes while extracting natural gas to offset the reduction of CO2 emissions when burning it….celebrating its expansion at double digit rates world wide obviously just means more of the same every where else on the planet…
in addtion, since our air conditioners are just heat exchangers, they’re actually heating the outdoors as much as they cool the indoors, & hence are a major contributor to the heat island effect in big cities…
RJS, as for AC warming, it would be a SMALL part of the Urban Heat Island effect of urban areas.
this comment has a couple of issues: “..but even switching to natural gas for power hasn’t on net reduced the greenhouse effect resulting from power generation, as enough methane escapes while extracting natural gas to offset the reduction of CO2 emissions when burning it…” 1) I can’tspeak for the GHE, but for CO2 the US has the largest reduction in CO2 emissions, largely associated with the US shift to burning gas.
RJS, to continue, the at least one of the papers making the claim of leaking gas during fracking has been retracted. https://retractionwatch.com/2018/01/22/fracking-paper-overstated-size-methane-leak-marcellus-shale-earning-retraction/
We’ll have to see what they have when they re-submit.
I remember studying US power usage charts. For ages, the peak demand was in the winter where electricity was used for heating, but as we moved into the 1960s, the small summer peak grew and kept growing. I think the two peaks were equal by the early 1980s.
Power dispatchers used to have great insight. For example, into the 1970s, everyone in New England used to come home from church on Sunday and throw a chicken or roast into the oven. It showed up as power usage.
CoRev, there’s a table in this report that shows methane emissions in tons per hour from each of several shale production basins:
http://www.noaa.gov/news/north-dakota-s-bakken-oil-and-gas-field-leaking-275000-tons-of-methane-year
over two decades, which btw is roughly my remaining expectancy, methane has about 86 times the heat trapping capacity of CO2…while the CO2 we’ve already added to the atmosphere will go on trapping heat for a thousand years after that, we’ll all be gone by then…
oboy
Hijacked topic
Looks like it will never stop.
There have been a lot of studies claiming atmospheric methane increasing and some few with alarming claims. This is a graph of GHG atmospheric emmissions: https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/styles/medium/public/2017-04/overview2.png
Notice one thing about this graph. The highest concentrated GHG is H2O, and it is seldom even listed, as is shown in this graph. There are a variety of reasons for H2O to be ignored, even though it is the most prevalent atmospheric GHG with the widest IR capture frequency range and MAKES UP 96% of total GHGs.
I referenced ALARMING above because they use terms like 86 times (or 21 times in other studies) more… and 275,000 tons per year, but when we analyze these number we just add confusion. For instance, this chart in your reference http://www.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/GRAPH%20-%20Methane%20emissions%20from%20US%20shale%20basins.jpg. shows ~ 50% of US methane releases is from these listed fracking sites. But is this true? Is there no natural and other man made releases?
EPA said this: ” In the US, about 20% of human-related methane is due to cows and other ruminants,…”. We’ve had other studies where major natural sources are listed as: Wetlands, gas hydrates, permafrost, termites, oceans, freshwater bodies, non-wetland soils, and other sources such as wildfires along with man’s own contributions burbs, farts and land fills. Summing these wildly differing estimates takes us way above EPA total provided above.
So how much faith can we put in these estimates? Is 21-86 times more “the heat trapping capacity of CO2” larger than H2O’s heat trapping capability? H2Ois 96% of overall GHGs, and traps heat in all 3 of its phases, gas, fluid and solid, and is resident from well below the surface to to the top of the atmosphere?
We know that H2O actually TRAPS heat for significant periods, hours to millennia.
I know you probably believe: “while the CO2 we’ve already added to the atmosphere will go on trapping heat for a thousand years after that, we’ll ALL BE GONE by then…”, but not from Global Warming. And, especially not from escaping methane.
RS, I do not intend to follow up on this off topic subject. My purpose is just to correct some of the alarmism.
CoRev, i’m not alarmed by any of this, i’m in Ohio. we had over a foot of new snow yesterday and couldn’t get out. that was alarming.
EMichael, sorry for contributing to hijacking your thread…my initial comment was just my own musing, tangential off of Coberly’s before it, & not meant to be a definitive statement in any way..
RJS,
At least your comment was somewhat related in that it concerned air conditioning.
The link is about AC and its effects in history on economic activity. Obviously it has had a huge effect, and many areas of the globe that were unproductive before AC are changing. It is not about climate change, but somehow it was hijacked early on.
Like nearly every single topic.
EM:
I found your early on comment to be interesting which is why it ended up as a post. Temperate conditions brought on by air conditioning or by weather have a large impact upon the productivity of Labor which goes to the profitability of business. Temperate conditions do play a much larger role in where a company will locate in the US than say RTW laws. Location is extremely important.
Things do have a habit of going in a different direction, don’t they?
:EM, you are wrong: ” It is not about climate change, but somehow it was hijacked early on. ” Do a search on “climate”. The article’s premise is based upon an optimum climate/temperature and based upon the IPCC (CC=Climate Change) AR3.
I used climate/temperature because it is used interchangeably even though they are not, when one is part of the other.
Yeah he uses temp data to map his work on production.
You made it climate change, hacker.
“The hotter the average temperature, he found, the less productive the people.”
This seems like one of those “well, duh” kind of findings.
Huge potential for asymmetry. If you are cold, you need clothing, so you need to produce clothing. If you are warm, not so much. What kind of productivity should count in such a study?
EMichael
actually, it was I who unwittingly hijacked your thread. I would say the problem after that was not so much the “hijacking” as the giving one commenter an excuse to engage us (you) in endless argument based on misleading if not dishonest “facts.”
rather than complain about the hijacking, you need to restate your thesis and explain to the rest of us why it is important.
for my part, the “warm is better” argument looks an awful lot like the awful arguments of the climate deniers.
it happens that i don’t like air conditioning, despite having sweated through some hot classrooms in the deep South. can’t really see that it made me any less “productive” than those naturally cool if shallow boys from Harvard. Maybe “naturally” is the problem.
on a blog you have to expect some free association of ideas… or not.
but then you would have to do something to assure that your ideas were able to stand up to the competition.
i also… not your problem… hate the overwhelming tendency of bloggers to engage in endless and trivial arguments while the building is burning down around them.
but good to know you are worried about “productivity.” that’s surely about economics, though it is usually a concern of the bad guys who can’t think it terms of anything other than “more money now.”