The gist: On hotter nights people get less sleep, this being especially the case for people who are poor (limited access to AC?) and who already live in hot climates (100->110 deg is more noticeable than 70->80).
Itâs nice data. They gave sleep tracking watches to 47,000 subjects for a few years, and this is what came out of it.
Their climate change angle is suspect. It probably helps publish to be relevant to a real-world problem. But their final paragraph undermines the projections they try to make: people adapt to the long-term weather patterns, and theyâll likely partially adapt to climate change occurring over the course of 50 years. Of course itâs still relevant from a health equity standpoint to consider.
>The gist: On hotter nights people get less sleep, this being especially the case for people who are poor (limited access to AC?)
Forcing a large part of the world where noone has an AC to get an AC (at least those that can afford it) is going to do wonders for the environment.
I'm quite sensitive to heat and the quality of life improvements from an AC are immeasurable, though I live in an apartment and can't really get one (have a crappy portable one for emergencies). I suspect that the climate impact of the ACs are going to create a strong stigma against it where they are not strictly necessary.
>Forcing a large part of the world where noone has an AC to get an AC (at least those that can afford it) is going to do wonders for the environment
Sure, but then why does the US get a pass on being super environmentally unfriendly by running heating or AC at full blast everywhere while also having buildings with very poor insulation (by European standards at least; the single pane windows with no outdoor blinds I had in Miami Beach would be illegal in most of EU) and no outdoor sun shades to block the sun energy entering the building, choosing instead to vent it out via AC after it had already entered, or just straight up wasting energy (Las Vegas casinos run the AC basically outdoors), while other, usually poorer countries, should just suck it up and learn to live without AC?
I get that the US is capital and resource rich and can afford to be wasteful with almost everything, but the climate impact is still global.
Building codes in the US are laughably sad. I've built 3 homes in 2 states and never built to code. I always encourage people who are building to view code as the minimum, but who wants a minimally good home? Apparently most people. The big builders want to put something up at the lowest cost. Building codes need to be raised to a higher level. It saves money in the long run and is better for everyone.
> I get that the US is capital and resource rich and can afford to be wasteful with almost everything,
https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states
The US has been reducing CO2 emissions year on year for a while now.
> the single pane windows with no outdoor blinds I had in Miami Beach would be illegal in most of EU)
Was this a while back or very old building? My understanding is impact windows are required less than one mile from the coast. Beyond that insurance drives their adoption as premiums rise significantly without wind mitigation.
AFAIK most homes with poor insulation where build when energy in the US was dirt cheap (relative to the median income) and it was rational to save money on insulation and just blast powerful AC (human effect on global warming was not known/established back then). Retrofiring insulation into already built homes is not cheap.
> Forcing a large part of the world where noone has an AC to get an AC (at least those that can afford it) is going to do wonders for the environment.
Heat pumps are better than any other kind of heater efficiency-wise. Getting a mini split is good for the environment whether or not you use it to cool.
> On hotter nights people get less sleep, this being especially the case for people who are poor (limited access to AC?)
As someone whoâs fought multiple property management companies over dead ACâs I can confirm: it is difficult to sleep when youâre seeping into your own puddle of sweat. And thereâs no real way to properly cool a space this humid Iâve ever heard of.
And if itâs too humid to cool off with sweat, you just die
This might become a reality for people in india at the moment... :(
This is good to keep in mind although should you ever find yourself in such a situation know that you can still put your feet in a bucket of water. We usually get water from rivers our underground reservoirs so it tends to be cool enough even during heatwaves. Itâs perhaps not the most convenient way to cool down but beats death.
> people adapt to the long-term weather patterns, and theyâll likely partially adapt to climate change occurring over the course of 50 years.
Can you explain how populations of countries slowly creeping on routine 35WBT are supposed to adapt exactly?
I hope and expect theyâll consider dehumidification and air conditioning (which naturally âincludesâ dehumidification) as part of the adaptation strategy.
(Iâm not suggesting that we give up on global warming, but if a people are facing 35°C WB, AC/dehumidification is going to have to be part of the answer, because the next 5 years of climate is already cast and the only other short-term alternative is âwell, moveâ which is far less practical or empathetic.)
> theyâll likely partially adapt to climate change occurring over the course of 50 years
We will adapt by moving indoors to controlled environment, but it's not like we will evolve. At some point, the global mammalian birth rate is going to plummet because it will be too hot for sperm. Mammals won't physiologically adapt to that in a mere 50 years, but those able to live in controlled temperature indoor environments should be able to continue procreating. But when prolific procreators' (such as rabbits and squirrels) populations plummet, we should not ignore it.
I really don't understand why we can't stop Global Warming... now. The contributors to Climate Change are not typical citizens, it's instead various industries. Why are we more concerned about those industries, construction, glass, shipping, energy, than we are about the human global population (and all the other living things)?
There are physiological adaptations as well. People in hotter climates are still going to get good sleep. Itâs just when there are hotter temperatures than people are used to that sleep is impaired, and also that adaptive mechanism only works so well, and there is disparate impact for people in different climates. At a certain point, there are heat waves or very hot temperatures that simply arenât conducive to human life.
100% agree about the urgency to make an economic system that is compatible with climate stability and thus with human life.
This comment won't do well right now but I suspect in the future we may come back to this idea. I believe more work needs to go into automation of forming/welding frames for underground homes as the temperature is rather constant under ground. 3D printed/molded? Some locations will need specially built units that can handle moisture. I have probably binge-watched too many mining/tunneling videos but I could see this technology becoming affordable to the consumer through technological optimizations, maybe? Anyway moving the home under ground could provide additional room above ground for a garden or parking spots. Underground homes would also be tornado resistant. Another advantage is energy efficiency or moving towards being carbon neutral. There are concrete / shotcrete companies making carbon absorbing material now.
I am thinking of the real world example of Coober Pedy, AU [1] They have subterranea hotels, mines, homes, recreation facilities and more. If I ever went to AU that would be my first stop.
Anecdotally my home is partially earth bermed and even on hot days hot being around 101F it is cool in my home and I do not even own a HVAC unit. One of the many reasons I moved was due to heat and sleep issues.
Reading things like that really makes me think that we'll literally do _anything_ rather than tackle the root cause.
Soon enough people will work on de orbiting earth further away from the sun rather than stopping living unsustainable
Agreed if you mean WE as a hypothetical union of all individual humans and human institutions. But all of this makes a lot more sense to me if you distinguish between individuals and institutions. Institutions (companies / governments / Unions / HOAs / PTAs w/e) seem like they're impossible for any individual to control except by collective action which is just more institutionalization thats impossible for individuals to control. Individuals can make decisions to do things like install solar panels on their house, invest in a heat pump, buy an electric car, live in walkable areas, plant a garden, NOT work for or purchase things from institutions they disagree with, build an underground house etc within the confines of what institutions will allow. I don't think theres any more that we can do, the rest seems like subjugating guilt narrative bs and self-satisfied collective action virtue posturing.
There is no WE imho, its individual human beings against global industrial institutions. Collective action just propagates more destructive / uncontrollable institutional behavior. Federated / decentralized individual action propagated through federated / decentralized communication networks.
Anyway I can barely remember to brush my teeth or buy groceries so what do I know.
Living underground tackles the one issue that no green revolution is going to fix - space. Above ground space is fixed and the population will continue to rise. We can build upwards or downwards but upwards blocks light, which is also a fixed quantity.
If space above ground is fixed, space below ground is also fixed. Seems like a tautology to me.
living space isnât remotely a concern, if we all (the whole world) lived in a single mega-city as dense as NYC it would be about the size of Texas
light also isnât much of an issue, we could power the world with a solar array the size of New Mexico
fertile farm land, stable temperature, and distribution are much much much larger issues
living underground might be good for reducing electricity needs for heating and cooling, or avoiding certain natural disasters⌠but probably isnât very useful for much else
Most of the US is solving this by building sideways (i.e. sprawl). Itâs far cheaper than digging down, at least in the short term.
> but upwards blocks light
Also known as "shade," which is a nice thing to have when temperatures are rising.
I fully support tackling the root causes. That said I can not do that by myself and my experience interacting with governments has unfortunately made me a bit cynical.
What I as an individual can most certainly do is install a modular home under ground if a company were inclined to make one, preferably out of recycled material. I could rent an excavator tomorrow as they are closed on Sunday.
I have a theory that if enough homes were underground that would substantially reduce the load on the power grid from a lack of HVAC use, freeing more capacity for EV vehicles and buying more time for power companies to upgrade the power grid and reducing overall carbon emissions world wide. Perhaps power companies could lobby governments to make under ground homes affordable, modular, carbon neutral and most importantly safe. The wealthier and more influential people could even have underground garages to protect their expensive toys from the environment and theft.
thing is the root cause is a coordination problem, it's impossible to get 8 billion people to tackle any issue unilaterally, so we are left with solutions that allow individuals to opt in to a future where survival is not dependent on everyone else
Underground construction is really hard to do correctly. Partial earth bermed foundations as you mentioned are a good compromise, especially if the earth is built up. But even then, drainage and soil pressure are big engineering concerns.
Also you have no control over how much thermal interface you have. My office is on the first floor on a slab. It's great in the summer and freezing in the winter, despite a carpet.
Digging down becomes increasingly expensive vs equivalent volume building up.
Why not just use ground source heat pumps? It's much easier to bury some tubes than habitable spaces. It's easier to move heat/cold where you need it. You aren't forced into a fixed thermal flux.
I'm really not sold on the costs of digging down being all that high, long-term.
I'm 100% sold on it being expensive today, but I can come up with ways to drive them /way/ down with automation. The critical thing is:
1) You don't need materials.
2) You don't need to transport anything other than a digger
I agree it's hard, like engineering a CPU was hard, but I think Elon's got the right idea with the Boring Company. It's not /fundamentally/ expensive. Fundamentally, building in-place with available materials should, some day, be cheap.
> 1) You don't need materials.
In this context, you do. You need material structural stability (which is nontrivial, even for partially bermed structures; digging down further is a different story too) and for human habitation. Even above-ground you see retaining walls everywhere in places like New England because dirt likes to move. Worse, you'll need relatively expensive materials, and ones that are OK with contact with a lot of moisture. Maybe plastics can be the answer to some degree, if ones that are structurally sound and not tasty to microorganisms can be employed en masse, but the default answer is probably steel, and that won't last forever (or even all that long).
Beyond that? People aren't generally high on dirt walls and floors. And smoothing stone to presentation levels in-place, ensuring regularity, etc. is not a trivial task.
It could be done, don't get me wrong. But we have wear and decay problems above the surface that probably pale in comparison.
Underground construction is really hard to do correctly.
I agree it is harder to do correctly and costs more. It's an investment that if done right could outlast any above ground home. But that is quite a loaded caveat on my part, done right. That's why I envision this being done in a factory and very specific instructions and compliance requirements that if adhered to should produce more predictable results. The bunkers I see people building today are all custom one-off designs and I think that is where they get into trouble.
I do like the idea of heat pumps. That would be a balanced trade-off for those that do not want to mess with putting in a home under ground.
>It's an investment that if done right could outlast any above ground home.
I would think this was true, but what I've learned so far suggests it's not...
Underground, you're not finding refuge from harmful forces on your structure; they exists there too. Things shift, things crack, things leak, humidity causes problems, the whole exterior now endures a chemical interface with the surroundings (and all your Vault-Tec steel will corrode at some speed determined by the nature of the local media).
If you're lucky enough to have near-surface bedrock where you are, digging into that is probably your best bet, but, even then, it seems like an uphill battle.
And thatâs without even mentioning light.
Sure, sunlight can be piped down underground for natural lighting, but Iâd really miss being able to see trees and blue sky from my office desk.
In the summer you'll want the surrounding ground to take away the heat, but in the winter that will be too cold, so you'll need to heat your home. There will be some (well quite a lot actually, as you don't have any insulation if you want ground cooling in the summer) waste heat transfering into the surrounding earth. Over time that will heat it up, so in the summer it'll be less effective at cooling.
This is actually why the London Underground is so hot in the summer. It wasn't always like this, but over time the ground surrounding the tunnels has heated up.
https://citymonitor.ai/transport/londons-tube-has-been-runni...
Well, when you reach the ~23c sweetspot, can't you just stop heating in the winter?
Underground houses are really cool, but we can get the same effect by building above ground with thicker walls. No AC needed when building with adobe.
I definitely sleep less well in the hot, humid, summer than in winter. When it's cold you can add layers. When it's hot you reach a limit of zero layers of clothing/coverings and then have to move the heat and humidity elsewhere artificially via A/C. I also think (this is my subjective opinion, I have no proof) that cold reduces swelling and inflammation, thus making for easier breathing during sleep.
Just having a regular fan helps a lot. Very little energy usage, very cheap. I bought a new fan a few weeks ago, one that is nearly soundless in its lowest setting. Even the slight breeze made by the lowest setting already makes a huge difference compared to stale hot air. It also uses an order of magnitude less energy than an A/C, and costs an order of magnitude less to purchase+install (100 EUR vs 3000 EUR).
When it's very hot fans actually make you hotter[1][2] though the science isn't yet settled on what exact conditions fans are not appropriate for[3].
[1] https://www.health.ny.gov/publications/6594/
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/disasters/extremeheat/faq.html
[3] https://sci-hub.st/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31382270/
If you live in a place like London, where it gets hot in summer but many places still don't have A/C, a fan can work wonders.
Here's the magic trick to cool your home down quickly:
During the day your house heats up. In the evening your home is likely warmer than the night air. Many people try to open the window and put the fan close to the window to blow cold air in.
What works much better is pointing the fan out of the window!
I'd love to open the windows in summer nights. Unfortunately anti-social people love to ride reaaaally loud motorbikes in the middle of the night.
This - create a negative pressure space inside the house. Then open other windows throughout the house to equalize that pressure. By pushing air out one window, youâre effectively creating a breeze from many windows. Itâs also easier to push a large volume of air out of a window than to try and pull a large volume of air from outside a window.
Yeah can confirm that's doable, unfortunately it's very disruptive since you need to keep light levels down before opening windows and during it otherwise your place becomes mosquito and moth central.
The silver lining is that it will get better eventually since bugs are dying off rapidly but for now it's either eye strain or buying nets for every window.
> What works much better is pointing the fan out of the window!
I just remember: hot goes to cold. So pushing the hot air toward the cold air is more efficient. If that means pushing the hot air inside the home toward the outside then sobeit.
Do you have a heat pump for heating?
If you do, you get A/C for 'free', and if you don't, you're wasting so much energy in the winter that you can never make up for it by 'making do' with a fan rather than proper air conditioning.
Signed, some guy who was in Belgium for the heat wave in 2018 and thinks Europeans should just suck it up and put in heat pumps. Sweltering in the summer and burning gas directly in the winter isn't virtuous.
Everyone who has heat pumps knows they can cool, the issue is getting one because they kinda cost like 5x as much as an equivalent AC unit for some goddamn reason and the only difference is the reversing valve. I suspect the market needs some EU regulation so the manufacturers stop price gouging based on marketing bullshit.
I have been researching heat pumps, in my case air-to-water, so I could get very cold water âcheaplyâ in the summer, but itâs still a massive project to turn that into AC.
I probably canât make it work, because I need a bit too high water circulation temps to meet the heating load at 12°F/-11°C and the up-front economics are significantly worse due to not enough experienced installers/general lack of competition in the air-to-water space. (Our gas prices are low enough and electricity high enough that the payback period is lengthy.)
If I had existing ducts, air-to-air heat pumps would make a lot of sense (and would give AC automatically), but hydronic distribution doesnât afford âfreeâ AC.
> If you do, you get A/C for 'free', and if you don't, you're wasting so much energy in the winter that you can never make up for it by 'making do' with a fan rather than proper air conditioning.
Eh, depends on what you are heating with in winter.
A friend of mine lives in a rural area and basically gets firewood for free. Even the best heat pump can't beat that.
(Heat pumps are still great in general. And much better than using electricity directly to heat.)
Fans work fine for hot, dry climates, by increasing your sweat evaporation rate. When coupled to evaporative cooling (fans that pump a little water to evaporate into the wind), they work even better. But in hot, _humid_ climates, they are worthless. Climate change is increasing both average temperatures and humidity in many places. Heat and humidity are a killer combo.
I'm in a coastal city in India and I really appreciate fans when the clouds trap the sunlight and its hottest just before it rains.
> When it's cold you can add layers
Not being able to heat a room above 16°C is a better problem to have than not being able to cool below 30°C but cold takes it's tool too. At night you can use a thick comforter or a couple and the problem is solved, but working behind a desk in a cold room is trying. Many layers of closing helps but it is not an ultimate answer - while being in a cold room in warm clothing I become tired more quickly than in a room at 20°Câ25°C.
My guess is very few people are willing to go back to pre-A/C days. Especially in automobiles. And any attempt to persuade people to give them up is going to be met with forceful pushback. It's now a luxury few will be willing to give up.
> The elderly, women, and residents of lower-income countries are impacted most
If small increases in global temperature can impact sleep enough to care about, then that is a much stronger additional argument for economic growth( to make AC, which can reduce night temperatures by a lot, affordable and universal) than it is for trading growth for some small avoidance of further temp growth. The latter is how I expect most people will read this result...
I don't see your argument at all. I see this as a powerful reason why even seemingly small changes in temperature can have a huge impact on human life. If this was the literal only issue, that could be an argument. But it's not. It's one of many.
My hope is that people will read this and say "it's not just the animals, the plants, crops, drought, it's people directly affected too". Although I apparently overlooked the "fuck the environment, fuck the poor, get AC" argument.
The study suggests that nighttime temps over 25°C are detrimental to sleep. One of the most obvious ways to get nighttime temps well under that is via AC.
It doesnât seem outrageous nor âfuck the poorâ to ask the question âis there a reasonable path to get AC more widely deployed to help more people sleep better?â
It's not about "fuck the environment". That's an extremely uncharitable interpretation to take of your neighbors. People are willing to to sacrifice, but only IF they see it as a meaningful sacrifice that actually does something. Sort of like why recycling rates are going down because more and more people realize most of winds up in the landfill anyway.
Solar panels + heat pump (an AC that can cool or heat your home) completely solves this problem.
We have simple solutions to this issue, the only thing to do is make it more affordable.
> "fuck the environment, fuck the poor, get AC" argument
Arguing that the benefits of economic growth for the poor are underrated and supported by OP more than more politically-palatable interpretations is precisely the opposite of 'fuck the poor', and given what we know about the other benefits, probably the opposite of 'fuck the environment' too.
The "elderly, women, and residents of lower-income countries" is about 80% of humanity.
Also coincidentally, the exact people the ruling elite gives zero fucks about.
AC heats up the planet though (just think of the thermodynamics: not only to you pull out the heat and expel it outdoors, but that takes energy, which ends up as heat exhaust as well).
People need cool air, no question, but it's not a free lunch. We need to cool the climate as well.
(BTW I do believe everybody should have access to as much energy as the OECD countries use per capita. Sadly even this is controversial)
Waste heat from AC is nothing compared to the ~1.3kw per square meter of solar irradiance.
Side note: We really need better solar panels!
> AC heats up the planet though ..
It doesn't.
The name heat pump explains it pretty well. It "pumps" heat from one place to another. In case of your AC from inside the building to outside. Yes, it generates additional heat from the electricity it uses.
But ...
It doesn't matter how you use energy on earth (except for mostly weird examples), because basically except for these weird examples, almost 100 % of the used energy will end up as heat anyway. It doesn't matter through what cascade of transformations the energy ends up as heat, whether you use electricity to boil water, or to power an EV, or to power a heat pump, almost 100 % of the input power will end up as heat anyway.
What are some weird examples? You convert captured solar energy into chemical energy (for example pure carbon or hydrocarbons) and store the chemicals forever, then you've prevented some of the captured energy from being turned into heat. Another would be to emit electromagnetic radiation into outer space. Or you could carry rocket fuel into space and just dump it there, unused.
That's not correct. Every transformation has efficiency loss. If you pipe the same amount of energy through a less efficient process, less useful work gets done for that amount of energy. Therefore to hit your target of useful work via an inefficient process, you'll have to send more energy through it, and thus more energy also goes to waste (heat).
Apart from basic thermodynamics: most air conditioners are not heat pumps.
What about all the non-human primates/mammals/vertebrates/animals affected?
There are plenty who thinks that people who can't buy an air conditioner are lesser and don't deserve one. Bootstraps and all.
I like to look at the bigger picture, this will cause further instability in the world, which is bad for all of us. Besides the consumption of those who can afford an air conditioner drives climate change. You may be handing over the money in the shop, but it's the entire planet that subsidizes your purchase power, which is not cool, literally not cool.
Air conditioners nowadays can and should be bought as reversible heat pumps. It adds nothing to the purchase price and it replaces gas heating as a much more efficient way to heat a building.
We should be installing heat pumps everywhere. Power consumption may go up in summer but would go way down in winter as efficiency is greatly increased. Unless your point is that poor people donât deserve heating any more than they deserve coolingâŚ
Last I checked a heat pump is considerably more expensive than an air conditioner. And a regular air conditioner can probably only heat when the outside is not freezing.
I would actually want to get a heat pump but it's basically prohibitive. Would be nice to replace them with a "cheaper" air conditioner unit.
The cost increase is marginal, but the benefits are enormous.
Modern heat pumps work well down to -20F. If itâs that cold I donât want to live there.
> power consumption ⌠would go way down in winter as efficiency is greatly increased
Not sure where you live, but in my experience living across the USA, I donât think switching all heating to heat pumps in winter would reduce electricity usage. Most homes heat with propane, fuel oil, kerosene, or, in places like NYC, steam. There are certainly some homes out there with electric element heating but they are so expensive to run that theyâre not very common.
It might be better for emissions if we used renewable energy to generate all of that power. But we donât right now.
Are there no places in the world without a need for central heating?
If your only space conditioning load is air conditioning, you donât need to have a reversing valve and defroster.
Heat pumps are less effective when it's freezing cold.
They are more than 100% efficient until you reach stupidly low temperatures; in which case, then you can break out the furnace or whatever. Or put on a blanket.
People who own computers capable of posting on hacker news don't get to tell the global south they can't install AC.
A 6502 could post on hacker news
> There are plenty who thinks that people who can't buy an air conditioner are lesser and don't deserve one. Bootstraps and all.
This sounds like a strawman.
It does, but people do a good job at making a strawman of themselves. These bootstrap folks are out there, and they are here. And I'm not just talking about the libertarians, plenty of liberals have trouble seeing the bigger picture. When it's painful to do that, we don't do it. You don't need to live in Nazi Germany to be have to ignorant for your own good, cognitive biases like just-world fallacy are enough. Climate change is plenty enough, it creates a lot of uncertainty and it brings the strawman out of people. Our defense mechanisms are rather predictable.
You could try to pass the Ideological Turing Test..
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/06/the_ideological.htm...
"this will cause further instability in the world,"
What will? How?
Climate change, what else would we be talking about?
I don't see lack of air-conditioning causing instability. Other aspects of global warming, sure.
Well, while their title alone leads to a "no shit, Sherlock?" response, because it's quite clear that it's hard to sleep in abnormally hot days (but there isn't anything there about the impact of global warming that it wants to push), that is really a data-mining study that found a correlation inside a huge amount of possible variables.
That means the study itself is a solid base for further examination, but meaningless for any real world conclusion.
They've identified several correlates due to weather (cloud cover, rain, wind, day length), but then I can't find where they correct for these in talking about effect sizes. All of these effects then "add up" to make the nearly 10-minute variation in sleep duration.
Also, sleep isn't only about duration - most sleep scientists would want to know about sleep efficiency too. This is "time asleep / time in bed". If you wake up more when it's cold, then there is a reason for shorter sleep when it's warm. Similarly, you'd ideally correct for air conditioning and factors like this on an individual level, but they don't seem to have this data.
Activity before bed, and the light that gets into your bedroom in the morning are certainly correlated with heat. It's important to investigate how these variables interact.
Can we also talk about light pollution? Birds arenât sleeping either.
True. There are some parks with all kinds of exotic birds for human attraction. I get every time seeing all the projects lighting up the ponds and trees. Absolute madness.
And sound pollution, too. Fucking vehicles, man. I live in a busy city and in my estimates night traffic is at least 90% pleasure.
How do I know? Only idiots force their engines during the day, and at night I mostly hear idiots
Inconsiderate fucks.
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