The Met Office has extended the heat warning as the heatwave continues into its fourth day – and yesterday saw a new record temperature for June, with a high of 35.7C recorded in Surrey. With a hot summer ahead, and more to come in the years ahead, surely air conditioning is an easy solution to keeping cool?
Apparently not, according to sustainability professor Lucelia Rodrigues, who told Channel 4 News that we can’t ‘air-condition our way out of the heatwave’. Her main reasons are the effects on the climate (because ‘we also often use fossil fuels to pump the air conditioning’) and the possible heating effect on the surrounding environment, which could make it perhaps ‘some ten, twelve degrees higher than when you don’t have air conditioning.’ We should instead focus on improving infrastructure and ‘designing for the future’. But how accurate are these claims?
The Climate Change Committee’s citizens’ panel says that air conditioning can be a useful ‘quick fix’, and that, in future, almost a quarter of homes will need some form of cooling. The UK has one of the oldest housing stocks in the world, with three-quarters of houses built before 1980 and two in five built before 1946. So when Professor Rodrigues says that British infrastructure was not built with cooling in mind, she is correct.
