- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
One twisted thing about cooling and climate change: It’s all a vicious cycle. As temperatures rise, the need for cooling technologies increases. In turn, more fossil-fuel power plants are firing up to meet that demand, turning up the temperature of the planet in the process.
“Cooling degree days” are one measure of the need for additional cooling. Basically, you take a preset baseline temperature and figure out how much the temperature exceeds it. Say the baseline (above which you’d likely need to flip on a cooling device) is 21 °C (70 °F). If the average temperature for a day is 26 °C, that’s five cooling degree days on a single day. Repeat that every day for a month, and you wind up with 150 cooling degree days.
The Orange R by John Clagett written back in 1978 was describing this feedback loop in its story.
In the story Nuclear radiation was poisoning the air and scrubbers all over the country were cleaning up the radiation but were using nuclear power to power them creating a huge feedback loop where more radiation was leaking and needing more scrubbers to clean it.
I won’t give away what they thought about solar power, but it’s awfully close to the same messages that certain orange people say about wind and solar power to this day.
ETA: it’s amazing that back in the '70s they thought our future would be nuclear pollution from power plants while they had polluting coal plants and now 50 plus years later we still have polluting coal plants.