# air-conditioning and global warming

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/air-conditioning-and-global-warming/754464>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [May 10, 2016, 4:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/air-conditioning-and-global-warming/754464 "2016-05-10T04:02:19Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\
**Post date:** [May 10, 2016, 9:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/air-conditioning-and-global-warming/754464/21 "2016-05-10T21:35:33Z")

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> [@Chronos](#):
>
> In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics.

You don’t want to do time for breaking the law of thermodynamics. It’s pure chaos!

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**Author:** ![watchwolf49](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/e9c0ed/32.png) [@watchwolf49](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/watchwolf49)\
**Post date:** [May 10, 2016, 10:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/air-conditioning-and-global-warming/754464/22 "2016-05-10T22:32:38Z")

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> [@John\_Mace](#):
>
> You don’t want to do time for breaking the law of thermodynamics. It’s pure chaos!

Not near as bad as trying to break the law of gravity …

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**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\
**Post date:** [May 10, 2016, 11:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/air-conditioning-and-global-warming/754464/23 "2016-05-10T23:43:25Z")

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> [@](#):
>
> Quoth **Orwell** :
> 
> Why is this time different than all of the other times the earth has warmed and cooled? Your first and second sentences are not supportive of each other. If anything, they are contradictory. I see no reason that it is believable to so many people that changes in climate are now caused by people, but were not decades and centuries ago.

The use of the phrase “decades and centuries ago” indicates a fundamental misunderstanding, here. To say that something happened “decades ago” suggests that the event itself spanned a time of perhaps a decade, or shorter. But nobody would ever speak of a climate change on such a short timescale. The current episode of global warming has itself been going on for over a century, and it’s the quickest known instance of climate change in the planet’s entire history. Previous climate changes took millennia or longer to take effect, long enough for living things to gradually adapt to the new conditions.

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**Author:** ![watchwolf49](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/e9c0ed/32.png) [@watchwolf49](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/watchwolf49)\
**Post date:** [May 11, 2016, 12:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/air-conditioning-and-global-warming/754464/24 "2016-05-11T00:38:42Z")

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Temperatures have gone up and down over these past several million years … but the CO[sub]2[/sub] concentrations in our atmosphere didn’t get any higher than 280 ppmv … today we’re seeing 400 ppmv or more and I guess we can tell the extra CO[sub]2[/sub] is from burnt fossil fuels … and that’s strictly an active of human-kind.

Like **wolfpup** so eloquently said “We can’t use the atmosphere as our sewer for very long.”

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