Relief in Every Window, but Global Worry, Too

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Kuni Takahashi for The New York TimesAir-conditioning units installed in a building in Mumbai, Maharashtra, May 21, 2012.

“In the ramshackle apartment blocks and sooty concrete homes that line the dusty roads of urban India, there is a new status symbol on proud display,” Elisabeth Rosenthal and Andrew W. Lehren wrote in The New York Times. “An air-conditioner has become a sign of middle-class status in developing nations, a must-have dowry item.”
“Air-conditioning sales are growing 20 percent a year in China and India, as middle classes grow, units become more affordable and temperatures rise with climate change,” Ms. Rosenthal and Mr. Lehren wrote.
The potential “cooling demands of upwardly mobile Mumbai,” alone have been estimated to be a “quarter of those of the United States,” they wrote.

Air-conditioning gases are regulated primarily through a 1987 treaty called the Montreal Protocol, created to protect the ozone layer. It has reduced damage to that vital shield, which blocks cancer-causing ultraviolet rays, by mandating the use of progressively more benign gases. The oldest CFC coolants, which are highly damaging to the ozone layer, have been largely eliminated from use; and the newest ones, used widely in industrialized nations, have little or no effect on it.
But these gases have an impact the ozone treaty largely ignores. Pound for pound, they contribute to global warming thousands of times more than does carbon dioxide, the standard greenhouse gas.
The leading scientists in the field have just calculated that if all the equipment entering the world market uses the newest gases currently employed in air-conditioners, up to 27 percent of all global warming will be attributable to those gases by 2050.