“For years we have known that air conditioning protects people from extreme heat, but we could only guess by how much because the available data told us who owned an air conditioner, not who could actually afford to run one,” said Kai Chen, associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health.
The strong protective effect of AC against heat-attributable mortality indicates the public health necessity of addressing urban heat by making AC affordable and greening urban spaces, the authors noted.
Ironically not open access facepalm
Globally, we use a lot more energy to heat spaces than to cool spaces. And installing air conditioning units in a lot of places will actually reduce overall energy use and fossil fuel consumption/CO2 emissions, because air conditioning units can be reversed and act as heat pumps that are 3 to 5 times more energy efficient than combustion at heating any given space.
Europe and North America, especially, need to switch as many heating systems as possible over to heat pumps. That will make things more comfortable and safer, while also reducing overall annual energy consumption.