How air conditioners could add to global warming.

As temperatures rise drastically in various countries across the world, the obvious solution seems to be buying more air conditioners. Apart from increasing air pollution, more use of ACs could make global warming problems even worse as it adds to the vicious cycle of adding to the temperature rise, warns a recent study.

1000 more deaths from AC use just in Eastern US
"What we found is that air pollution will get worse. There are consequences for adapting to future climate change," said David Abel, lead author of the study published in the journal PLOS Medicine.
Shockingly, the amount of power needed to meet this anticipated surge in indoor cooling will equal the combined electricity capacity of the United States, the European Union , and Japan today, the report said.

Which factors did this study check?
The study by Wisconsin-Madison University used the results from five different models to predict what would happen as a warmer world used more fossil fuels to cool the buildings where humans live and work using air conditioners.
It tried to figure out how this would affect power consumption from fossil fuels, air quality and, consequently, human health just a few decades into the future.

Trade-off between air quality and human health:
There is no question that air conditioners do and will save lives as heat waves increase in frequency and intensity thanks to climate change, said Jonathan Patz, a professor at UW-Madison.
Tracey Holloway, a professor at UW-Madison said that the study showed us what could happen if we adapt to climate change using more and more fossil fuels by simulating such a scenario.

The recent study by researchers from the University of Wisconsin- Madison forecast that air pollution from the increased use of fossil fuels to use air conditioners could cause as many as a thousand additional deaths annually in the Eastern US alone.

Perhaps in time, we can put a stop to the vicious cycle of increasing AC use due to global warming and again causing an increase in global warming because of the same AC usage.