A lot of Swedish politicians claims that Sweden has lowered it's emissions and while that is true we also outsourced a lot of production and increased our consumption rendering our emissions actually higher when you count that in.
Pollution (at least Carbon pollution) is a global issue, and tackling it only at the local level has proven to be ineffective. It's a shame that it is politically impossible for the UN to make its own version of the EPA--complete with an enforcement arm that has teeth. Without it dirty manufacturers simply go where the pollution laws are least stringent (or at least poorly enforced) and continue to kill us all slowly.
I think this is a very realistic assumption.
Global Warming Is Irreversible, Study Says:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9988890...
"A large fraction of anthropogenic climate change resulting from CO2 emissions is irreversible on a multi-century to millennial time scale, except in the case of a large net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere over a sustained period. Surface temperatures will remain approximately constant at elevated levels for many centuries after a complete cessation of net anthropogenic CO2 emissions."
This is because most of additional energy (more than 90%) from CO2 forcing is stored in ocean. Oceanic thermal inertia is enough to keep warming in 1000 years scale without any additional CO2.
Given that indoor temperature is ~ 20C, the ∆T for heating can be much greater than for cooling, since cold outdoor temp can easily go as low as -20C, while really hot weather won't go much above 40C.
Thus, in a warmer climate where you need less heating in winter and more cooling in summer, you might actually end up using less total power for AC.
In the west most cooling is done with a heat pump permanently wired into refrigeration mode aka a conventional air conditioner. There's a widely held belief that the entire system coefficient of performance is exactly 1 with somewhat less popular urban legends claiming a small fraction of 1 or only analyzing 100% efficient theoretical gas table cycles of 30 or whatever. However real world deployed average systems including air handler (aka fan) power and a realistic depreciation or embedded energy of manufacture etc results in about 3. So in the real world the total cost to the environment is about a kilowatt/hr to move about 3 kilowatt/hr of heat out of a building. It scales better than linear with size, something to do with moving air being expensive and larger AC being connected to larger buildings having a better surface area to volume ratio.
Anyway for better or worse a kilowatt into an electric heater costs 3 KW of burned coal or uranium down at the plant and generates about 1 KW of heating in a typical building, whereas a kilowatt into an AC or heat pump costs 3 KW of burned coal or uranium down at the plant and moves about 3 KW of heat out of the building.
In practice it takes less energy to cool than to heat although in theory a heat pump has difficulty telling the difference between 90F outdoor and 50F outdoor temps.
45 years on, we've yet to achieve an actual reductions agreement, let alone enact it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Conference_on...
I'm not particularly sanguine.
There are many books and authors on this topic. For the energy angle, I strongly recommend Vaclav Smil. For the political dynamics, William Ophuls is among the best I've read. His 1977 Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity is a brief, but commanding overview of the problems and dynamics. It's long ago enough that many of its predictions are testable. While pessimistic on population and food, much the rest has held up, and Ophuls' predictions specifically on China and the former Soviet Union are uncannily accurate.
He's written more since, with what he says is his final book being published in 2012.
http://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-sc...
http://www.worldcat.org/title/platos-revenge-politics-in-the...
http://www.worldcat.org/title/sane-polity-a-pattern-language...
So yet more air conditioning will ensue, consuming more energy, warming oceans further, raising humidity, and thus exacerbating the problem.
Positive feedback cycles sure are great.
There are plenty of places in the world that regularly ge t those conditions. People/Animals survive.
The average high temperature for some months is in the low to mid 30's and with >90% humidity (which goes up locally after rain).
I'd like to see flukus spend a day in a hot sauna with water continuously dripping on the coals.
Consider the levels of CO2 rising from ~280 in the pre-industrial era to maybe ~700 by 2100. A 420 CO2 PPM outdoors also increases by at least that amount the air indoors, which leads to much higher CO2 concentrations, which are uncomfortable for people to breath in.
I notice fatigue, grogginess and reduced cognition at levels above 1500 PPM, which are quite often reached in poorly ventilated offices and bedrooms. So levels that might be okay right now at ~1200 won't be okay by the end of the century.
This is assuming a constant CO2 rise for the next 85 years at 3 PPM/year, which is quite optimistic. Depending on how bad the positive feedback cycles are, the rise might be much higher and will result in very poor indoor air quality for most people.