Air conditioners exhaust hot air, exacerbating the problem of urban heat buildup. Downtown Phoenix can be as much as twenty degrees hotter than the surrounding area. New York City averages two to five degrees warmer than its leafy suburbs during the day—and sometimes twenty degrees warmer at night. This phenomenon, known to city planners and heat researchers as the urban heat island effect, is so pervasive that climate skeptics once claimed that climate change is merely an illusion created by thousands of once-rural meteorological stations becoming surrounded by urban development (the
...more
