Tau Zero's Journal: Keeping cool in a warming world

I still have to wonder what the person who asked this question of Slashdot had in mind, but I don't have to wonder what I think of the poster:

Man, there's somebody who takes the climate change seriously and seems ready to do something about it. We need more people like that!

But the question raised by the poster remains: if we are ready to do something, what should we do? Going to rallies and shaking our fists against the threat from global climate change will do exactly nothing to stop or even slow the problem. Whatever we do, it had better be effective... and it had better be cheap too, because we only have so much money and we have many other necessities to which we must attend.

I have long been struck by the absurdity of air conditioning in the US of A (mostly the South, but everywhere to some degree): there we/I/they are, cooling our/themselves using energy which ultimately comes from the combustion of coal, which spews carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, increasing the infrared opacity of the atmosphere and trapping heat more effectively, which increases the temperature and thus the amount of energy required for cooling. Sooner or later we'll get tired of the gunplay, look at that foot and wonder where the toes went.

But the question remains, what do we do? Not just years but decades ago, an experiment was run in a northern city, Minneapolis I believe. During the winter a snow gun was used to create a large pile of ice in a pit on the grounds of an office building. In the spring, an insulating cover was pulled over the pile. During the summer, icewater from the bottom of the gradually melting heap was pumped out and circulated through fan coils to cool the air; the warmed water circulated back to the ice pit to be cooled again. All of this occurred without any energy required for the actual cooling; only circulating pumps and fans had to be run.

Why the heck aren't these things ubiquitous across the north, chilling office parks and shopping malls for free? Oh, yeah, and making productive use of the mountains of snow that we plow off of roads, parking lots and sidewalks?

There's not enough free cold across the south to generate the ice required to carry them through hot summers, but there's plenty of free sunlight. Heat can power a heat engine, and heat engines don't have to push cranks; they can push heat around instead. There is more than one way to use heat to make things cool, so the question rises: why the heck aren't we doing it? Is it really too expensive, or are we just doing the same old thing as always because we're using flawed accounting?

Enough ruminations from me, I've got stuff to do.