Cool you have reservations about anticipated future aircon requirements as stands, thanks for posting.
I was once tasked with designing and supplying aircon needed to cool a much larger, higher power dissipating facility (a Satcom datacenter with transmit links), as part of the facility design, I remember being shocked on realising that the aircon requirement more than doubled the basic power requirements of the facility (350KW) without cooling, but there was no way round at the time, this was how it had to be designed given the resources available.
The fundamental issue is that we are destroying everything by continuing to extract all energy from Earth. Everything that nature created originally from sunlight including life itself is being destroyed by us. It begins with the energy profit of getting more Joules out of something that nature created, than the Joules of work we put into destroying it. It can be oil, wood, coal, nuclear fuels, or even kinetic energy from wind and hydro. The fact is we are undoing nature at a much higher rate than nature can create.
It is a kind of dishonesty that we don't account for all the Joules in and out of the energy extraction transaction. The Total Joules of energy from sunlight that it took for nature to create whatever it is we destroyed is always much more than what we get out.
That cost is to nature, and all of life, which ironically ultimately is to us ourselves. We are cheating our own selves by the extraction energy transaction dishonesty.
The effect of this on heat is that we are continually adding to the heat impulse. Converting anything that has been created from energy which would have been heat, if it had not been otherwise used, either by us or nature, back to heat, has to add to temperature impulse by E=MC squared alone. No need to talk about CO2.
CO2 is a symptom, not the cause. The rising heat impulse is a symptom, not a cause, that we ignore as part of the dishonesty of the energy extraction transaction. There is no such thing as actual profit in terms of physical energy, it is all a con, upon which we have built an entire world, the world of humanity.
Seeing this, and accepting it, is the first thing we need to do, to not only understand the full gravity of the consequences of what we are doing, but also to understand that it doesn't have to be this way, there is a real way out.
We can emulate nature by using energy the same way as nature uses it, by creating things directly from the energy of the sun. We have the technology to do this, we should recognise when it is being done.
We can recognise it by noticing that where we take energy from the sun that would become heat, by not otherwise being used by nature, and we convert this to anything other than heat, this is reduction of heat. In this case we didn't take anything from nature, we subtracted nothing from what it creates, even better, we added creation of our own, supplementing what nature creates.
It doesn't matter so much what we create like this, the important thing to note is that this is the opposite of what we were doing by extraction.
This is truly creation, which has the opposite effect on temperature impulse than destruction.
Even better, we can actually do it at a much greater rate than nature.
Technology currently enables us to create around a Kg of hydrogen for every 24x2. 5KW hours of electrical energy. When that energy is from solar then we are fully working in creative mode. Obviously it can be scaled up to give us much out as we can find real estate to install solar.
Hydrogen functionally replaces not only all fossil fuels but also all utilities and transportation and other heavy battery use, and even also some human food (See "Solein"), whilst having side effects of filtrating and circulating both water and air.
How all that finally comes around to affect aircon; firstly the amount of aircon needed ultimately would be reduced overall, we would be returning Earth to the historical state of lower temperature, less CO2 generation, so no rising capacity requirements.
Secondly, the worst case of powering aircon from solar energy can never be worse than if we did nothing at all with the sun.
So still it comes at no cost to Earth.
In practicality we would never even see that worse case, because even if total power used was all returned to heat, the creative activities enabled by creation of the temperate living environment within the aircon protected area, have to be also taken into account. Creation of anything enables creation of yet more things that create. If all are solar powered, then all are creating.
Can you see how this is the opposite of how things work when powered from extracted energy?
To enable it, to push it through to 100% of all activities done by solar, we have to ditch the for-profit business model, because that is what ties us into the dishonest energy transaction.
We do that the instant we start to issue money representing the economic product already created by solar.
Currently that stands at hundreds of billions in every developed country, built up since around 2005.
It can't be issued as debt, for the reasons outlined earlier.
It has to be for free, honestly announced as being solar indexed stmulus or UBI, in order to rescue the value of the currencies issued.
By that we will be moving from Capitalism, technically to something new - Energyism.
This is the only way out of the energy problem.