Well according to a study conducted in Japan, it seems very much so. Though Air Conditioners make your office and home space cooler their rear end emissions contribute to the “heat island” effect that makes cities hotter and unbearable. Maybe air conditioner users and manufacturers will have to look into their carbon footprint.
Yukitaka Ohashi of the Okayama University of Science in Okayama, is quoted to have said:
In the office areas of Chiyoda and Chuo Wards in the Tokyo metropolitan area in Japan, the waste heat resulting from the air conditioning operation is more than one-half of the sensible heat from the surface during the summer.
AC’s release heat in two ways:
They move heat from the inside to the outdoors.
As machines, they release heat by consuming power.
Heat released by AC’s is enough to raise temperatures by 1 to 2 degrees Celsius. So much extra city heat may also result in supercharging of storms as a result of which there might more violent thunderstorms in downwind areas. Yet again climate suffers due to human intervention.
Source: Discovery