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Over the past three decades, one technology has snuck into the very centre of Australian life, shaping where and how we live.

It influenced the design of our houses and offices, the cars we drive, and the length of our daily commute.

It even changed our notion of comfort.

It's everywhere, yet largely out of sight. It's plonked on rooftops, tacked to back walls, and piped under panels and upholstery.

The technology is air conditioning.

Now ubiquitous, only a generation ago air conditioning was sold as a pricey extra, and a generation further back it was a rare engineering marvel.

So, how did "manufactured air" become a must-have?

How has it already changed us — and how will it continue to shape our existence?

How air con went mainstream

Most years, around September, a little-known report is published on the Australian Government Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water website.

Called "Cold Hard Facts", it's mostly unread outside of refrigeration and air conditioning industries.

But buried in its tables of dry figures is the story of how Australians — who broadly pride themselves on their ability to handle the heat — embraced air conditioning over a few short decades.

The early 2000s in particular saw air conditioning become the norm. In 1999, about 35 per cent of Australian homes had air con.

By 2010, it was 70 per cent.

We can also see the steep rise in the number of air conditioning units installed each year.

In 2000, it was 330,000.

In 2022, it was 1.5 million.

These figures describe not only the arrival of air conditioning, but also the departure of a former way of life. A much hotter one.

It was a world of open flywire windows, breeze-catching louvres, sweating crowds in pubs, creaky ceiling fans, and office workers in short-sleeved shirts and straw fedoras.

"People back in the day used to just accept that they didn't have air conditioning and were quite comfortable without it," Graeme Dewerson, principal consultant with Expert Group which compiles the Cold Hard Facts report, says.

"We've really changed, haven't we?"

Seventy years ago, newspaper stories about "weather conditioners", "climate controllers" or "manufactured air" were treated with incredulity.

When Queen Elizabeth II visited Australia in 1954, air conditioning in cars meant the "four and 60": Four windows down at 60 miles an hour.

But this would not befit a young queen.

A Melbourne taxi-driver-turned-mechanic retrofitted the regent's fleet of British-made cars with early US-imported mobile air conditioning units. Newspapers described it as "special equipment" that could lower the inside temperature.

Only a few buildings at the time had air con.

Then, in the late 1950s, Australia's first "skyscraper" rose in central Melbourne. ICI House was made of glass and steel, like a garden greenhouse. But instead of roasting its office workers alive each summer, it cooled them with conditioned air.

"You wouldn't be able to have the ICI building without air con," Alan Pears, a sustainability expert and senior industry fellow at RMIT University, says.

"And the whole emergence of the high-density high-rise could not happen without air con."

At the time, the 20-storey ICI House was a glinting monument to the power of air conditioning to change how and where Australians lived and worked.

From the 1960s, air-conditioned skyscrapers rose in city centres. Apartment towers were built taller. 

Yet the whirr of air conditioning units was rarely heard in the suburbs.

Air con conquers the suburbs

Through the '70s and into the '80s, most new cars in Australia were sold without air con, and most houses relied on what would later be called "passive solar" design.

Long eaves shaded the windows and big sleep-out verandahs caught cool breezes.

A container of water below a fan provided some evaporative cooling.

This all changed when cheaper car and home air conditioning units hit the market.

Suburbs sprawled further, often away from cool sea or river breezes, and air con made those hotter inland areas more habitable.

The arrival of cheap split-system residential air con units in the 1990s saw a turn away from traditional passive-cooling housing design.

"Air conditioning made building designers and architects quite lazy," Sam Ringwaldt, CEO of Australian air conditioning company Conry Tech, says.

"You could literally build a box in the desert and as long as you put enough air conditioning in it, it can be a comfortable work environment."

Air con in vehicles also made longer commutes possible, and, by the 1990s, it came standard in new cars.

These days, people routinely travel in bubbles of air con between other, larger bubbles of air con.

The rise of air conditioning has even changed what we consider to be a "comfortable" temperature.

"Traditionally, the building code designers used to assume you would tolerate up to 26 to 28 degrees C before you turned on any cooling. Now we're finding lots of people will turn on AC when its fair bit lower than that," RMIT University's Mr Pears says.

"It has meant that air conditioning has become integral."

A warming world means more air con

Staying cool comes with a catch: It chews through a lot of energy.

On the hottest days, the power grid almost exclusively feeds electricity to meet air conditioning's demand.

In a hot and humid city like Brisbane, air con accounts for 90 per cent of household electricity use during peak times.

But air conditioning's underlying technology hasn't changed much since its invention more than a century ago.

An air conditioner is a compressor combined with a long closed-loop coil of refrigerant gas (a chemical good at absorbing heat).

When hot air flows over the cold, low-pressure coils, the refrigerant inside changes from a liquid to a gas, absorbing heat in the process.

To keep cooling efficiently, the air conditioner must compress the refrigerant gas back to a liquid again.

This work of compressing refrigerant gases requires a lot of electricity.

Refrigeration (which relies on the same underlying technology) and air conditioning use a quarter of all energy generated in Australia, according to Cold Hard Facts.

The same report says air con accounts for about 12 per cent of total greenhouse gas emissions, or about the same as the national fleet of 20 million cars, utes and vans.

And that's just Australia. At a global scale, the amount of air con being installed is hard to comprehend.

"Around the world today, there's about 250 new air conditioner units getting installed every second," Conry Tech's Mr Ringwaldt says.

"And it will be that way from now till 2050. These are staggering numbers that people are unaware of."

To put this in context, Australia currently has about 18 million air conditioning units. Based on Mr Ringwaldt's figures, this number of units is being installed globally every 20 hours.

And as temperatures rise, installation rates are going up accordingly.

"You've got developing nations like Indonesia, China, India, Brazil that are gobbling up air conditioning, because these are some of the hardest hit places by climate change," Mr Ringwaldt says.

"They know they're getting hotter. Therefore they need air conditioning. And this helps make the planet hotter."

More air con means more electricity use, further increasing the greenhouse gas emissions that drive global warming (most electricity globally is still generated by burning fossil fuels).

Global energy demand from air conditioners will triple by 2050 on current trends, according to the International Energy Agency.

Recent international efforts have aimed to reduce air con's emissions.

In late 2023, more than 60 countries signed the Global Cooling Pledge to cut emissions from cooling systems and increase air conditioning efficiency.

Australia declined to be a signatory.

Greenhouse gas emissions from old units

Aside from energy use, staying cool comes with another and lesser-known catch.

Many of the refrigerant gases air con units need are very effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere.

A standard wall-hung split air conditioning system may contain about 1.7 kilograms of the refrigerant gas HCFC-22.

HCFC-22 is a greenhouse gas hundreds of times more potent than CO2. So a standard air con unit may contain the global warming equivalent of a few tonnes of CO2.

Australia's 18 million air conditioners and heat pumps hold gases equivalent to 100 million tonnes of CO2, according to Cold Hard Facts.

So long as these gases don't escape, they don't add to global warming.

Under state and federal laws, when an air conditioning unit is decommissioned, the gases are to be collected and incinerated to avoid dangerous emissions.

But these laws are widely ignored, Graeme Dewerson from energy consulting company Expert Group says.

"There's around a 20 per cent end-of-life capture rate [of the gases]" he says.

That is, of the hundreds of thousands of air con units that are decommissioned each year by demolition teams, car wreckers, electricians, and others in the broader industry, most of the time their refrigerant gases are not captured.

This equals roughly 7 million tonnes of CO2 every year into the atmosphere, which is equivalent to the annual emissions from about 1.6 million petrol cars. 

It's a "terrible" situation, says Mark Mitchell, managing director of airconditioning company SuperCool, says

"So many sectors of the industry are not prepared to coordinate and focus on the goal of making things better for the environment," says Mr Mitchell, who's been in the industry for four decades.

Our lives are being quietly and unobtrusively shaped by a technology that we barely notice.

Now, as the climate changes, we're forced to take a closer look at the machinery that maintains our comfort.

It's quite a sight. No wonder we're feeling sweaty.