The World Cup is hotting up – literally. A temperature of 38.8C on the pitch has already been recorded. Does this give the teams used to playing in a tropical climate an unfair advantage? One way to make things more equitable would be to air-condition the stadiums, which sounds mad until you realise that this is exactly what Qatar's organisers have said they'll do for the 2022 World Cup. And with daytime temperatures in Qatar often exceeding 45C during the day, such measures will be absolutely essential.
The first problem the bid has to overcome is an investigation by Fifa's ethics committee into alleged corruption. However, a bigger obstacle might be to put on the tournament using solar and renewable energy, as they have promised. It's going to be an enormous engineering challenge but one well worth undertaking, because as global temperatures increase over the next century, there is going to be greater demand for sustainable air conditioning, not just in football but for the growing number of people who will find themselves living in hot and humid parts of the world, including the UK.
I had a succession of cars in the 1980s and none of them had air conditioning, they had windows instead. Driving with an open window cools the occupants but increases the aerodynamic drag, making the car less efficient. By having air-con, the windows can be shut in hot weather, saving fuel – or so everybody thought. However, the air-con itself consumes energy and the latest experiments show that it is almost always more efficient to have the windows open.
Nevertheless, the environmental and economic concerns of saving fuel tend to go out the window when you find yourself in a traffic jam on a hot day. Closing the windows and turning on the air conditioning is often the only tolerable way to crawl along the M1 in the summer. This is the essence of the problem in Qatar with the football stadiums: if they install huge air conditioning systems they will need to shut the roof to make them effective and fuel efficient and that in turn has several consequences.
Traditional air conditioning works in much the same way as a fridge. A liquid with a low boiling point is pumped around a set of copper tubes and as warm air passes over the tubes it raises the temperature of the liquid, causing it to evaporate. In the same way that your skin is cooled as sweat evaporates, so the evaporation of the refrigerant inside the copper tubes cools the air. You'll notice that the back of your fridge is hot – this is where all the heat ends up: it is released as the refrigerant is squeezed back into a liquid by the pump.
The air conditioning in a building releases that heat into the environment, the effect of which is to raise the air temperature. This doesn't have a big effect except in dense cities where this temperature rise is appreciable. Scientists at Arizona State University have shown that night-time temperatures are increased by more than 1C in urban areas solely as a result of air conditioning. That doesn't sound a lot, but is in fact equivalent to the global warming that has happened in the past 100 years. Air conditioning on this scale in the cities of Qatar would also consume a huge amount of electricity, which will be a serious challenge for renewable energy systems to provide.
A better approach is to develop new ways of air-conditioning large stadiums using mechanisms such as evaporative cooling with sea water, computer-controlled shades that track the sun and the generation of convective cooling currents using wind-catcher towers typically found in desert habitation. There's no reason why a stadium built for a desert should look anything like one for built for a jungle in Brazil. In fact, it makes every sense not to do this. Nature adapts to its environment and so should football. Perhaps the Qatar stadiums should be dug into the rock, taking advantage of the cooler thermal mass of the ground in summer. Or perhaps they should take inspiration from a camel's nose, which uses heat-exchange membranes to extract water from exhaled air, and in the process cools its brain.
No one knows, including the Qatar 2022 World Cup organising committee, what the solution to this problem is and there have been widespread calls to move the tournament to the winter, when temperatures will be cooler. I think if that happens it will be a missed opportunity. Sustainable, low-power cooling technology is something the world badly needs. As global warming increases, the number of cities in desert regions will also increase and so will the demand for air-conditioning technologies to make these places habitable. We need to be more ingenious about how to cool these urban environments and setting a goal of exploring such technology for the World Cup in 2022 is a great opportunity. Let's have a global competition; above all, let's get the footballers themselves involved – they have huge wealth and influence.
Not least, let's do it because creating a temperate environment inside the Qatar stadiums will perhaps give British teams a better chance of actually winning the World Cup in 2022.
