since it allowed/encouraged people to live in totally-inhospitable HOT arid climates in the first place. But the fact that it has created a feed-back loop is mind-boggling.

And the move to the south (manufacturing) was largely fueled by this.

I always thought pumping hot air out (and the additional megawatts of power needed to do so = heat) was a losing battle.

To suck off all that heat and transport it to somewhere where it could be used to generate electricity.

Or maybe to redesign air conditioning systems to include their own mini generating plants that feed back into the grid, rather than simply dumping waste heat.

If you're going to move heat from cold to hot, you will inevitably end up with more heat than you started with. There is no way around that. The larger the temperature difference between cold and hot, the more waste heat you will generate.

I can't see a lot of difference in this. Cooling is cooling. and to do such creates heat.
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no net change, whether done at 2 am or 2 pm

it increases the night temp.

so it is normal they do so.
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that's just what people do, run AC to cool off. If they do so in the day.. it is the same...... or worse in btus to cool, because the air temp is higher.

Due to heat generated from running the compressors and motors that run the air conditioning.

this is sort of a "duh" statement, except now someone measured it.

Heat is heat. If the daytime temps are being raised by AC exhaust then all the AC units get to work harder. My other thought on this is that the amount of pavement laid down in cities now is greater, especially black pavement versus concrete which is more reflective. In many areas of the southwest you can feel the heat rising off the pavement long after sundown.

This sounds like the crap they pull in TV weather forecasts where they add humidity ONLY if it is already hot and deduct wind chill ONLY if it is already cold.

actually, running them at night might be MORE efficient (per degree cooled).
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and for sure less strain on the power grid in that using electricity in off peak hours is "best".

I see it play out dramatically on a small scale. I work outside on a very large ( approx a quarter mile X a quarter mile square ) concrete area, and you can really really feel the heat releasing from it after sundown and it feels damn near as awful as say 3PM. What's interesting though is after sundown as you walk to the edge of the concrete border, which is a wooded and meadowed area, you can feel a HUGE cooling effect of the vegetation: It's really quite dramatic.

very few homes at that time were equipped with central air. We had evaporative units (swamp coolers).

As a kid, I don't remember being hot but I do remember going into homes that did have "refrigerated air" and feeling the difference.

Personally speaking, after having air conditioning, there is no way I could go back to the swamp coolers. BUT, if I never had it, I would have never missed it. I think that is pretty indicative of our culture overall.

I grew up and live in the California Central Valley, which is nearly as hot as Phoenix (should be 104-105 degrees today). Like you, I never had A/C as a kid, and instead had swamp coolers...like just about everyone else. A/C was a rarity that you generally only saw in offices.

Anyone who has spent time around swamp coolers should remember their distinctive smell. That damp, musty odor that invariably seeped through the entire house and onto everything in it. When I was a kid, nobody thought much about it...that smell was just the "smell of summer". Today, of course, we know that the smell is actually airborne mold spores, and that the humid, spore filled air that is blown from the coolers contributes heavily to mold growth elsewhere in a home. It's also a major contributor to childhood asthma among the poor.

My house had an "Earth Cooler", which was basically a swamp cooler with its water reservoir buried several feet under ground to keep the water temperature stable. I still remember what that tank looked like when the house was upgraded with actual A/C and the contractor ripped the old system out of the ground. My dad and I were standing there when the backhoe pulled up the old tank and it broke in two. One look at the nasty mold and mildew inside (not to mention the smell), and we were gagging. We couldn't believe that we'd actually been breathing the water out of that thing.

I don't care about pollution
I'm an air-conditioned gypsy
That's my solution
Watch the police and the tax man miss me
I'm mobile
Oooooh, yeah, hee!

that doesn't emit as much heat (or any at all, if possible).