Final answer:
Opening a refrigerator door is ineffective for cooling a room because the refrigerator adds more heat to the surrounding environment than it removes from its interior, due to the principles of heat transfer and conservation of energy.
Step-by-step explanation:
Opening a refrigerator door is not a good way to cool a room because the refrigerator itself generates more heat than it removes from its interior. In essence, when you open the door, the warm air entering the fridge is cooled down, but at the expense of producing an even larger amount of heat at the back or bottom of the fridge. Refrigerators operate on the principle of heat transfer, where they remove heat from the inside and expel it into the surrounding environment to keep the interior cool.
Conservation of energy dictates that the energy used by a refrigerator to transfer heat from the inside to the outside must be greater than the energy removed from the cooled space. Due to this, the process contributes to warming the room slightly. This is because all the electrical energy used by the refrigerator ultimately converts to heat, which is added to the room, along with the heat that was originally inside the fridge.
Efficiency of refrigerators and air conditioners are further hampered in extreme climates, but in the context of cooling a room, leaving the refrigerator door open does the opposite of cooling. It uses electricity to move thermal energy from the inside to the outside of the fridge, only to add more heat to the room itself after accounting for the energy consumed by the fridge.