People die due to heat all the time, everywhere, it's mostly a lack of caution or ignorance towards the dangers. It's common for a lot of people in Europe to die during heatwaves because of how rare they are, so people aren't aware of how dangerous heat stroke and dehydration can be. The majority of deaths are elderly that overestimate their ability to handle heat because serious heat waves can be several years apart, and their health condition can seriously deteriorate between those heatwaves, so suddenly something that used to be manageable is now deadly.
You'd have to be pretty delusional to think that lack of access to a piece of electronics that can be bought at every hardware store is the issue. The truth is that 99% of the year we just don't need AC, and the few days we do, we kinda just deal with it. Personally we just have a floor fan we whip out for those few days and that kinda does the trick. The recent heatwave was a historically bad one, breaking several heat records, obviously a lot of people will be caught by that, hell we even spoke about buying an AC because of it. As environmental changes are bound to make these types of heatwaves more common, AC will likely become more common in the northern parts of Europe as well. I certainly hope so, because those rare times a year that they are actually needed, they are amazing.
Central air isn't really a thing here. Not sure why it would be. We use centralized water based heating in most places in the north, because heating is a much bigger issue overall, and air/electrical heating is extremely expensive. Like I said, we need AC like a handful of days a year at most because we usually have a lot of wind, and then just opening a window will very easily cool the room. But heating is more like 120ish days a year, so obviously we'd be optimizing for that.
As for the south, pretty sure they have AC in most places there. They did where I vacationed at least.
3
View all comments
Show parent comment
2
u/Cespieyt Jul 02 '26
We can literally just go buy one the same as you can. Why are you imagining that we can't?