> Many European countries have draconian laws about air conditioning that are killing people this summer
Cite your sources.
There are specific issues in specific places (eg heritage restrictions in Paris), a higher prevalence of shared infrastructure rather than single family homes, and a higher level of renting rather than home ownership.
And there are people on the green-left end of the political spectrum in parts of northern Europe with weird hangups about air conditioning.
But as best I can tell this claim is false; the biggest reason why air conditioning is not so widespread in Northern Europe as in the United States is that the climate simply hasn’t, until recently, required it.
> biggest reason why air conditioning is not so widespread in Northern Europe as in the United States
It certainly is a transitional period where each summer more and more people realize that eventually something needs to be done, "maybe a/c next year" for many years until the year of installation finally comes.
In Northern Europe it certainly is still a rare occurrence that everything gets heated so warm that the air does no longer cool during the night and you can't cool down for the next day. Yes, we do get heat waves but they don't last very long. Yes, summers are mostly getting hotter but it's still nothing like in southern Europe. We might have several weeks of 25-28C with a lot of lakes and sea to dip into.
Admittedly it can be tormenting in city apartments where you might not have a place for A/C even if you wanted to, and where you might not have enough outside walls to effectively cross-ventilate. Further, the stone and pavement in a city absorb heat like a sponge which keeps the average a few degrees warmer than greenleaf areas across the hot season.
Yet I think maybe half-ish of households (or at least detached houses) already do have A/C. Installations have been steadily creeping up in the last 25 years. But those units aren't there because of their cooling capacity (which isn't necessarily always even used). Those are air-to-air heat pumps that keep the house warm in the winter, and can be used for cooling in the summer.
> climate simply hasn’t, until recently, required it.
I would qualify that as it hasn't required it since the invention of air conditioning.
Which also isn't strictly true; the high temperature for Paris on July 1st this year is identical to the high for the same day back in 2015[1], and there are several times since 1970 that the temperature was over 30C.
Other sources[2] indicate 1947 was just as brutal as 2019 and 2022, and the warmest night was in 1772 (27.5C)
Outside air temperature isn't an issue. It's not like people drop dead the moment it hits 40. The problem is that after a few days of that everything is heated up through and you have no place to escape it. That's new and hasn't been happening before.
But "somewhat longer heatwave" isn't as scary sounding as "HOTTEST EVER RECORDED TEMPERATURE IN $LOCALE!!!!!!" which is why all the scaremongers keep screaming the latter.
We're warned of heatwaves and given instructions on how to not die all the time now. Not once did this occur when I was a child where I live. Record temperatures are more shown as an almanac style this is what's happened today whenever I see them. Personally I wish more scaremongering were happening right now.
Yes, there have been hot days across northern Europe before; however, the frequency of very hot weather has increased substantially.
It may not have gotten the headlines of this year’s heatwave, but we were in Switzerland and Germany for a month last July. For three of those four weeks, it was stinking hot. The maximum temperatures weren’t so bad, but the nights were oppressive, and there was no letup. If that’s going to be the norm
most summers, it absolutely justifies investing in air conditioning.
German here:
you are not allowed to install anything thats visible from the outside without the owners aproval (70% of people Rent in Germany) or even the aproval of the Apartment Owner Association (Imagine HOA but for Apartments and every bit as dumb)
whoops sorry I think i mixed the numbers up with the EU average, which is close to 70% point in case is that its much much more than in other countries.
The Danish Building code has requirements for retaining heat in the house, which is great in the cold winters, but devastating in the heart of modern summers. Combined with rules that practically require large south-facing windows to satisfy the total energy requirement limits, it gets very, very hot. And air conditioning subtracts significantly from your energy rating, making it almost impossible to include AC in a new building and satisfy the emission rating that any new building must satisfy.
The code allows only 25 hours a year where indoor temperature exceeds 28 degrees, but the validation of a building uses old temperature data, so on practice it's more hours of higher temperatures, and for houses that, even if you want to add AC later, wasnt designed for that.
Abs to add insult to injury, if you renovate an older building, you _can_ be required to bring it up to modern specs. That can be so expensive that it's cheaper to tear it down and build a new building. Because you can't do something half-good?
The building code _is_ a real problem, and changes ... well, haven't happened yet, so the buildings built today will be unlivable for as long as they stand in the new hotter summers.
Yes. I don't get that hang up. I bought new apartment in 2024. It has triple pane windows, and 20cm of styrofoam on the external walls.
I can cool down entire 70 square meters apartment with single 3.5kw split; that has worked well in the recent 40 degree heatwave. It does not even use "higher gears" to maintain the 24-25 degrees inside.
Not to mention it's usage overwhelmingly correlates with sunshine availability.
Cite your sources.
There are specific issues in specific places (eg heritage restrictions in Paris), a higher prevalence of shared infrastructure rather than single family homes, and a higher level of renting rather than home ownership.
And there are people on the green-left end of the political spectrum in parts of northern Europe with weird hangups about air conditioning.
But as best I can tell this claim is false; the biggest reason why air conditioning is not so widespread in Northern Europe as in the United States is that the climate simply hasn’t, until recently, required it.