To Americans who might feel inclined to scoff at Europeans talking about the heat: I know you’ve heard this before but maybe you’ll listen to an American who spent many years of her life dealing with 115F / 46C summers out in the American west and now lives in France.
THIS IS WORSE. It’s so much worse.
When you hear “there’s no AC” you probably are thinking like…oh that’s rough, but still I’ve dealt with those temps. My old place didn’t have AC. It can’t be that bad.
NO. The lack of AC trickles down into every facet of dealing with the heat in a way that slowly and quite literally boils you alive. It’s not just “oh my apartment is hot this sucks”, it’s “there is nowhere you can go to cool down and if you overheat there is no help available”
For most there’s no AC anywhere. Anywhere. The coolest place available is maybe your local church, or a shopping center. Both will kick you out around 8pm, the hottest part of the day. In France and Spain in particular, the time zone is wrong (Hitler’s fault—we’re still aligned with Germany instead of the UK) and the sun doesn’t set until 10-11pm. Heat is still being actively pumped into your living spaces at 10pm.
And the temps do not meaningfully drop overnight. (Which you might expect if you’re from the American west. Southerners do understand this.) Many people live in stone walled buildings that just keep heating up. This is very literally the experience of being in a stone oven. And there’s no way to drop the temperature. You can’t escape it.
If your body temp climbs to unmanageable levels and you start experiencing heat exhaustion, you can call the hospital…most of which also do not have AC. I’m not sure how they’re treating people, I guess with ice packs? There’s already been a handful of deaths in my city, and that’s before any kind of post-wave reporting. These are real time reported deaths.
Anyway I want you to really, really internalize the sense of panic that starts to set in when you’re in these circumstances. The animal brain really starts to go wild when there’s no options and no escape. That’s why Europeans are posting about suffering.
(And no—leaving isn’t possible either. Many people don’t have cars, and the trains are down due to track over heating. And also don’t have AC. These conditions are frankly genuinely scary.)
i've said this on twitter since americans LOVEEEE to make fun of us in europe rn and i'll say this here too: AC really isn't much of a thing here. Besides the fact that hmmm it contributes to boil the planet, it uses a lot of electricity that people can't always afford, I KNOW SHOCKING!!! POOR PEOPLE EXIST!!! the bill quite literally skyrockets you know? not to mention, in big cities the extensive AC use from shops (that keep staying open during the hottest hours of the day because capitalism!!) causes constant blackouts and power shortages, in Milan and Turin the electricity cables that power entire zones of the cities MELTED because of the sun. Last year i was still in my student dorm in Turin and we had multiple blackouts during the day, I lived on the fifth floor, there was no AC, we could barely function and we ran out of power ALL THE TIME. that means no water in the fridge, no ice cubes, no fan. You think with all the denial of climate change (that you ACpilled people are contributing to), governments can magically convert entire nations to the AC? it takes a lot to change a system that we lived in for decades. Just shut up and accept that it's not supposed to be this hot and humid in Europe, that dozens of people are dying of heatstroke and that climate change won't be fixed by the AC (in fact, it will make it worse and it's still not something that is generally accessible).
