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My recommendation would be to read the article and view the source cited therein as a good starting point.
Honestly I'm surprised this is something someone wants to contest. Do you have a lot of iced beverages in your part of Europe too?
I read it and it doesn't match reality. I look at the façade of my building and out of 40 apartments there are 30+ air conditioners. People use them both to cool in the summer and to heat in the winter. AC are extremely versatile devices when temperatures swing from -20C in the winter to 40C in the summer.
And yes we have ice drinks - we just don't enjoy as much the starbucks travesties - so ice is usually in water, soft drinks or soda water and cocktails. Or you just open an ice cold can of beer and drink it on the go.
We haven't tuned AC to 11 like US because relatively more people in EU live in regions with bearable humidity. And up to 32-33C heat is no problem if humidity is low. You just drink more beer.
Counter anecdote: many parts of Switzerland have serious restrictions on residential AC. Some cities have outright banned them (Basel, Geneva), others require the AC to be powered by solar panels, others just don't allow the heat exchanger of a mini split to be attached to the facade of a building. Those two are de-facto bans on AC in apartments.
When you're talking about Europe, regulations like that will vary wildly between locations, and you'll always find anecdotes supporting whatever side you picked.
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Have you ever heard the phrase "the plural of anecdote is not data"?
I'm not trying to convince you that your particular eyes are lying to you. But Europe is a pretty big place. In most of it, AC is not very common even as heat waves increase.
There is objective data on this fact. In my essay, I linked to such information. This is not, to my knowledge, a contested set of facts. You could, with the language skills and internet access you have go forth and rapidly find out that either I am right in my characterization, or show data that would force me to reconsider my statements.
But you standing outside of a building and telling me I'm wrong will not cut it because 1) I've been to a bit of Europe and 2) I can read sources describing the overall situation in the U.S. vs. Europe.
In even backwater shithole countries like Romania/Serbia/Bulgaria the use of ACs is overwhelming. You'd be hard pressed to find a building without them, even wearhouses and factories are chock full of ACs. New developments are even required to either have central heating/air or ACs, complete with solar panels on the roof.
Citation, please.
Here's a neat game, open google maps street view and try NOT to see an external wall AC in a city.
I would posit that seeing window mount or other external AC units in a city is actually evidence of poor AC infrastructure. A residential structure with a bunch of window units sticking out means that there is no central AC available to the building. That means every window without a unit is a room without AC. For example, my high school was built before central air handling was common. It was absolutely covered with window AC units. Even still 0% of teacher offices had AC, maybe 20% of common areas, and only about 50% of class rooms had AC. Of those that had AC about 80% were inadiqute to cool the rooms to normal office temperatures. The office building next door, however, was built to modern North American mid-rise building standards. It had no external AC units, central air handling, and district supplied chilled water. Handling a bunch of IT and computer equipment the whole thing was kept at a chilly 72°F (22°C) all year round.
Besides that though @FtSoA is clearly right. It's trivially easy to find statistics showing less AC availability in Europe. From the International Energy Agency The Future of Cooling (emphasis mine):
Things are changing, as new homes in Europe are often heated with heat pumps that can be reversed for cooling in the summer. The pace of retrofits and new construction is slow though. In the mean time "Heat claims more than 175,000 lives annually in Europe."
If you insist on trading anecdotes though: "How is it that the most advanced research facility on Earth forgot to install air conditioning? " This is in a place that has reached 40°C (104°F). The "birthplace of the World Wide Web," but all the network switches overheat at 2PM every July.
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I got in trouble the last time I curtly linked to a google search about the prevalence of AC units in Europe so I won't provoke the mods again.
But seriously why can't you simply google the relative prevalence of AC units in the U.S. vs. Europe and stop this pointless journey of "let's count the AC units one by one"?
This is not a hard problem. This is not a controversial issue with contested epistemic status. Data is available.
And it shows you are clearly wrong. By a lot.
Or, if it doesn't, be my guest and provide data counter to that I have already provided.
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It's the old established areas of Europe that have an allergy (or ideological objection) to A/C, not the ex-communist countries.
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