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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27486 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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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):

Household ownership of ACs varies enormously across countries, from around 4% in India and less than 10% in Europe, to over 90% in the United States and Japan, and close to 100% in a few Middle Eastern countries.

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.

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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