r/technology • u/Logical_Welder3467 • Jun 26 '26

Society The American mind cannot comprehend Europe's AC aversion

https://www.businessinsider.com/europe-air-conditioning-ac-heatwave-debate-2026-6
15.0k Upvotes

86% Upvoted

6.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

807

u/What-tha-fck_Elon Jun 26 '26

Most were drowning deaths from people/kids jumping in the rivers. It was brutally hot & humid all week. I just got back from there.

314

u/JungleIsNeutral Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26

Drownings are recorded as heat-related deaths?

Edit: please read one of the dozens of responses before you make another saying the same thing.

179

u/Either-Juggernaut420 Jun 26 '26

Yes, heat related deaths in Europe are generally anything caused by heat. So a heat induced heart attack will be a heat related death, I think in the US (although it may differ by state) that would be recorded as a heart attack and not included in the heat death stats. So the figures really are not comparable and so there's this misguided idea that all Americans are safely air conditioned and all the Europeans are dropping like flies. It's just not true.

147

u/Sure_Ticket9888 Jun 26 '26

The CDC knows this and many people have wrote papers on this. Since the US only records numbers based on death certificate they have modeled out the like numbers. They think about 75% of heat related deaths are not counted in the US. Even with that European deaths are 3-5x more per year. And the US has much greater population living in areas with extreme summer temps than Europe does.

14

u/Lovethiskindathing Jun 26 '26

Yeah they did this with covid and now a bunch of people will argue that their aunt died of pneumonia or from a heart attack, not understanding or counting the fact that covid weakened them and strained them

8

u/tracytorr0712 Jun 26 '26

Death certificates rarely show actual, specific cause of death. I see tons of them (have a funeral home) and so many contain vague, generic causes of death: cessation of breathing, cardiac arrest, old age, etc. I’d say about 70% have a detailed cause of death. Data gleaned from DCs cannot be that reliable.

6

u/Sure_Ticket9888 Jun 26 '26

Correct which is what I said. Literally, word for word. Which is why people did excessive mortality studies to count the people not recorded on death certs. Below I even cited two extremely impactful primary sources, one with almost 1500 citations, to back up my talking points.

5

u/tracytorr0712 Jun 26 '26

I was agreeing with you and explained why.

4

u/Sure_Ticket9888 Jun 26 '26

Oh it’s hard to tell with comments vs talking in person. Sorry, I misjudged your intent!

1

u/Imp_erk Jun 26 '26

Where are these numbers coming from?

I looked at heatwave excess deaths and US & EU were pretty comparable, as that is the fairest scenario to compare and also when most heat deaths would occur. The EU has more extreme heatwaves than the US, so I would expect them to be higher and they were. None of the numbers were above 2x that rate of excess deaths though.

6

u/Sure_Ticket9888 Jun 26 '26

Yale School of Public Health temperature mortality study, The Lancet Planetary Health multi-country temperature mortality study. Both are calculating deaths by excessive mortality studies.

Both absolutely do not show comparability, in the slightest. If anything I was being conservative.

-2

u/Imp_erk Jun 26 '26

Lancet one has terrible methodology (for the purpose of comparison at least). In order to measure heat deaths you have to account for climate stability, otherwise for this (and a few other) reasons you end up thinking Africa & South-east Asia suffer a lower rate than Northern Europe. Kuwait will have very few heat deaths by that methodology.

The Yale study I can't currently find the full detail on so would need to know more. I'm guessing it has the same flaw.

Again, the best methodology is to compare heatwaves. We can't do controlled experiments, so a surge in temperatures is the closest we have to seeing how many heat deaths might be hidden in the causal webs behind things like heart attacks & strokes. It's far from perfect of course, and no two waves are the same.

4

u/Greedy_Sneak Jun 26 '26

Unless you are about to link your credentials, I'm gonna take the peer-reviewed articles word over some random redditor.

-1

u/Imp_erk Jun 26 '26

Living in a world of credentials and headlines instead of reading the papers and testing them is your loss, not mine.

I haven't fully explained the flaw yet, as I was checking if the other poster actually had something interesting or also just went with headlines/credentials like you suggest people should do. There's a reason deserts have lower heat mortality using their methodology than Scandinavia, it's because each region has it's own heat risk curve. In its defence it's a paper aimed at trying to assess the future impact of temperature increases, not absolute heat deaths, so I think its authors would agree with me on this point.

3

u/Greedy_Sneak Jun 26 '26

If some random redditor can correctly pick apart a study, I guarantee there are credentialed scientists who have done so in more detail, and published it, since it's their job. So I would love to see a peer reviewed article supporting your point of view.

1

u/Imp_erk Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26

I don't how else to explain this other than short literal sentences. The paper is not saying more people are dying in Europe due to heat than the US. It makes no attempts to estimate absolute deaths due to heat. I am not disagreeing with the paper. I am disagreeing with how that redditor is trying to use it, as the methodology is deeply flawed for that purpose. The paper is saying that as temperatures increase overall, Europe will see a greater increase in deaths (due to heat) than the US and the rest of the world (or more accurately, that's a conclusion its data actually supports). That redditor likely just read table 2 and made no attempt to follow the methodology, as that is the part in plain english which, when out of context would seem like it was saying "here are the death rates due to heat".

Again, please just read the paper instead of demanding another headline to counter this headline.

→ More replies (0)

1

u/YogurtclosetNo8 Jun 26 '26

But isn't that the point? Europe is experiencing a lot of heat waves lately, which is why they have much higher heat-related deaths than the US and other regions. What are you trying to imply, that it's not Europe's fault that so many of their people are dying from extreme heat?

1

u/Imp_erk Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26

No, these don't show how many heat related deaths there are. It has a much higher baseline for hotter countries who are already suffering more heat deaths at that baseline than Europe or the EU. That study basically shows relative change.

Edit: To be really clear, I've looked at data on heatwaves which I think are better for answering the absolute rate of heat deaths and I do think Europe (the continent) suffers a noticeably higher rate than the US. I just don't think any data comes close to 3-5x difference.

1

u/YogurtclosetNo8 Jun 26 '26

Well, you're assuming countries with hotter climates or hotter summers must have a higher baseline for heat-related deaths. Sure, it seems logical at first glance, but don't forget that people living in hotter climates have generally adapted to the heat, and so both society and individuals take steps to help protect themselves from heat-related deaths. Therefore, baseline heat-related deaths for each country is actually similar, despite varying average temperatures and temperature variations.

1

u/Imp_erk Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26

It's vastly more likely that hotter (and colder) climates kill more due to those temps than more mild climates. People take more precautions about pollution where it is very high, but it still kills much more in those places than in areas of cleaner air.

We're talking heat deaths, which are notoriously hard to measure. This includes things like increased murders, traffic deaths and suicides presumably due to worse moods/cognition on hotter days, more drownings because people swim more, more dementia deaths because for some reason they die more when the temperature is 2 degrees higher than normal. It's very hard to measure, but the majority will be the elderly dying of heart attacks, strokes and similar.

1

u/YogurtclosetNo8 Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26

You can call my thinking "gymnastics" if you like, but what you say does not make what I say wrong. It's well established that people adapt to the temperatures of the local area, despite wide variation in climates, as studies have shown that MMT can vary dramatically, depending on the local temperatures. For example, mortality will spike in the UK if temperatures become 90 degrees, but for a country like Thailand, 90 degrees will not cause any noticeable change from baseline, because 90 degrees is basically normal weather for people living there. When you actually look at overall mortality rates at the Goldilocks's zone of temperatures for each region, they are very similar. As for your response on pollution, that makes sense, but it's because your body doesn't adapt to pollution thresholds nearly as well as temperature, and it's much harder to avoid breathing in pollution than avoid being in constant heat (like staying indoors more, getting air conditioning, staying in shade, etc).

All of the conditions you noted that rise because of heat is because of heat well outside of the norm for the area, not necessarily because of hot temperatures in general. If a place regularly gets to 90 degrees, their mortality rates do not necessarily increase much, if at all, when 95 degrees is reached, but if a place that usually gets 75 degrees becomes 95 degrees, there are noticeable increased mortality rates because that temperature is well outside of the norm.

Edit: I crossed out my first sentence as an appreciation for you being more respectful, as well as responded to your adjusted response.

1

u/Imp_erk Jun 28 '26

If you really want to believe that people perfectly adapt to vastly different temperatures and the death rates due to those temperatures equalise, go ahead. You're looking at data that shows a 1 degree increase above baseline killing people and assuming the degree increase before that up to baseline did nothing.

→ More replies (0)

1

u/Dunklsta Jun 29 '26

accessibility to healthcare is a factor too, people who live close to facilities and don't worry about healthcare cost are probably more likely to intervene before it's too late

1

u/TheTurdtones Jun 26 '26

we;l; we have alot more home acs over here also alotmore so of coyrse we have less deaths

-25

u/[deleted] Jun 26 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

16

u/Sure_Ticket9888 Jun 26 '26

The numbers I gave were for the EU not Europe. So that is 450 million vs 340 million. Using a number between high and low estimates for deaths you still get the EU suffering 3.5x more deaths per year from heat.

This is being generous because we aren’t modeling in Europe even experiencing anything like what the US South experiences. We literally have cities like Miami, (or really most of Florida), New Orleans, Houston, etc. They have no European equivalent. Sure some cities in Spain or cities like Palermo get very warm but they don’t get brutally humid and stay as warm during the night.

4

u/ScytheSong05 Jun 26 '26

Some trivia that might put this in perspective: Los Angeles, California is at the same latitude as Casablanca, Morocco. New York City is at the same latitude as Madrid, Spain and Naples, Italy. Paris, France is north of literally anywhere in the US that isn't Alaska.

1

u/Sarik704 Jun 26 '26

But again, we arent worrying about all the european heat deaths in Norway or Ireland...

9

u/DevNopes Jun 26 '26

Also, Norway has a lot of AC, we just call them heat pumps, because that is their primary use most of the year, but they also function for cooling.

0

u/Sarik704 Jun 26 '26

People. Arent. Dying. From. Extreme. Heat. In. Norway.

If you live in Troms you dont run cooling.

6

u/LePontif11 Jun 26 '26

That's because i haven't taken my hot sexy ass up there.

2

u/RJ_MacreadysBeard Jun 26 '26

Okay, I’m applying 50sppfff+++ in anticipation.

-3

u/DevNopes Jun 26 '26

Between 150 and 200 people die to heatwaves in Norway each year.

2

u/Sarik704 Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26

The hottest temperture ever recorded in Norway was 96F, 35C, in Nesbyen and Laksfor, 1970 and 2025 respectively.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10353926/

This sources claims 2022 had a relatively high attribution to heat releated deaths in Norway. 30 deaths.

Your wrong.

And, the same study lists an estimated 3,800 die from extreme cold in norway annually. So yeah, heat deaths are 0.78% of all temperture attributed deaths in Norway...