The European heat wave seems to have subsided somewhat. But it’s warm elsewhere and so the proponents of “global” warming are rushing to the next local hot spot. Though as Chris Martz notes, the problem in Europe is an “omega block” in the jet stream of a sort that seem to be getting more common in Europe but not most of the planet, strange if they’re a planetary phenomenon. For our part we continue to maintain that, first, since the planet is almost certainly warming naturally as it emerges from the Little Ice Age, warming alone is not irrefutable proof of human influence, and second that since the Urban Heat Island clearly contaminates the records we are not sure it’s warming as much as those famous graphs seem to show. (As one among many pieces seizing on the heatwave, said, “I was particularly struck that many cities in France and Germany recorded their warmest night ever.” But nights warming faster than days is a key UHI red flag.) Third, EU warming is clearly amplified by the decline in European cloud cover over the last quarter-century which no one has managed to link it to CO2 and somehow doesn’t get mentioned in news stories. Meanwhile we turn on the AC. Because a revealing aspect of this episode, as we also discuss in our eighth item below, is the curious difference between Europeans and North Americans when it comes to how governments propose to protect the public from the heat they say is now more common.

On which point Robinson Meyer in Heatmap comes up with the usual and then the unusual:

“There is a heat wave in Europe, the world’s fastest warming continent. And so, as you may have heard, a perennial topic of online climate discourse has returned: Why don’t more Europeans have air conditioning?... It’s a fraught topic. I’ve assumed that as extreme heat gets worse as the climate changes, Europeans will simply get on with it and install AC, much as Americans in the Pacific Northwest have done. Yet there are cultural and regulatory obstacles to AC’s growth in Europe.”

What’s remarkable in his cataloguing of the stats is not so much that Europe has less AC than the US, predictable given that it’s poorer and that it doesn’t have sweltering tropical places like Mississippi. It’s that it has far less even than chilly old Canada:

“Only about 19% of European homes have air conditioning. That’s less than the United States, of course. But it’s also less than Canada, which has a more comparable climate. Nearly 70% of Canadian homes have air conditioning or equivalent equipment.”

The world leader, it seems, is Japan at 91%. And while it is logical that the rate is higher in southern than northern Europe, and rising, it’s weird that Italy with its Mediterranean climate would have less AC than Canada or Japan with their temperate ones. Or not weird since Britain, whose climate is notorious for being cold and wet, is with Europe on this odd business Brexit or no Brexit:

“Just over 4% of British homes have air conditioning. What’s most striking to me, though, is that the elderly are most susceptible to heat-related death — and only 3% of households with someone over 75 in the UK have AC.”

In this sense it’s not Americans who are the outliers, despite a spate of stories about Europeans visiting for football matches only to encounter soccer, hypermarts and other uniquely American phenomena. As Roger Pielke Jr. wrote, the issue is:

“Europe’s Deadly Aversion to Air Conditioning/ Tens of thousands die in European summers for want of a technology the rest of the rich world takes for granted”

Now he does think Europe is warming. But he also insists that Europeans are dying unnecessarily from heat:

“This post shows that Europe largely chooses these deaths through a long resistance to a 1902 invention that the rest of the rich world treats as an incredible benefit of modern technology – air conditioning.”

And since one of the crucial aspects of climate change is the dubious connection between science and policy, it’s worth asking why a continent full of reasonably wealthy, literate and presumably not entirely stupid human beings would do something so stupid when they could easily afford not to and must know it. And part of the answer is government. (Including a classic detail that in Switzerland citizens are getting refuge from bad weather and bad government in private-sector movie theatres that have cooling systems the state makes it hard to get at home, while in the UK they even flee to hotels.)

RPJ cites three important essays, one of which “details how French and Swiss rules deter installed AC” and another explains “how U.K policies ‘all but ban’ air conditioning, despite its benefits.” But since governments everywhere are subjected to a lot of the same perverse incentives and this policy is more or less unique, it must be something in the political culture and indeed the other essay “traces the aversion to a deeper hostility toward energy.” Which in turn cries out for explanation.

As does the fact that, as Heatmap emailed on June 26:

“France paused production at two nuclear reactors to avoid violating environmental rules against spewing warm water from the plant’s cooling systems during heatwave conditions”.

Which seems bizarre unless you really think that basically energy is bad and who needs it, especially in bad weather. Which they seem to.

The Washington Post, which has the usual American leftist belief that European contempt for their own country is fully justified (right down to Americans having stupid windows), did concede that “European soccer fans enjoy a brief fling with America’s air-conditioned culture” but then insisted that:

“Despite a deadly heat wave at home, many say they won’t permanently embrace Americans’ electricity-guzzling amenity.”

And why not? You guessed it. Profiling one Briton who loved it but hated it:

“Installing AC simply wasn’t the British thing to do. He’d have to break a stiff-upper-lip mentality and make peace with a trade-off that Europeans tend to view as taboo: Air-con accelerates global warming.”

As Pielke Jr. notes, in a new paper he and three coauthors point to the fact that:

“Climate advocates have long disparaged adaptation – they cast it as an avoidable cost of failed mitigation, dismiss its effectiveness, and treat it as an obstacle to emissions cuts. We argue that this framing inverts reality.”

But that phenomenon is by no means uniquely European. Whereas refusing this one crucial adaption appears to be. And while it might be that the US, Canada and Japan have more AC because they got richer sooner and installed it before climate change became a “thing”, there must be more to it. And it must have something to do with Europeans’ excessive inclination toward statism and trendy left-wing ideas. Which in this case are killing people quite directly... and with a holier-than-thou attitude.