Europe Heatwave: Records Tumble in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands
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There's also no concept of central air conditioning anywhere in europe for non-commercial buildings, which is a big opportunity for improvement (especially in Greece where air conditioning is everywhere, looks disgusting in the streets and is less efficient than a central unit in summer).
Possibly the worst offence in Germany and especially in Belgium is that you can't ask restaurants/bars for tap water. They'll refuse to serve you, and will ask you to buy bottled water. (Tap water is 100% safe, they just don't want to do the kindness)
It's an especially absurd custom given that, you go west a few kilometers and pass the French frontier, every bar and restaurant is legally obligated to serve tap water for free whenever customers ask. In most mediterranean countries, it's not even a question of asking: You sit down, a waiter will bring you water, before you've even ordered.
That said, yeah, it does look very ugly, and I wish new buildings had central AC units.
Strangely, I saw more units with central A/C in Toronto than in San Francisco. I guess they're used to hot summers there.
(It's ubiquitous in the American South, though, since many of those areas were quite unpleasant to live in before air conditioning was invented.)
A home in San Francisco doesn't need central heating at all, but a home in Toronto (where it remains frozen for a few months in the year) very much does.
Once you have central heating, adding a central A/C unit (or a heat pump) is not a significant additional expense compared to how much a home usually costs, and failing that can be roughed in for later installation, so the decision to purchase one when the summers get too hot is an easy one, or when you have a family and want A/C so that small children or the elderly don't roast while living/visiting.
Toronto can get humid at times:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto#Climate
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humid_continental_climate#Hot_...
Temperatures in July and August often go >30C, and adding >70% humidity to get the Humidex you're looking at ("feels like") >40C.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humidex
* https://toronto.weatherstats.ca/metrics/relative_humidity.ht...
Sweating starts become ineffective because the air is already saturated with moisture, the sweat just beads up on your skin and there's no evaporative cooling. If you have a "dry heat", what you mostly have to do is (a) be in a draft to cool down and (b) replenish liquids. With >80% humidity, it's like trying walk in and breathe soup.
My girlfriend's grandparents are still in france and the 108 degrees fahrenheit temperature that it is supposed to be tomorrow sounds miserable. The grandparent says that people are looked down upon for having AC so they had to buy the grandparent a fan but that doesn't help when it gets above the 98.6 degree body temperature.
> Possibly the worst offence in Germany and especially in Belgium is that you can't ask restaurants/bars for tap water. They'll refuse to serve you, and will ask you to buy bottled water. (Tap water is 100% safe, they just don't want to do the kindness)
We got a lot of problems here in the US, but I love that I can get tap ice water from every restaurant for free and I've even gotten free ice water from starbucks without buying anything. So nice.
If I'm a restaurant owner and someone is taking up a seat while drinking free tap water, of course I'm not going to like that.
That is what the problematic behaviour with your described case is. "Free tap water", however, absolutely should be the standard. In Belgium, you will generally be refused tap water even if you're a paying customer with a 100 EUR bill. Whereas in France, it's illegal to refuse serving tap water… think about that.
If you're not allowed to drink tap water, you'll be drinking bottled water which creates plastic/glass waste and promotes a business that essentially repackages tap water.
At the end of the day I guess it comes down to preference. Perhaps a silly question, but why do you go for tap water? Just because of the waste issue? And a second question, why would tap water have to be free and would you pay for it?
PS: Cool business! Are you in Belgium?
It's wasteful not to. I wouldn't say it tastes the same, but even though the water where I live is very chalky, I'm personally fine with it.
> why would tap water have to be free
Because it's virtually free to the restaurant. Having it free also promotes the healthy habit of drinking water instead of other drinks: When thirsty, if tap water is not an option, many people will choose soda over water… if you're paying for it anyway.
> would you pay for it?
If it's water I want, I'd rather pay for tap water than pay for bottled water, simply on the ethics of it. But I would find it absurd and disgraceful to charge for tap water. Remember, this is a custom that is standard in many countries.
> Are you in Belgium?
Brussels. Sablon to be specific :)
60% of the human body is made up of water (some parts more, some less):
* https://www.usgs.gov/special-topic/water-science-school/scie...
Now there are certainly other beverages available, but at a restaurant the options are usually alcoholic or sugary. And if you're not into alcoholic drinks (lifestyle, health, or you are driving), and do not want to ruin your health with sugary drinks (pop/soda), what are the alternatives if you want something with your meal?
Yes, you can pay several dollars/euros for bottled water, but given that it is H2O, I'm not sure what value you're getting. Bubbles?
At some Asian restaurants they give you complementary (green) tea, which I like, but I still often ask for a glass of water.
After my meal I'm fine with getting a tea or coffee, but my friends and I usually do that at another place and not at the restaurant.
(I'm also not much of a beer or wine person, so if I order a vodka or whisky with my meal I get strange looks.)
Not how it works. You get free tap water with your order. So no need to use up a plastic bottle.
In extremis you can sometimes walk in if a restaurant isn't busy, ask for a glass of water, drink it while standing, and leave immediately. You would never sit in such a circumstance
Perhaps I'm not used to it, but that sounds extremely silly and rude to me?
The sort of request that is granted with a smile if asked politely, and denied if asked rudely, basically. Part of the general fabric of society.
You would only ask if you'd been out a while on a hot day and were parched, or something similar. There's surely some social analogue not involving water where you live?
Never done that nor heard of anyone ever doing that. I've always ordered food/drinks and tipped at restaurants where I've gotten free water which is everywhere. The no pay example I cited is Starbucks which is an order and pick up coffee shop. I actually pulled out my wallet ready to pay for the cup of water but they were nice enough to give it to me for free which is probably a good idea in hindsight considering mint says I've spent $1200 there over the past 4 years and I appreciated that.
Just the fact they do that makes me want to go there more often.
And Starbucks stock has never been higher.
Is that not what happens in other countries?
I'm not sure about that. It would be true with a spherical cow, but I don't think it's true when real people are involved because people sweat to cool down. I believe that phase change of water evaporating off your skin should continue to cool you down no matter how hot it gets, like a swamp cooler in Arizona. A fan should help this by rapidly replacing the humid air around you with more dry air.
(However my understanding is that evaporation cooling stops working once humidity hits 100%)
It's not 100% humidity, it's a flowing scale that depends on how much cooling you need to do via sweating.
If it's 10C outside, you don't need any sweating at all and the air humidity doesn't matter.
If it's 30C outside and 50% humidity, you're going to feel miserable, older folks could suffer under the stress.
From my experience, keep the sum of humidity in % and temperature in C below 100, better 80, to be comfortable.
As for humidity, the evaporative cooling from sweat should aid cooling until you hit 100% humidity (at which point sweat can't evaporate). But we're just talking about the mechanics of cooling here. If we're talking about human thermal comfort, which has been (with some debate) empirically quantified, thermal comfort only exists within a narrow band of temperature and humidity. So for example, a person sitting indoors clothed with typical summer clothing, will only be comfortable at a temperature of 27C at a humidity of approx 55% or lower (see this tool for more info: http://comfort.cbe.berkeley.edu/)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39881236
Explanation of alcohol licensing on the government website. Search for the word water.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/alcohol-licensing
There is also a campaign about providing free drinking water for refilling bottles:
Have you tried their beer? And why are you asking for water in the first place?
They always serve beer with extra consideration and thought put into the bierdeckel. You just don't get bierdeckel everywhere, this is quite a German thing, a matter of pride, customer service and a job well done. However, walk into an American bar and ask for a bierdeckel and you will get a blank stare. Even though bierdeckel are 100% safe, American waiting staff just don't want to do the kindness. To them any insistence on a free bierdeckel is just weird.
As for air-con in Europe. This is the last thing we need.
There was a time before air conditioning when it was possible to heat and cool buildings. The trick to it was not difficult, you just needed a stone or other robust building that takes a while to heat up during the day. A breeze running through the building due to having attic windows open and the front door open did a better job than any 110v fan. This was convection, just normal heat rising, with no external breeze needed.
This also worked well during winter albeit without the windows open for the cooling breeze. The physical mass of the building would keep it warm inside even if there were no fires in the hearths overnight.
America is different in that buildings are made from a few bits of wood and some PVC decorative covers. The specific heat capacity isn't right for natural cooling and, with the more southern latitude, the only way to survive is with air-con. This applies to the clammier parts of the American South as well as the dryer desert areas. Living there needs air-con. This is probably why people didn't live there in such vast numbers in the days before air-con.
But air-con is like a disease. People get used to it very easily and have to spend the rest of their lives with it. People are also vastly more spherical than they used to be and their lives are sedentary. As a consequence they can't regulate their own body heat. Their only option is to not enjoy the seasons and splendid weather, to be boxed in behind their noisy air-con machines with the windows closed and none of that natural temperature management that used to go on in former times.
As soon as the fatties that need air-con completely take over then that is game over for buildings that have served us well over the centuries with well considered solutions for natural temperature control.
German here - drink pretty much exclusively tap water. Ordering tap water in a restaurant definitely IS frowned upon (the restaurant has to choose putting it on its menu and/or accommodate your request) , but I have yet to meet another German who would take offense at drinking Kraneberger.
I guess there may be regional differences, but it's very clearly not universal.
> There was a time before air conditioning when it was possible to heat and cool buildings.
There are a lot of old buildings with thick walls as well as special building styles (like the Fachwerk that we apparently have a lot of, compared to other countries) that deal very well with heat and, I must admit, have a much superior air quality and just overall feeling of climate than any air conditioned building I have experienced so far. Perhaps those are adjusted to a very particular temperature profile, though, and if the climate changes, AC might start to make more sense.
I don't think we have very good experience with installing AC, though. Just an anecdote, but at my $JOB, we're housed in a very "modern" building with light materials, large windows from floor to ceiling, exposure to sunlight from dawn till dusk and a hilariously impotent AC (supposedly fed by an innovative ice storage something or other). The people in charge do a marvelous job of pretending, for years now, that it's a complete mystery why the ac keeps failing to move the needle - at the record heat of 39°C outside, the temperature inside climbs well beyond 32°C. But I guess that makes sense if you were responsible for making as basic a mistake as "building the walls too thin".
> As soon as the fatties that need air-con completely take over then that is game over
Aber sag uns doch endlich mal was du wirklich von den Amerikanern hältst, Klaus-Dieter.
We really have lost it with this air conditioning. It should be evident that the feedback loop has gone wrong when, after centuries of buildings serving us well, we can't enter them without the aircon, lighting and everything else turned on, with all doors and windows shut.
It is like summer comes along and we have excuses for wasting as much electricity as possible, then winter comes along and we do it again. There is no let up to it and people aren't necessarily directly paying for air-con and other demands. They are also not aware that they are heating up their environment considerably with this over the top lifestyle.
Modern offices are absurd alien places. The water can't come out the tap, it has to be brought by a man in a van. You can't wash and re-use a cup, cups and eating utensils have to be single-use disposable. Need an expensive fizzy drink? Have as many sugar rushes a day as you want, there is a vast refrigerator full of the junk, humming away, not too far away, all of it for free.
The noise of ad-hoc air-con solutions and the moaning people make about air-conditioning is a phenomenon deserved of study. A lot of people really do have this overly corn-fed obesity problem that can't be spoken of because to do so would be 'able-ist' and possibly a sackable offence. However, if you had to provide A/C for a group of fit people or for a group of fatties, which do you think would have the lower electricity bill? Also, why should those that can stay off the snacks have to endure these fattie-friendly alien workplaces?
I should hope so, what with the being German and all.
The rest of what you wrote borders, again, on projection and doesn't seem to be a constructive way to tackle the issue that you do seem passionate but not sufficiently empathetic about.
I don't think building a/c everywere is the right solution if we suffer from climate change due to our energy consumption habbits...
(And I was never refused free tap water in Germany. Puzzling.)
Central AC is still a lot more efficient than "every apartment gets individual AC", which is the norm in eg. Athens.
Each apartment can get a separately metered unit, with one compressor serving multiple indoor air units. The indoor units can be in different rooms, each set to different temperatures, with different schedules (why cool the bedroom during the day?).
Typical units can heat the home to >20C even if the outside temperature outside is 5C, and there are even units that can extract heat from outside when it is -20C (originally designed for northern Japan).
In the summer they take heat from inside a building, and dump it outside. In the winter, they extract heat from the outside air and send it inside.
The same unit does both heating and cooling.
You also do not need to renovate a home as much to install them. Traditionally air ducts are often used for a lot of HVAC, and they can sometimes be a hassle to retrofit into older buildings. Heat pumps using ~1-2cm pipes between the external compressor and internal 'heads' to move the heat, so it's a lot easier to run that pipe (like plumbing) than a much larger air duct.
Great! Now all we have to do is tear down and rebuild old buildings, coordinate window policy with hundreds of tenants, and build out expensive air exchangers that don't run on electricity. That is much better than AC.
There are so many things we can do if we just want to... do we really need to put our personal comfort before the healthyness of our planet?
Yes, if only we weren't so selfish, we'd be better off. What's the action item here? People are selfish and self-centered and are going to put their personal comfort above the health of the planet. And since the health of the planet is important, and you can't change human nature, then we better figure out real ways to make personal comfort be less harmful to the planet, rather than rely on "friends living in colder buildings".
Make them pay more money every time they show descructive behaviour. Tax them for it.
Instead of taxing elderly people for selfishly installing AC so they don't die, we should focus on improving technology such that running AC is not harmful to the planet.
Using taxes to reduce bad behavior can slow down climate change, but it could never stop it. Technology is the only real solution.
For those with compromised thermoregulation systems, primarily the elderly and the sick, and especially those who also lack an appropriate support network, most of the heat mitigation techniques other than "be in a cold enough environment" will not work.
They'll just figure it's a normal but unusually hot day. Then they get heat stroke and die. It's very easy to not notice it's happening to you until it's too late; there are known cases of people dying at (or after) sporting events on hot days due to this.
Yeah. That's totally just a "personal comfort" problem.
Or use 2" / 5cm of closed-cell spray foam to air seal buildings to reduce drafts, and then add more insulation to reduce heat exchange/loss.
(You can spray foam more, but it can get expensive and batt insulation can be just as useful.)
I live in Germany, in a house that's nearly 500 years old. There's one room that's holding up well against the heat, but the rest of the house is getting uncomfortable.
In the past there used to be days that were this hot, but now it's the second year where we get weeks and weeks of >30 degrees. Air conditioning was just not necessary so far, but I'm seriously considering adding some.
> Possibly the worst offence in Germany and especially in Belgium is that you can't ask restaurants/bars for tap water.
The discussion is a bit unclear what you mean here, if that's about tap water at the table, or tap water in general.
When it's hot, I never had issues asking for a refill of a bottle I bring along or a glass of water "on the go". I'd stand near the counter, drink it, thank them, and go my merry way.
Tap water at the table is a different matter, and yes, it's uncommon here and you might be considered a cheap-skate, as drinks are part of the calculation to make things work (food really is cheaper in Germany than in many other Western countries though).
It's like saying "electricity is part of the problem" well duh, that's why we're moving to green energy and more efficient power usage. We're not just gonna stop using electricity.
Not in Spain
> As temperatures soared to 38 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit), the cooling system on many ICE high-speed trains simply switched off, leaving passengers to swelter amid inside temperatures of up to 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit).
> "A company that has aspirations to be a high-tech firm, but one which soft boils its customers instead of bringing them comfortably to their destination, has more than a small technical problem."
That's a once off message - being a record. Good for immediate PR. Terrible for sending the message that needs to be sent - namely climate change.
The messaging needs to switch towards things are now permanently hot in X rather than well today is extra hot.
Gets the trend across in a very concise and obvious manner.
OK...I'll be the pedantic nit-picker and bring this up: 39.9 C is 103.83 F. How the heck did they round that to 102 F? I can see 104F or 103F, but 102 F!?
Or maybe they got the report as 102 F and calculated C from that? No...that doesn't work either. 102 F is 38.889 C, so should have rounded to 38.9 C if they wanted one decimal place, not 39.9 C.
Also, might as well nit-pick this too...there is supposed to be a space between the number and the unit symbol according to the rules for SI units, except for °, ′, and ″ when used to denote angles in degrees, minutes, and seconds, such as 14° 13′ 41″ [1].
I could see omitting the space if they included the circle, such as 39.9℃ and 102℉, since the circle keeps the C or F from being unpleasantly close to the number.
[1] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2794/punctuation...
39.9°C -> 39°C -> 102.2°F -> 102°F
Global warming is causing the heatwave now. But what caused the heat wave in 1833?
The BBC should have said that. This article mentions it: https://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/wireStory/europe-braces-rec...
It's the Onion, but still seems on point
[1] https://www.theonion.com/report-average-american-must-have-l...