At least 18 people died in France, including two children left in a hot car, as a heat wave gripped Europe and smashed temperature records in several cities Monday.
As schools in France closed or modified their schedules, forecasters in Britain predicted temperatures could break June records this week.
The temperature in Bordeaux in France’s western wine country rose to 41.9 C, breaking a record set last August. In Poitiers, in central France, it reached 41.2 C, surpassing a previous high set in 1947.
It’s also the buildings.
I live in Sweden. My flat was built in the 60s, and it’s made to retain heat. It was part of the million programme and is incredibly sturdy. I half joke it’d survive a nuclear bomb, but it very well might. There’s even a shelter.
Past few days we’ve had temps going up to around 27. That’s not too bad if you’re outside. In my flat however the temps easily rise to 32, and has even hit 35. Opening a window helps a little, but the entire building heats up and retains this heat.
While it gets cooler outside during the night, the building is still radiating heat, and it doesn’t fully dissipate come morning. I have a portable AC, and while it works well, the moment you turn it off the heat that remains in the walls, ceiling, and floor quickly radiates out and completely nullifies the efforts of the AC.
Many places in the U.S. has the complete opposite problem. Like this example.
It’s not about people being wimps, it’s about the climate changing in fairly chaotic and extreme ways, and our adaptations to protect against the weather simply not keeping up.
That sounds like a nightmare. I live in Australia and used to work in a 2nd floor office with very weak vented AC. In summer afternoons the sun would beat down on the one exterior wall, and it would heat up like a radiator. On hot days the wall and window glass became too hot to touch from the inside. You could feel the radiated heat when you walked in the room, like walking past a pizza oven.
Modem building codes require some sort of weird looking air-gapped cladding on the sunward side of buildings, steel, aluminium or concrete panels suspended 100mm away from the wall on pegs, and gridded awnings over windows so that the sunlight isn’t beating directly against the wall, otherwise the buildings are basically unsurvivable.
Technology Connections did a video on awnings and how much they were useful before AC, and how they’ve fallen out of fashion despite being needed more than ever
Yeah, that sounds similar to my situation. I have blackout curtains, but they don’t really help since they like you say, just heat up and radiate that out into the room. The best room is the living room/office since there’s a fully enclosed balcony that kind of acts as an airgap. I can just close the balcony door and it’ll trap most of the heat outside.
I’ve seen the TC video in question. My old workplace actually had awnings. It was fantastic, since they were cloth we could adjust them as needed. It still got really warm because the building was flat and so the roof also absorbed a lot of heat that then made it into the building, but despite that the awnings made a noticeable difference.
Honestly, given how the Australian sun is, I couldn’t imagine dealing with this over there. I’d actually just pop off from heatstroke.