Technology

Ah yeah let me check my thermometer after a whole night of ventilation.... yeah it's still 27, down from 28 last night whooo. And this is my bedroom which is towards north.

European living in a "temperate climate" here. A decade ago, I didn't need AC. Temperatures over 30 happened for a few days at a time a couple times per summer. Heatwaves that killed old folk with sustained temperatures over 35 for a week happened once a decade.

Now it's the norm. We see temperatures in May that would only have been possible in the peak of August in the mid-2000s. We see temperatures over 35 everyday for weeks at a time. When it finally rains, it doesn't cool down anymore. It just gets unbearably humid. Temperatures at night don't fall down below 28 after a few days.

Even worse. My living room, home office and kitchen are in full sunlight the whole afternoon. I can live in the dark, but the walls have a thick insulation. Insulation doesn't deflect heat, it stores it and slows it down. It's literally accumulating heat as soon as a single sun ray touches it. Once the heat creeps through, they stay hot and radiate for a week. You could ventilate all you want, you can't fight the thermal mass of a wall heated through its core up to 45C.

Climate change transformed my mild-winters, warm-summer region into a rainy-winters, unbearably hot summers region in a few decades.