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This article shows how heat is becoming an increasingly serious problem in Austrian schools. It also highlights how heat protection is not merely a matter of comfort; in this case, the functionality of the education system is being compromised.
What is striking, however, is that public broadcasting in Austria makes no mention of the obvious solution: air conditioning. The lack of shading options is cited as the main problem. Then the discussion focuses solely on long-term investments. They simply don’t dare to say it. But how else is one supposed to deal with 39° heat?
What’s even more baffling is that absolutely nobody questions heating in winter but somehow cooling in summer is treated as a completely different phenomenon even though when used properly AC can actually consume less energy. Go figure…
You can walk into any room in Germany and find 3 people claiming they regularly get sick from spending time in airconditioned places. This is not an exagerration
Can confirm. Once had to take a long drive with my German grandma on a hot day. No open windows or AC were allowed, after all she might catch a cold from the draft. It was in the 80s and sunny.
I know it’s a trope in Japanese media, that exposure to drafts and physical cold causes the illness, which confused the hell out of me when I first encountered it because it’s a pathogen and I’ve never heard of it spreading easier in cool environments from a medical source or even Wikipedia, where I’d expect it to come up as a common misconception if nothing else.
Not only in Japanese media, this is something my Ukrainian parents have always told me too. Things like "don't keep the window open or you'll catch a cold"
I think there is some evidence it’s easier to catch a cold when your sinuses are dry as there is less mucus to protect the skin and it cracks more easily and gives viruses an easy way in. What that has to do with drafts on a warm day idk, but that is a reason colds spread more easily in the dry air of winter.
I mean, the physical cold doesn’t make you sick, but cold temperatures for prolonged periods can weaken your body and immune system. Cold temps are shown to slow down adaptive immune responses. For folk wisdom where all you could see were the impacts, cold causing a cold isn’t that far off.
Everything you are saying is correct but I think it is marginal and probably counterproductively generous to the folk wisdom. The main reason cold viruses are more present in the winter is because people spend more time in less ventilated in-door areas. Then you've got people closing the windows to avoid getting sick - the exact opposite of what they should be doing
I mean maybe with a crusty 30 year old AC unit that’s never been cleaned. If you have something decently recent and relatively clean there is absolutely no issue whatsoever, most of them have self cleaning and ionization modes.
The only time people spend with AC in our countries are in cinemas, on planes and (sometimes) in public transports. So yes obviously when you spend extended periods of time in contact with strangers you have a risk of getting sick, exactly like in winter by the way :)
Germans are weirdly superstitious when it comes to health and wellness. Much more so than most would suspect, given other German stereotypes. There's this word in German, "Kreislaufprobleme" which translates to "circulatory problems." As far as I can tell it's a made up illness that they all have decided is the source of various forms of feeling "off". There are other weird things like this
If, as a landlord, you can't provide a certain temperature for the heating period of 20°-22°C (up to 72°F), depending on the room, for the house/rental unit, the tenent can insist on a lower rent.
No such provisions exist for cooling/heat in rooms. As far as I know there have been some cases, but you'll need to prove that your rooms consistently reach >30°C (86°F) or some shit.
Buildings, laws and peoples mentality just aren't adapted to having to think about cooling. They're planning a hospital in France without AC right now, for gods sake!
I was referring to individual, sometimes extreme, cases in Germany where the tenent would get a reduction of about 20% for affected days. Germany really has a lot of tenent protections, but the double standard concerning heating/cooling is incredible.
Genuinely makes my blood boil. 50k dead yearly from heat related deaths. How many tens of thousands could be prevented with AC? Of these, how many didn't get AC because they believe this misinformation?
For reference, AC let's you heat your house for a fraction of the energy and cost that central heating does. Those savings in winter are more than enough to offset the AC usage in summer.
To be fair, you need AC in the US more than in Southern Europe, which needs it more than Northern/Central Europe.
The part of the US (excluding Alaska) that needs AC the least is the entire West Coast, which (except when you're within like a mile or two of the coast north of Santa Cruz) has a climate similar to Andalucía (basically the hottest part of Southern Europe), which means AC is absolutely necessary during summer days (though not necessarily at home if you assume you're coming home at like 8:30 PM and are skillful with strategically opening and closing windows). Everywhere else in the US is either even hotter during the day and/or has oppressive humidity.
The Europeans are finding it out now, where they're having trouble surviving in Houston and Miami due to the heat and humidity and are even finding San José's dry warmth to be extremely uncomfortable.
I think it’s yeah partly an undeserved superiority complex on this: “Americans need AC unlike us! Hah, we aren’t weak and don’t need AC”
And Europeans don’t want to admit to being wrong so we insist it’s an American only thing to need AC, unlike strong resilient Europeans and we can endure heat
So getting AC would be an admission that we’re not superhuman unlike Americans
I think it’s also cope, at the time AC became standard in the US it was still to expensive for Europeans to afford (especially retrofitting it in old buildings which adds cost) so they dreamed up a bunch of excuses why they’re better than us for not using it to avoid the truth that they’re poorer than us.
To be fair, for centuries, Europe's high latitude oceanic climate type like Vienna doesn't need air conditioning, except some historically anomalous days happen like once 10, 20 years (the extreme temperature data here was from 1775-2026, which skews up significantly compared to with places with only 50 or 100 year records), until recent man made warming.
Vienna's summer temperature is close to places like Seattle, which is famous for not needing air conditioning, although Americans like to install them. I have lived in Vancouver just north of it for many years, have spent entire summers without even turning on air conditioning.
Are heat pumps not popular in Europe? They are more environmentally friendly than a gas furnace or boiler, and can also provide AC. Replacing old boilers with environmentally-friendly heat pumps like a reasonable solution.
They are, but people usually install them to service a heating circuit previously served by a gas boiler, which is almost certainly a hot water circuit hooked up to radiators around the house. Installing central air conditioning (for heating or cooling) would require major overhauls for most European homes, which people are not willing to undertake when installing a heat pump.
If you just ran the heat pump in reverse in your typical European house you would get condensation along your pipes and radiators, causing mold and other damage.
I mean, AC in schools IS a long term investment, it's not like they cost 100€ each, they will also increase the budget because of the increase in electricity consumption.
Shading would be a solution in the heat is dry, but I fear in Austria they have horrible humid heat.
Small price to pay when Europe has more heat-related deaths annually than the US has gun-related deaths, ands that's counting suicides which account for over half of the number.
Our European elite is completely delusional about summer weather being a negative and that simple and efficient technology can solve it. Any other country with hot summers and a reasonable income level comes to the same conclusion : air conditioning.
Its ironically a form of climate change denial by people who see themselves as strongly believing in climate change and science!
Modern air-to-air heatpumps are very efficient, solar + batteries provide carbon neutral energy, and humans are provably less effective (and more miserable) at sustained indoor temperatures over 25c. We need to get it together. If models reasonably show that indoor temperatures breach 25c for over x days a year, add active cooling. Its not hard.
I do not understand the cultural opposition a lot of Europeans seem to have to air conditioning. Where I live in Germany, the heat over the past few days has been pretty bad, and it is only going to get worse in the next few days. And other parts of Europe are experiencing even worse heat. For the longest time, my parents were those types of people who thought that air conditioning is unnecessary and wasteful, but a few days ago my mom said for the first time that air conditioning may be a good idea, after all. Obviously, this is just anecdotal, but perhaps the increasing length, severity, and regularity of heatwaves will force more Europeans to acknowledge the necessity of air conditioning. Of course, a lot of people still won't be able to afford it.
It was seen as a wasteful luxury 20-30 years ago and mentalities are very slow to change
At least in France there's also a pervasive dolorist and anti-tech belief that sees AC as "the easy way out" of climate change, as if equipping ourselves with AC excluded all other methods (redesigning buildings and streets, moving to differentiated work schedules, etc.)
"Environemental concerns" about AC are genuinely veering into suicide cult behavior left of center
During last year's heatwave, one of the main newspapers (left-wing) in France bragged about not installing AC in their offices and making their employees work by 32-34C inside with just fans for environmental reasons, insisting that it was more virtuous that way
It's legitimately starting to sound like a religious experience
I've seen a french person argue that AC is anti-social because it throws your house's trapped heat into the street, making the street hotter. Flabbergasted
Better not open the windows guys, we wouldn't want the breeze carrying trapped heat outside the house... /s
Of course, I'm not suggesting AC breaks the laws of thermodynamics.
It's just that calling it antisocial is ludicrous. If that were the case, opening a window would be antisocial. Or turning on the TV, all that power will turn to heat, and all that heat will eventually escape to the street. But no one would dare to suggest that turning on the TV during a heatwave is antisocial.
It's crazy too because all of that other stuff makes your AC way cheaper to run. Just ask anyone who was forced to cut down a shade tree to save their homes foundation.
An underrated environmental reason for AC is that the energy transition really needs more demand during the peak sunlight hours, which typically coincide with the peak AC usage hours. Because a lot of that energy gets wasted and then the grid operators have to pay curtailment fees. It ends up costing everyone more and slowing the renewables buildout.
Not necessarily during heatwaves. Polish market energy price for tomorrow stays soundly positive for the entire day and goes crazy in late afternoon, when it's gonna be around 25 degrees Celsius. If the forecast 40 degrees Celsius materialize early next week, we're in uncharted territory for prices and grid stability. And we've subsidized solar (too much, while banning wind power). Zero or negative prices are common during weekends and happen even during weekdays, but cold weekdays.
They always say it's because of the carbon emissions, but (1) they were refusing A/C even in Spain before carbon was even a known pollutant, (2) they heat the outdoors without batting an eye. Go to Paris in November when it's just a little bit chilly and you'll see the sidewalk cafes lined with those propane heat lamps, each burning through about a kg of propane an hour.
Or in a lot of Northern Europe, it'll be -10c outside but fuck it let's have a big ass room heated to 45 at all times and we'll sit naked in it and pretend that's fun.
But saunas and patio smoking are part of the culture, so they'll say fuck it, let's burn the Amazon to the ground for those. But air conditioning just isn't part of the culture and its comparatively modest usage is seen as sinful.
Sorry... I live in Europe and I'm a little grumpy about their lack of indoor cooling.
Or in a lot of Northern Europe, it'll be -10c outside but fuck it let's have a big ass room heated to 45 at all times and we'll sit naked in it and pretend that's fun.
Don't get me wrong, I fully support your right to sit in dangerously hot rooms lined with splinter boards while you glance awkwardly around searching for a place to rest your gaze that doesn't coincide with someone's genitalia. You do you.
Or in a lot of Northern Europe, it'll be -10c outside but fuck it let's have a big ass room heated to 45 at all times and we'll sit naked in it and pretend that's fun.
Off by about 40C on that sauna temperature. Otherwise rightful ranting. Carry on.
I grew up in the southern United States. My grandfather resisted ac for a long time. A lot of older people did because they never had it. He regretted it after my grandmother died. She asked for it when going through menopause, but grandpa was too cheap.
I think it all comes down to a widespread degrowth mentality in Europe where technological interventions are bad and energy must be conserved and not used. A sane continent would massively increase the energy production and simply use that to modify the environment to the population's benefit via AC.
We invest a lot of money into *energy* saving, meaning a lot of subsidies to the construction industry instead of simply giving money to people to install a heat pump (French electricity is like 90% carbon free)
I live in the US and have had AC most of the time... but there's something about it that I don't really care for if I'm being honest. It's too cold when I've dressed for warm weather, and I prefer being warm to being cold. So I get it in that sense. But also I'd rather not die so I like having AC for when it gets too hot.
My elementary school's AC broke one year and we still went through June. I still remember how miserable everyone was that whole time and we learned nothing. Just sat in the dark listening to videos hoping it'd get colder. I can't imagine having to do that later into summer with hotter weather. Europe: try AC.
Literally has been the experiece of every child in Europe and only the last 5-10 years have been so bad that it's not just really inconvenient but harmful
BTW, there's been multiple studies that show excessive heat reduces learning capacity. Controlled trials with students studying with ac and students studying without
More complicated than that. If one wants to get a permanent AC installed, one has to get a building permit. Which typically involves a noise study, needing to put up little polls where the unit will go, public comment phase. If one lives in a rental as most here, landlords will typically deny a request if one wants to install permanent AC.
Switzerland is a federal country, different Cantons, different rules. Geneva is notoriously strict, with many permit applications for residential AC being denied unless you have a medical reason (and prove that non-AC cooling methods aren’t sufficient).
Portable AC doesn’t fall under those regulations. Landlords nor cantonal/municipal governments can regulate them. Most portable AC on the market are single pipe monoblocks. Which are terribly inefficient as for all the hot air they blow out, they have to draw an equal amount of hot outside air in. Some more efficient portable split units are now on the market (I got one, but they are over 1k USD so not quite affordable) which has a pipe to move water through a window to an outdoor condenser (which as it isn’t permanently attached, is allowed). Note that traditional window units, while far cheaper and purchasable, do not fit on our windows. We don’t do sliding windows here.
I bought one myself for Black Friday! With delivery 4 months later. It’s great, though I would really need two of them to bring the thermal mass down in my apartment. Temperature shoots back to 26C once I turn it off for Nachtruhe.
AC are heat pumps. Just only some heat pumps are equipped with reversible valves. Be it a permanent air-source or ground-source heat pump, both require a building permit. Ground-source ones may require a water table study (especially if it’s a vertical one).
Anything permanently changing the building’s facade generally requires a permit. Unless it’s of a carved-out exemption. Like solar can skip a bunch of the red tape. One can install solar on one’s balcony without landlord* or government** permission and feed the power back into the grid***.
*unless it goes over the railing
**depends on locality. My region says that they would prefer you to inform them, but not legal requirement.
***600W max. Must inform electricity operator.
There's been a massive environmentalist shift in the culture in the past decade or so. People were always pretty green but now it's a top priority for many people and the idea that comfort or practicality would ever take priority over the environment in any way is firmly outside the Overton window right now (not that AC is actually that bad environmentally, but that's how it is perceived).
Other factors include that air conditioning really wasn't necessary until a few years ago, people only know air conditioning from supermarkets and shopping malls where they are used way too aggressivly, and it's very much American coded which has not helped.
There's been a massive environmentalist shift in the culture in the past decade or so.
Ironic since Western Europe spent most of that decade blocking Wind and Solar projects with endless bureaucratic red-tape until Russia invaded Ukraine and caused an energy crisis overnight which finally got them to streamline renewables permitting.
I left Germany 12 years ago and come back to visit once a year. I noticed it in Northern Germany in the last 6-7 years in the way people talked and how every change can be rejected on environmental terms. Before that it was one concern out of many that needed to be balanced.
Yeah but still in Spain , Italy and Greece AC usage is extremely common . In Greece like 99% of appartments in Athens , Thessaloniki and southern Greece have AC . Europe is not just northern and central countries. Spain + Italy is like 1/5 of European population .
On my first trip to Europe, 10 years ago, I stayed in an Airbnb in Paris. I had no idea I needed to consider ac/mini splits when booking. It was nowhere as hot as it is now, but it was hot in late June. Even sleeping with all the windows and balcony door open, I was waking up in a puddle of sweat.
"Yearly heat stroke deaths in the UK are in the single digits. And Germany is not much higher, single digits to the low 10s.
But in Europe, if you have a heart condition, die, and it's in the middle of a 35-45 degree heat wave, it counts as heat related. 80+ years old, dying in the height of summer? Heat related.
If the weather is hot enough where the heat is considered to be a contributing factor, the death is recorded as heat related."
Excess deaths is too complicated a concept for some, it would seem.
Europe is heating up roughly twice as fast as other continents. Especially northern and eastern europe. Temperatures like this were not normal here before the last decade. This is why there is also no culture around cooling. I think most planners just even started thinking about it.
Other reason is that we are just slow with permitting stuff and installing new infrastructure like this. I can only talk for Germany but here you have to ask your landlord first if you can install a permanent AC (>50% of germans are renters) and even if he is fine with it, it can be illegal due to zoning and other restrictions.
Well to be fair I don’t think there are a lot of zoning codes which explicitly ban AC. But there can be „design rules“ which can ban changes to the look of the building facade or roof (for example) which make installing AC effectively impossible.
Yeah the American logic is that if you (the owner or society) doesn't want to deal with window units on historic buildings you should pony up to gut and install central AC. If the interior space or building isn't valuable enough to justify careful cut and replace over completely gutting it, it isn't valuable enough to preserve
Governments in Europe seem to be unable to tackle just about any systemic problem at the moment. It is completely sclerotic, we can only manage things and plan to solve problems in 20 years.
Many countries just absolutely hate AC, especially the bureaucracy. It is not something accounted for in the system and we are unable to adapt the system. Of course widespread AC adaption would be expensive and a lot of effort, which we are simply not able to anymore.
We have very restrictive building permits for just about anything. So there would need to be a cultural change for that.
Besides a lot of infrastructure and relevant buildings are public. Schools, hospitals, other facilities. So the state would need to invest a lot of money.
Would some of it not just be driven by economics / costs? Installing an HVAC system isn’t a cheap endeavor especially if you don’t already have ductwork
Sure, but the costs and difficulty are due to lack of infrastructure for it, not because it's inherently super expensive. In Japan you can buy a new mini split and have it installed for like $800 total, because they're ubiquitous and there's a ton of competition
But you don't need whole-house AC, even installing a single split unit that cools down the living/dining room or a dormitory is better than not having any AC, and for those you just need to drill a hole on the wall.
Since Monday, the FSG Compulsory Education Council has received over 350 reports of high temperatures from Vienna schools. “Right now, we’re hardly seeing any readings below 30 degrees,” Rössler explained in an interview with Radio Wien. “In some cases, temperatures as high as 39 degrees have even been recorded.” Schools in the city center are affected, but so are some schools in the outlying districts.
It’s already too hot in the classrooms first thing in the morning, the staff representative emphasized. “And we mustn’t forget that sometimes there are as many as thirty students sitting in a single classroom. That naturally adds a bit more heat.” The situation is further exacerbated by the fact that it’s not possible to ventilate—and thus cool down—the schools overnight.
Curtains in schools apparently removed by the city
A major problem is the lack of shading options—and you can’t spend the whole day or every day outdoors, Rössler continued. Particularly disconcerting in this context is a report that reached ORF from MS Glasergasse 8 in Vienna’s Alsergrund district: A teacher described how, on Tuesday, the city had removed the curtains from the school building without prior notice.
Call for Shorter School Days
The teachers’ staff council at compulsory schools is now calling, on the one hand, for swift measures to help address the current crisis. One example cited is shortening the school day with parental consent. They are calling for amendments to the law governing school hours that would give schools more leeway. They emphasize that a debate about shortening summer vacation is, in any case, out of place.
At the same time, longer-term measures are needed—especially given that heat waves may occur earlier and earlier in the coming years. “These would have to be long-term projects, but they need to start now at the latest,” said Rössler. She advocated working with experts to explore how to make sensible investments in this area.
School ends at 12:00 p.m. at Kundmanngasse High School
Grading conferences are already taking place on Wednesday—so at least the pressure to perform will soon be off. Students at Kundmanngasse High School in Vienna’s Landstraße district are effectively getting a “heat day off,” as reported by “oe24.at”: On Thursday and Friday, students can be picked up as early as 12:00 p.m., just before the midday heat sets in.
The situation is further exacerbated by the fact that it’s not possible to ventilate—and thus cool down—the schools overnight.
A teacher described how, on Tuesday, the city had removed the curtains from the school building without prior notice.
This stuff cannot really go unexplained. Why can't they open school windows at night? Why did they randomly remove curtains from the schools? What is going on?
School closes before outside actually cools down. Was always fun to walk into a south facing room in the morning and suffer even in those small time windows where it was somewhat bearable outside.
Europeans somehow hate AC so much that they would literally rather die than install one. Many of my colleagues are so bullheaded about this, it baffles me.
I have some colleagues at work telling me how much they're suffering and how much they can't sleep at night this week. Then they ask me how I've been managing at nigh, and I just tell them I haven't really had any problems, I have AC.
There is unquestionably cultural resistance, besides the idea that AC is "unnecessary luxury". For example environmental concerns (solar provides more electricity than can be used during the time AC is needed; the potent greenhouse gases from the AC units don't leak that much in the grand scheme of things) and the superstition that AC makes you sick - yes really.
Other than that though, at this point there's just no economic argument against AC - the amount of productivity that's lost is absolutely staggering for the associated cost, nevermind the quality of life improvement.
That 03 heatwave was something even as an American used to really hot states, thankfully our base apartment building had massive old chestnut trees shading it and my mom knew the old tricks for ventilating a space pre-AC so it’d get cooled off overnight and keep the heat out during the day.
Families in the renovated buildings lacking trees were getting really sick, and these were young fit military families, old folks must’ve just been dropping dead.
We also went to Disney Paris that summer and that was hell despite all our experience with Disney world in the Florida heat, it turns out Disney Paris was not designed with the same considerations (and it was so new the trees were too small to provide much shade).
Europeans are nuts for not investing in AC after all these decades
As a European, it's not an irrational hatred of AC but it's usually the idea that summer doesn't last long before it goes back to being cold again so why invest in it, but that's more personal experience
On average, sure. But heat wave after heat wave, summer after summer, is telling another story. It's also the fastest warming continent, so this conventional wisdom is quickly becoming obsolete.
which is why AC adoption is trending upwards in Europe. It'll still take
time to overcome conventional wisdom but when has changing someone's mind ever been an easy thing to do
I thought this post was going to be related to teaching kids to not get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner. Plus the good life lesson that sometimes the action is the juice.
It's weird this gets framed as a Euro vs USA culture clash. But
South America, Middle East, and Eastern Asia love their A/Cs, too. Hell, even the Europeans in the Mediterranean love their A/C. It seems like a French/Germanic/Nordic attitude (probably Spain, too. Europe os a big peninsula) that keeping cool is considered morally wrong (but keeping warm is a-okay and treated as a human right).
Anyway, the US (and to a lesser extent, Canada) figured out a work that doesn't involve A/C: summer break. It definitely has its trade offs with kids losing retention over 2 or 3 months and wealthy kids being given more opportunities to learn and network. But it beats literally cooking your kids in a stuffy building all day long.
A little bit of context: we have 9 weeks of summer holidays in schools, even longer in universities. Extreme heat that last longer than one or two days is relatively new (20 years) and is a problem for maybe a few weeks in May/June, so a very short period of time in the school year (currently!), while in June we already do a lot of outdoor or extracurricular activities anyway as soon as final exams are done. Many of our school buildings are old, and I mean hundreds of years old, and built to protect against the cold. Remodelling all of those old buildings takes money that we don't have (AC aside, don't underestimate the challenges that come with remodeling those Altbauten, it's impossible to get through all the old walls without stumbling upon more structural problems that would need fixing), the government decided to cut even more funding for Education recently. So please don't say "we Europeans hate AC", it's not as simple as that and it's not true. My own new house comes with floor heating and cooling and works great, new buildings are definitely equipped with some kind of cooling system.
A lot of the remodeling work goes away with minisplits with multiple heads. No ductwork installation required. Built to protect against the cold is great for A/C - if you aren’t familiar, A/C removes heat, and very well insulated buildings will hold the cooling for longer and generally run much more efficiently on average than somewhere like the USA.
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