Mates, please. Just stop with this BS: "175,000 people die from heat in Europe every year, while in the US only 3,000 do." The comparison is bogus. If we compare apples to apples, the numbers are much closer, and the US does not necessarily come out looking the best. Let me explain. I'm an AC-loving emu, but I'm also a perfectly objective emu, so let's go! For starters, the 175,000 figure covers the WHO European Region, which includes countries such as Russia and the nations of Central Asia. It's basically a catch-all region with nearly a billion people, and some of those countries are hot, autocratic, and relatively underdeveloped. But that's not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is methodological. The American "small" figure of roughly 3,000 comes from death certificates. Heat must be listed as a cause of death or a contributing factor. I don't know exactly how the coding works, but essentially someone qualified has to look at the deceased and conclude, "Yeah, heat defo played a role." The European 175,000 figure is based on statistical modelling. Analysts estimate how many deaths are correlated with high temperature and then convert that relationship into an annual number of heat-related deaths. This methodology does not require a coroner to explicitly identify heat as a contributing factor. The European method naturally produces higher estimates. The American method naturally produces lower estimates. So if we want a genuine apples-to-apples comparison, we need to apply the same methodology to different countries. And researchers have done exactly that. A 2015 Lancet study estimated temperature-related mortality across multiple countries. While it included only four European countries: Italy, Spain, Sweden, and the UK, it allows for a more meaningful comparison. Using a similar methodology and adjusting for population, the United States would come out somewhere in the middle. It would have roughly 10,000 heat-related deaths per year—lower than Italy and Spain, but HIGHER than Sweden and the UK. So the AC-abundant Yanks seem to be sitting right in the middle of their AC-deprived "Europoor" counterparts. Kind of an anticlimactic conclusion, but that's usually what happens when you're being perfectly objective. Stay cool! Or warm, depending on which season your hemisphere is currently enjoying!