It should not be that hot that far north.

Buildings and traffic lights are melting, I can only imagine what the power grids must look like in some cities considering the hoards of people hooking up AC units to their home, and most importantly, people are dying.

I'm from the uk. Our buildings are built to keep heat in. As in, there are government regulations about the minimum amount insulation new homes have to have. As in, you can get a grant to buy a heat pump so you spend less money on heating over the winter. As in, most buildings do not have a/c because the idea of wanting your home or office to be colder was laughable not even ten years ago. We used to hit 20°C in summer. 25°C in August, if we were lucky. This year we had temperatures 30°C+ in May. Schools got closed because it was too hot. We've never had that before.

When I was a kid, and I was born in the early 2000s, we averaged out at about a week's worth of snow days per winter. If you live in a country without those, it means the snow was so bad the schools had to shut because that many people couldn't get in. I had several classmates who missed school because, even though it wasn't a snow day, they were still stuck at home because of the snow. I remember bitching about my primary school headteacher having the rule of "if I can get in, you can get in" when he lived five minutes walk from the school and some of us were up on the hills and we literally couldn't open our front doors because the snow was that deep. I have a core memory of standing in the snow outside the school gates, my younger sibling holding my hand so tightly I thought my fingers were gonna fall off as I called our dad repeatedly until he picked up because the school was closed and we'd only found that out once we got there. I can remember wading through snow as a child to get off the hills and down to the main road bc we needed to go to the shops but the car was literally buried in snow. I can remember a white easter where my mother just tossed tiny chocolate eggs out in the snow (which was still falling) for us to find rather than properly hiding them. When the snow finally melted a week later, we were still finding eggs.

Last winter, it barely snowed at all.

We hit 14°C is January. And maybe that's normal where you are, but it's not normal here. Our January's should be 5°C at the highest.

Point and laugh all you want, but we've have over two hundred people die from "heat related deaths" so far this year and it's only going to get hotter.