THE THING IS, GERMANY IS ON THE LATITUDE OF CANADA, NEW YORK IS ON THE LATITUDE OF SPAIN. AND KNOXVILLE IS ON THE LATITUDE OF MOROCCO. Germany Scorned Air Conditioning—Then Came the Heat Wave: America’s fondness for artificially chilled air was long viewed as wasteful, unnatural and wimpy, but record temperatures have some Germans rethinking.

Natalie Mayer knows why Germans disdain the air conditioner, or the Klimaanlage—literally, climate apparatus.

“People here don’t like air conditioning. They think it’s a waste of energy, it’s bad for the environment, and people say it makes them sick,” said Ms. Mayer, a Californian who has lived abroad for more than a decade, including the last four years in Berlin.

She also knows it’s easy to be anti-A/C until getting punched in the face by 100-degree weather. Summer is barely a week old, and heat records in Germany are already getting busted right and left. . . .

High temperatures are known to make people act out of character. Police in the German state of Brandenburg stopped a man riding naked on a motorcycle. He said it was too hot for clothes.

Whenever there’s a heatwave in Europe, the European fashion for mocking American air conditioning and iced drinks is exposed as climate chauvinism.