Whether in Europe or North America, the summers in most areas used to be less extreme with lower peak days. It is the same story on every continent, every island, and all the seas on this planet!
While uncomfortable for a few weeks and plagued by mosquitoes, in the 1970s Rhein valley (NO dammit, you stupid damned spell checker, it is NOT Rhine, the river's name is Rhein!) in Germany we took it a little easier than usual, drank a lot, and chilled at water fronts.
In the North American desert areas, humidity used to be lower, so while not for everybody, that dry heat with steady temperatures was something the body could get used to. I certainly loved our visit to the Western U.S.A. in 1977, from the forests in Idaho, to the deserts in Utah, Arizona, and California. I spent 1999/2000 in Las Vegas, and it was not bad, but the old locals had already noticed the humidity going up back then, and told me how much more uncomfortable the place had become!
All this has now changed for the worse, because "climate change" (a shitty newspeak {*1} term for Global Heating straight from Orwell's novel "1984") is real, not a hoax!
Air conditioning is now a necessity in areas, where people used to sneer at paying the extra electric bills for it, because people fall over and die from the intermittent heatwaves today!
Note in the below definition, how Orwell's word for warm is "uncold". Conservatives have actually taken Orwell's horror vision of mangling language a step beyond, by abominating "Global Warming" (the original term) into "Climate Change". The term "Climate Change" completely ignores and even denies the fact, that our global average temperature is heating up, and the associated climate "changes" are due to the increased energy in our weather systems (stronger and more frequent storms), and we are experiencing more extremes, like on a teeter-totter getting whipped into ever more frantic up and down swings.
{1} "newspeak" was coined by the author of "1984", a not-utopian novel about a future paradise society, which was un-ideal.
Britannica's definition does not exclude this paragraph:
Newspeak, propagandistic language that is characterized by euphemism, circumlocution, and the inversion of customary meanings. The term was coined by George Orwell in his novel Nineteen Eighty-four (1949). Newspeak, “designed to diminish the range of thought,” was the language preferred by Big Brother’s pervasive enforcers.
Types of newspeak in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four include the elimination of certain words or the removal of unorthodox meanings from certain words; the substitution of one word for another (e.g., uncold instead of warm and ungood instead of bad); the interchangeability of the parts of speech, such that any word in the language could be used as either noun, verb, adjective, or adverb (e.g., the word cut no longer existed, and the term knife acted as both noun and verb, as in the sentence “She knifed the bread”); and the creation of words for political purposes (e.g., goodthink, meaning “orthodoxy” or “to think in an orthodox manner”).
https://www.britannica.com/art/newspeak
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