The water doesn’t actually have to be all that cool for swamp coolers, because it’s the evaporation that cools the environment and warm water actually evaporates quicker.
No, calling swamp coolers air conditioning is definitely wrong.
If it’s 100% humidity in your room, the swamp cooler is going to do absolutely nothing, but AC will cool it down and can even dehumidify a bit if you run it enough.
Swamp coolers are awesome, but they only work in dry climates unfortunately.
Cool, but that’s not what we mean when we say AC. The meanings of words change over time and AC is used almost exclusively to refer to a specific type of device so unambiguous that I don’t usually have to explain which exact type of device I mean.
Otherwise literally just putting up a fan next to your window is technically AC. The term AC will lose all meaning.
Ancient Iran had air conditioning (lemmy.world)