I lived in CA for a year and visited on business work trips many times. Want to know what it is like to step outside in summer? Just fire up your oven to 500 or so, then hold your face over the door as you open it wide - dry heat. I don't have nor do I need AC here along side my Adirondack downslope creek valley.
California is a huge state, with great distances from north to south and from sea level to towering mountain peaks. Hence, it has many climates depending where you live.
I lived in Malibu for a year and San Jose for three years, and have been in every part of the state, and paddled in many. The weather in both places was beautiful 12 months a year. No air conditioning needed and rarely any heating. Sure, there are places in California that get very hot, especially the deserts of southern California. But San Diego, on the coast of Southern California, is a perfect 65-75 degrees almost every day of the year. In the Los Angeles area, you can literally go skiing and ocean surfing the same day for much of the year.
Climatewise and naturalwonderwise, much of California is god's country, especially northern California. Almost every normal road in many places is a continuous display of what would be "scenic overlooks" or "Kodak spots" in the East.
On the weather reports from the Los Angeles TV stations in the 70's we would get five different reports each evening: high desert, low desert, mountains, valley and coast.
I often regret moving from San Jose to the East, where the climate is worse in all places. Well, in the East at least we do have Maine in the summer and South Carolina and Florida the rest of the year. Unfortunately, the automotive connection between the two is I95, which is unbearable from Portland, Maine, to Richmond, Virginia. Well, okay, Los Angeles has more unbearable freeways for shorter stretches.
I grew up in Germany where the winters are more along the lines of what I read in previous posts. -30C was (is) not uncommon.
