I grew up in a house built in the early 1900s, and we had old cast iron radiators that worked wonderfully. I hate forced air, especially the newer types. For most of my pre-teen and early teenage years my parents used a woodstove, which they have recently begun to use again. They took out the cast iron radiators and switched to baseboard during the period they didn't use the stove.
It isn't because it was the US. It was because it was a necessity to have reliable heating and insulation. For example, I just spoke to my parents and they told me that it was -25.5 c last night (-14 f) not factoring in the windchill. When you live in a climate like that, you either live in a few rooms of your house during the winter (like my friend who owns an old farmhouse with a wood furnace and woodstoves), or you insulate and have powerful furnaces/boilers. Or I guess you learn to love high gas/oil/electric bills.
I live in an old period building here with giant windows and nosebleed ceilings. It's cold, but being a period masonry building, it's impractical to expect anything else. If climate change hits here harder, I imagine that you will find more people double glazing, bigger furnaces, closing off areas of their houses, and/or using pellet stoves.
We have a little oil radiator in our room. I would have moved out if we didn't have a secondary heater. The boiler is new, but there is no way that we can expect it to heat up a building this size.
The coldest house I've lived in was also a period house in the US. It faced Lake Erie and had the original windows. While it doesn't get as cold there as where I grew up, the wind off the lake would blow a lot of the heat out, even with the storm windows in. I'd wake up some mornings and could see my breath. It wasn't a priority for our landlord, so we froze. Once the building heated up after the boiler ran a lot for a few days, we'd walk around in tshirts and shorts. We had absolutely no control of our heating. We could shut our radiators off once it started getting too warm, but we were on the top floor and roasted anyway.
The warmest houses in colder weather (for the most part) are in places with the coldest weather. There are exceptions of course.