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Comment by chana_masala | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it wouldn't have mattered, but I wish that the Fahrenheit increase would have been more prominently used over these years. I think that most Americans don't realize that 1°C is more than 1°F so it doesn't sound as bad when it's "only a few degrees"

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Honestly both of them are small, and I think citing the degrees is just terrible messaging altogether. I think people would gladly accept & adapt to even a 5°F increase; I know I would. The problem is that doesn't capture anything about the local variation (and impacts like hurricanes, fires, etc.), and that even beyond that, we're absolutely destroying everything about our planet as we know it, and a single-degree change in average temperatures is just icing on the cake.

Try to sit in a bath of 36°C. You can sit there for hours. Now switch to a bath of 38°C. After a while you'll be sweaty, sluggish, tired, breath harder etc.

They have this at the St. Gellert baths in Budapest:

https://afar-production.imgix.net/uploads/images/post_images...

People live in extremely hot weather. And air conditioning is a thing. A few degrees in temperature change is quite manageable.

(And btw, not everyone lives in 36°C. Try to get those who live in a 20°C weather to care about a 2°C change even without air conditioning.)

That's not a good analogy. Water transfers heat 24 times as fast as air.

The larger issue is that measuring the problem in degrees, doesn't convey the gravity or the urgency of the situation. Most will associate it with seasonal changes, or sea rise or extreme weather. But that is just the surface level.

What happens when millions are displaced because India, Pakistan and much of Africa can no longer support human life? What happens when food and water output is reduced? What happens when droughts stops being weather events, but become permanent? What happens if ocean accidification gets to levels where a sudden massive extinction happens? People are greatly underestimating the dangers of climate change. If what is described in the IPCC reports comes to pass and if we really are already at 2C as some reports indicate https://www.ecowatch.com/greenhouse-gases-paris-agreement-26.... Then we will see massive destabilization of global society. Most current societies are simply not equipped to deal with all the problems that will happen at the same time.

I do hope we can still do something to prevent this. But at this point we really need to go to negative emissions and fast, yet the best we can muster is 10 years of increasing emissions followed by another 20-30 of decreasing, and this is assuming the governments can stick to those targets. Assuming we are at 2C, then 4C by 2100 seems probable. Interesting times ahead.

Humans have trouble detecting less than a 2°C change in temperature. The truth is changes on global averages seem tiny because we use temperature as the metric. The temperature change is tiny. The heat energy is huge. We should use energy as the metric.

I equally wish that more Americans used SI -- Farenheit is about as familiar to me as Rankine; I have been bitten by the US use of 'mil' to mean thousandths of an inch whilst remaining how some en-gb engineers use it as inaccurate slang for mm. But this is a big distraction. Alas, I know that the whole reason we're in this pickle is that scientific literacy is low, and most people prefer short term gains over longer ones. In many ways the increased rate of increase in temperature might be a good thing, as it makes more people intuitively get that something is very, very wrong.

As an aside, most professional oceanographers or climate scientists I know are depressed, furious, or grant writing -- or a linear superposition of all three.

> I have been bitten by the US use of 'mil' to mean thousandths of an inch

Huh, I live in the US and I've only ever heard that called a thou but wikipedia backs you up. I'd think a mil would be a millionth of an inch.

I've always been under the impression it's pronounced "thou" but written "mil" - like how "pound" is "lb."

You see mil in small scale CAD all the time, circuit boards and chips and footprints are close to 50% mils vs mm in my experience if not more.

I use mm, but it’s often a pain when premade parts and libraries are in mils.

Comes from mille, means thousand.

Mil is used in circuit board design, not sure about other fields. I find it very confusing

I don't think it would make any difference, TBH. A difference of 3°C is "only" 5.4°F. That still doesn't seem too bad, at first thought, until you realize that it's 5.4°F difference forever (or, at least well into the foreseeable future).

Perhaps. But I suspect the bigger issue is that even 5.4°F still doesn't sound like much. It's hard to communicate that the average temperature implies much higher highs and many "unusually hot" days.

OK 3C is 5.4F for anyone who is wondering.

I don’t think that’s the straw that would’ve broken the climate change camel’s back in America.

Different units of measurement will not make it any less of a hoax or inconvenient truth preferably ignored.

Shoulda used microkelvins!

Ok but even 1°C is pretty bad? Even 1°F is bad.

If we were going for emotional effect shouldn't it be expressed in Kelvin, or a temperature scale that is designed specifically to scare the public? Something where 3°C is 20°Scare?

E: Kelvin doesn't work for scaring the public unless it is reported as an absolute temperature. TIL.

> If we were going for emotional effect shouldn't it be expressed in Kelvin

A difference in 1K is equivalent to 1C difference. The thing is, when Celsius scale was invented, they didn't have a concept of "absolute zero" yet.

Once "absolute zero" was known, then Kelvin units were invented, which were equivalent to C except that 0 means absolute zero.

Whoops. Well, my point remains. 1, 3 and 5 all seem like pretty small numbers. I don't think C to F would change public perception.

FWIW Celsius and Kelvin have the same scale, they're just shifted.

Yeah, brain fart. Thanks for reminding me.

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