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Comment by rntz | Hacker News Reader

> "hothouse" temperatures could stabilize 4°C to 5°C (39 to 41 Fahrenheit) higher than pre-industrial levels.

A change of 4-5°C is a change of 7-9 degrees Fahrenheit, not 39-41.

Lol, looks like the Google result of "convert 4C to Fahrenheit". In the authors defence, it isn't their fault the Americans still use Fahrenheit.

Wasn't 100 Fahrenheit the temperature of a chicken on tuesday in the sunshine? Can't quite remember how that scale was created.

I always heard it was the rectal temperature of a cow, but that's not what wikipedia tells me, so someone probably made that up. One advantage of the Fahrenheit scale is that the range from 0 to 100 roughly corresponds to temperatures people normally deal with.

The second point is 96, human body temperature.

After moving to Europe I am completely on board with the simplicity of the metric system, however I do prefer the Fahrenheit scale for exactly the reason you described above.

A human will face winter weather conditions from 0-32F which converts to negative values on the Celsius scale (not practical).

On the other end of the spectrum for summer time conditions, there is a wider range of values to ascribe to changes in temperature from 60F-100F or approx 16-38C.

Negative numbers may be less practical in your eyes but they sound more dramatic and thus make complaining about the cold much more satisfying. ;)

Why is it not practical? We're taught in schools that water freezes below 0C and boils above 100C thus more than 0 = hotter, less than 0 = colder, more than 100 = you're melting. If you wake up and see less than 0 on thermometer you know it's freezing time.

> there is a wider range of values to ascribe to changes in temperature from 60F-100F or approx 16-38C

And why is that important? Are our bodies so finely tuned that it's important to know the difference between 104 and 105 F?

Even in the less granular celsius, unless it's just about bragging rights everything is about brackets anyway.

30+: wear shorts and hydrate

20-30: comfortable in short sleeves

10-20: bring a light jacket

0-10: wear a sweater

n10-0: wear a winter coat

n20-n10: wear gloves and a hat

n40-n20: no exposed skin

Am I missing something, or are we just adapted for very different climates? Freezing is "wear a sweater" to you? I don't own a winter coat, but if I did it would come out of the closet somewhere in the 5-10C range.

Yeah I mean it's certainly subjective and I aligned the numbers to fall at 10 degree boundaries. But that's roughly where I fall. Anything above freezing and I'll usually prefer a sweater with a light jacket to a full winter coat.

I'm also willing to admit that this is probably a case in which whatever system you grew up with, that's what you will prefer and no argument will sway your opinion in the other direction. (Although the metric system does have clear advantages)

It's assuring to know their conceptualization of F is equal to my conceptualization of C (Read: some tricky math is required, none-the-less).

Pre-industrial levels when we were still coming out of significant cooling period. In every other period of human history, increased average temperatures have coincided with golden ages. Depending on where you peg your baseline for what "normal" temperatures are, the projections can look more or less scary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Warm_Period

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period

I'm suspicious of anyone attempting to boil down the operations of such a dynamic, chaotic system as climate into simple cause and effect. There's so damn many things that feed back on each other, and that's just the tip of the iceberg that we think we understand. Much more research needs to be done.

> Much more research needs to be done.

Yet the current US stance is to defund such research. :(

You realize what the current development looks like on a chart right?

https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

The chart is for carbon dioxide, not temperature. What's your point?

Google Venus atmosphere. Nature has already given us a model to use.

How's this one?

https://xkcd.com/1732/

Thank you for this site the collection of data here is amazing!

Anyone coming out of that site, without thinking climate change is real, is lost forever.

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