On Monday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released the first part of its 2021 report; and the facts were dire. No person can ignore the facts laid out there, and we all should be impelled to take action. We are already experiencing bad effects, and the trajectory is toward worst.
The report, prepared by international scientists, uses the Celsius scale for temperature to present the results that are crucial to our understanding of the situation. The Celsius scale is overwhelmingly used throughout the world, and the United States is only one of a very few countries, mostly quite small, that continue to use the Fahrenheit scale for temperature.
This is important because the temperatures reported on the two scales are quite different and defy easy conversion by a person reading one or the other. Thus, for instance, the temperature in Sicily on Aug. 11, reported as nearly 49 degrees Celsius, does not register with people viscerally in the United States until it is converted to 120 degrees Fahrenheit.
In the current global warming challenge, it is imperative that all people gauge the climate with the same temperature scale. How can we, as a nation, join with the rest of the world in mitigating global warming if we don’t agree on the basic measure of it: temperature scale?
I urge readers to advocate for adoption of the Celsius scale in the United States so that we can view uniformly with other nations the current and future impacts of global warming.
David von Seggern
Portland
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