Climate Contradiction

Ever since car makers started installing dashboard thermometers to let us know the temperatures outside of our cars I feel like society has gotten just a little too obsessed with knowing the exact temperature all the time. I admit to being guilty of this as much as anyone - my house on Cape Cod has a thermometer which will tell you just how hot it is both indoors and outdoors on one dial and when I am down the beach I check that thing 10 times a day. The thing is that I don't know why because the exact temperature is one of the most inconsequential numbers in our lives. First off, even though we are all (allegedly) running at 98.6 degrees, one person's hot is another's cool. To me the perfect day is about 70 degrees, but there are plenty of people who would need to wear jackets as if it was that cold. Even the meteorologists, whose job it is to track this kind of thing, knows temperatures are a sham because they invent terms like 'heat index' or 'dew point' to explain why sometimes 85 feels comfortable and yet other times it feels like you wandered into a sauna. Also, no one's mind has ever been swayed by knowing the temperature. No one has ever said, "I am hot" looked at the thermometer and said, "Wait, it's only 76, so no I'm not." Lastly, people only want thermometers around when they will confirm our gripes about the extreme side of weather, no one cares if they have a reading between 40-70, which is most of the time. When people can ignore a number for 8 months out of the year it is hard to give it too much importance.

It should also be pointed out that for all the importance we place on thermometers, they are one of the most unreliable pieces of technology we have. They can be wildly inaccurate based on where they are located or which direction they face because that will impact how much time they have in direct sunlight and that can change a reading by a lot, as can being planted into pavement which gets hotter than a surface like grass. When you add up all the factors it is not exactly the kind of thing I would put a ton of confidence in and yet more places than ever are installing thermometers outside of their establishments. This afternoon I was driving around and came to an intersection with two banks across from one another (by the way, this happens all the time and I would love to know why. It is like towns are only willing to grant zoning permits for banks withing a 500 foot radius) and each bank had one of those electronic signs out front which first show you the time and then changes to show you the temperature. First off, the two banks couldn't even agree on what time it was so I guess I shouldn't have been very surprised when they also had different temperatures. But what really set one bank apart from its cross-street rival is that every other time it showed the temperature it would be in Celsius. Was that done on the off chance there was a big group of tourists from Europe in town and that bank was hoping to hold their money while they were in town? Because I can't see any other reason.

Look, I really don't have much to offer in the ways of a defense when people from Europe or Asia want to take America to task for sticking with the imperial units of measurement when nearly every other country in the world uses the metric system. Things would probably be a lot easier for businesses if we just relented and fell into line but you can chalk the reason we never converted up to good old American stubbornness and I can't see any reason why we would change that personality trait now. But while I don't know why we feel so loyal to yards instead of meters, I will totally defend the fact that we stick with Fahrenheit even though Celsius is probably more popular world-wide. As you know being the most popular doesn't automatically make something the better and to me there is a very large gap in the logic with Celsius, which is its lack specificity. We just talked about how people always want to know the exact temperature and while Celsius does a fine job of getting you in the ballpark it can't do any better than that because each degree is asked to cover too much ground. For example, if it is 22 degrees Celsius than it is 71.6 degrees Fahrenheit outside. If it jumps to 23 degrees Celsius that means it is 73.4 degrees outside. So, what happens when it is 72 degrees? Well, I guess you are just shit out of luck. I may think needing to know the exact temperature is a waste of time but any unit of measurement which doesn't allow for entire numbers to be accounted for doesn't deserve my loyalty. It would be like asking me to wear a watch which only updates the time every quarter hour.

Part of me wonders if this way of measuring is just because Anders Celsius was a bit of a drama queen and liked to make things seem colder than they really were. After all, if you hear that it is 5 degrees outside you steel yourself for one hell of a day. But if that same person told you it was 41 out you would grab a sweater to go under your jacket, throw on a hat and get on with your life. Basically, most of the world is following the advice of a person who liked to exaggerate. Also, it would be one thing if it were easy to convert between one temperature system and the other but it isn't, because Celsius doesn't seem to go up at a regular rate. If 0 Celsius is 32 Fahrenheit than why I am crazy to expect 64 Fahrenheit to equal out to 1 Celsius? Yet for some reason that it is equal to 17.777. Every other unit of measurement goes up in standard increments and while I am sure there are people out there who will tell me Celsius has a standard conversion number for each degree I would point out that nothing is easier to figure out than going up by 1. Lastly, when you find out that Fahrenheit actually came along first it just is another reason that we can all ignore anyone who claims that water boils at 37.778. The good news for me is that these are likely the same people who would want to talk about why they think soccer is better than football, which means there isn't really any reason for me to be talking to them in the first place.