Thank you for the explicit explanation. Please kindly share if you have an idea of pre-industrial temperature levels (which is the most important from a perspective of total impact).
Is there dataset available for the pre-industrial temperature levels. Thank you.

In recent years, high temp records outnumber low temp records by about 2:1. This was true for the period from Jan 1 of this year, and it was true for the period from the beginning of 2000. About 280,000 heat records since 1-1-00, and about 140,000 low records since then.

Metric is (or will be) the global standard and if the IPCC is using it, that should be the standard.

Who still uses F apart from the US and CA?

Resistance is futile and imperialistic! Relent and succumb to your Metric Overlords, imperial scum!

Hope this doesn’t muddy the waters, but I think the Hadley temperature results are for from the pre-industrial. The first asterisk is for emissions, where the baseline is 1990. But for temp, it’s pre-industrial.

But, again, thanks for taking this on.

[JR: You are right! Thanks.]

If a US visitor comes to the site then they see all temps in F with C in brackets. And for others the other way round. Speak with your web gurus.

While a policy of usually describing temperatures as they are projected to rise by 2100 makes for larger numbers and makes scientific sense, I think the average citizen is still not ready to vote for all the extra cost, effort and inconvenience that will be required “just to try to fix something something scientists think might happen 90 years from now.” To most people, 90 years from now sounds like someone else’s problem. They should not feel this way, but they do. People are too worried about paying this month’s bills and the longest projection they feel they *might* be able to do something about, maybe, involves the date their kid is going to start college.

For this reason, I wish the media would focus first on the temperature rise projections out to 2030 or 2050 and then state the longer projections as a follow up. That places the problem within the lifetime of 80% of the voters.

As a writer trying to focus on volkSpeak instead of scienceSpeak, I’m very glad to see Climate Progress including the degrees Fahrenheit along with the degrees Celsius when talking temperature because voters in the U.S. still think — and still *feel* — temperature in degrees Fahrenheit. If there is consensus that getting the U.S. populace fully committed to fighting climate change is one of the most important goals to achieve right now, then logically writers should be quoting all temperatures in degrees F first (followed by the conversion to C in parenthesis).

Not scientifically correct, I know, but it is psychologically correct as far as U.S. voters go.

Joe:

I think it’s just as important to say from a communications standpoint that anyone hoping to engage in useful, persuasive climate dialog with an American audience – even the comparatively elite subset likely to be reading ClimateProgress – should be speaking in the familiar Fahrenheit at all times (at least in parentheses).

Your Old Pal,
J.