Century. As science expanded its knowledge, it's gone from speculation to concern to caution, then steadily warning with more and more evidence. Funny how science could have been saying nothing at all and we'd be right where we are anyway. It's almost like the facts were inconvenient to everything else we were doing, so we either shelved them for tomorrow's problem, or just flat ignored it.
If only that someone had won the popular vote over 20 years ago leaving the deciding electoral votes to Florida with the narrowest of margins (hundreds of votes, by the certified count) giving it the ability to choose its own fate in a historically close election.
The number one alternate timeline I’d like to see is if Gore had become president in 2000. Even more than if the Nazis had won WWII or if Caesar hadn’t gone to the senate that day.
(I’d also like to see the world if the spanish armada had taken a different course back in 1588 and avoided that typhoon though…)
It’s a very commonly cited example of alternate history. I’m surprised you’ve never heard that before. There’s been multiple books written and there’s a show on Netflix called man in the high castle, all of them exploring this topic.
To answer the question, it would be interesting to see how it played out. How long would they maintain control over the US and Allies? What would resistance look like? How long would hitlers regime have lasted before being deposed? How long before collapsing under its own weight? What would the entire Cold War era have looked like, assuming the soviets lost too, and what would THEIR resistance look like? How would technology have developed without a Cold War driven space race?
Obviously it would’ve been a catastrophe but it’s fascinating concept to speculate about.
Ahh your phrasing made me think you meant you’d want to physically see that world, I was just tired and it was right after your Al Gore what if so I got confused haha
As the arctic ice continues to accelerate it’s thaw, water levels will rise a foot in the next 30years. This is going to continue as temperatures rise. Better move to higher ground Florida. Your state will look like Atlantis in the next 100-200years.
No see, governor rick scott (Republican) banned his administration from using the term climate change, just like governor desantis (also Republican, surprise surprise) banned covid. So Florida is safe from both of those without any action required. Freedom!
There is a scene in the book Ministry of the Future where there is a wet bulb event in India and tons of people flocked to the water to cool down. The water was also like 100°F so the waterways ended up being filled with dead bodies that does from being too hot.
Thank you for sharing that. Holy shit, that was well written and uncomfortable in a way that felt right. I won’t lie, reading about the dawn breaking dried my own eyes out a bit.
I actually haven't read it myself, just know about that opening. I've heard some reviews of it not holding up to the level it starts with. But perhaps it's one of those books where you either like it or not. I've read plenty of opinions on books and movies I've enjoyed that tore them apart, so think of this is a caution more than a warning.
Really had to do a double take. Like, what the fuck, the ocean is boiling, it can’t be that be that bad, right? Then it clicked that you’re using that weird Fahrenheit system.
Yes, sorry, it’s weird. Celsius is easy - water freezes at 0 and boils at 100 and there we go…
This is actually great, I’ve never found a good way to remember Celsius temperatures. I might go closer to Terrasque’s scale though, 30 is definitely hot where I am.
I suppose they had little booklets. A bit like the logarithmic tables that people kept for complicated calculations. Maybe they were issued on the first day of school or something. People would keep them all their life and look at them surreptitiously whenever they had to convert units.
As a Canadian, 50 is kill me right now cause fuck that, 40 would be constant cold showers to stay cool, 30 is uncomfortable and needs occasional cold showers, 20 is perfect summer weather, 10 is perfect spring weather and 0 is a nice winter day.
Can’t stand the heat, I’ll take -30C over +30C any day. Can always put on more layers if you’re cold, there’s only so much you can take off when you’re hot though.
Thinking about it... Isn't that exactly what the Celsius scale does just with reliable definitions about what "cold" and "HOT" mean?
Shower water with 38°C is hot, a bowl of rice at 38°C/100F is decidedly not "HOT". So the perceived convenience of the Fahrenheit scale is not applicable to everything, is it? How is it convenient then?
It is convenient because they are used to it. That is all there is to it, and peace be to that.
It only becomes silly when they begin to claim that F is better for “human temperature”, because again it all comes down to what you are used to and celsius is just as convenient if you are used to that.
O F is the freezing temperature of a saturated brine solution, while 100 F was the body temperature of a human. Yes, body temperature has been revised a bit, but the two points were chosen as stable points that anyone could access that would generally be unchanged by pressure changes, etc. Human homeostasis is quite good at keeping a temperature in a narrow range. Also, boiling is massively affected by air pressure. At 5000’ elevation, boiling is approximately 202 F and continues to get lower as altitude increases. Lots of people live at higher altitudes. (Hi! I am one of them !)
This is really interesting and I think there is a lot of support for the body temperature point. I was curious about whether the method of deriving 0F is insensitive to pressure changes and I can't find any evidence of that. But I don't know enough about chemistry or physics myself. Do you know, or have any details on where you learned this?
Re: freezing temperature of brine and pressure sensitivity, of course it is sensitive but we are talking about MPa-GPa of pressure, way beyond small pressure changes due to changes in altitude. You can get started by looking at physical chemistry of solutions if you are interested! A good place to start is “freezing point depression” and “boiling point elevation” of solutions. Also, single component phase diagrams: here it is for https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phase_diagram_of_water_simplified.svg.
With how mountainous Europe is, no it doesn't. What bothers me (aside from the ongoing, increasingly vivid global extinction event) is the sense that, were the situation flipped, you guys wouldn't miss a beat telling people to look it up instead of assuming every country works like theirs does.
Good news is, we'll both have something else to complain about in a year or two, if we're...still able to do that.
Oh, I think you might be projecting there. Have you ever been to Germany or France or any other European country? If the situation was flipped and we Europeans were the only ones using a system no one else does, we wouldn't tell you to look it up, we would never stop complaining about our governments for not changing shit.
Well, I'm..american, so I'm generally too broke to leave my house. I will openly admit I'm increasingly jealous of the French tendency to fuck shit up at the slightest inconvenience. They seem to know a lot more about getting things done.
I think one would also have to account for geography in that, no? If a country were landlocked and surrounded by a ton of others that all used the same separate system that they themselves do not, then there would be very significant reason and pressure to change. As much as it's derided for it, America IS very much a universe unto itself, and the only dealings it has with nations that do things differently are in areas of work that have switched over to more standard measurements.
All science and engineering are primarily or totally done in metric after we crashed the Mars Orbiter headlong into the dirt at mach speed. Everything else tends to use the more mathmatically sensible kelvin. Mexico uses metric and celsius, but I've literally never had a reason to go to mexico and probably never will. Canada uses both, but same deal.
I make a concerted effort to include both systems whenever I have to type for an audience of mixed/ambiguous nationality, but in my day-to-day, I will never meet another person who can easily switch between them and I have no use to do that either. It is a useless skill for me to have. Despite this, I have the sense that I see more europeans complaining about farenheit than I ever see Americans complain about celsius existing, and for such a damn stupid populace, I'm left to assume we either comment less or google it more.
Regarding projecting, I could be tongue-in-cheek and ask if you've ever met a European before. Our food. Our language. Our buildings, cities, cars, media, sports, slang, holidays, garbage disposals, windows, classrooms, whether or not we take our shoes off in the house. I struggle to think of a single subject you guys will not routinely make an inordinate amount of fuss over, as if it killed your children, and I'm convinced at this point that it's for love of spite and there's literally nothing we could do to make Europe happy if we wanted to. It makes sense that any chance to acknowledge the alternate measuring system would be prime ribs.
Brits especially will snark about american english that routinely turns out to be a defunct british word. Germans will complain about the drywall, but their own houses have the same drywall. Houses in Switzerland are made of wood, but nobody bitches at the Swiss.
Parting note, the downvote feels in keeping with that kind of pettiness.
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