One Global Temperature Scale

Happy Wednesday! Today I'm supposed to go into detail on my dishwasher soap experiment DOE, but that is being pushed to next week. Sorry. There's something else on my mind this week. I have a proposal to make the world a better place... or at least to make it a little easier to understand.

Years ago I was pondering the different temperature scales. My pondering led me to a conclusion that all of the currently used temperature scales have flaws and that maybe we need a new one. I came up with what I thought was a decent solution. Then I promptly forgot about the whole thing.

Last night I found myself pondering this again. I have no idea why. It must have been inspired by something in the crossword puzzle I was doing. So I was pondering how to come up with a temperature scale other than C or F (or K) that would make sense to people. And then I remembered that I had already done that a few years ago, but I couldn't remember what my solution was. So, I came up with a solution last night. It might be the same one I came up with years ago. Or maybe it isn't. Either way, here's my thought process:

1) The scale should be based on things that people experience regularly and understand.
a) I feel pretty strongly that we should set 0 degrees to the temperature at which water freezes (at atmospheric pressure.) Seriously... who decided that water freezing at 32 degrees was acceptable?
b) The boiling point of water is another good point to set to a nice comfy number.
c) Human body temperature is another point to consider. However, this temperature varies from person to person, day to day, time of day, amount of activity, time in a woman's menstrual cycle, etc. So, it isn't scientifically precise enough for me.
d) Typical weather patterns and comfortable (to humans) ambient temperatures are also important.

So at this point Celsius is winning as it is defined by the freezing point and boiling point of water. However I see a few problems with C. One is lack of accuracy compared to F. A change of 1 degree C is larger than a change of 1 degree F, by almost double (1.8 or 9/5 for the nitpickers.) Using F we get a more accurate result with the same number of significant figures. Which leads us to:

2) The scale should span more than 100 degrees between water freezing and water boiling to allow for more accuracy than the Celsius scale.

The other problem with Celsius is that the (relatively) small range between freezing and boiling leads to an even smaller range to be used for typical weather patterns. Americans are quite used to temperatures in the 80s and 90s. The hotter parts of the country regularly break 100 or even into the 110s. Records hit in the 120s. Now imagine telling those people that their record temperature is 50 degrees. To us, 50 degrees means grab a jacket. It would be a hard switch to make. We like being able to state extreme temperatures with extreme numbers. Therefore:

3) The scale should allow for those of us used to F to still express hot weather temperatures in similarly large numbers.

NOTE: For below-freezing temperatures (above -40), C is lower than F and therefore already the "more extreme" sounding scale. 

And, one more subjective rule:

4) The numbers for typical room temperature and typical body temperature should sound/feel reasonable. Again, it would be a hard transition to go from F to C as room temperature changes from 70F to 20C (or so.)

My proposed new temperature scale is super simple: Double Celsius.

So, we would have the following (also showing F and C for comparison):

*National Ave Temperature data from NOAA

**Extreme Temperature data ballparked from this wiki page

Is it perfect? Nope. 

Is it better? *I* think so. 

Sure, it makes cold temperatures REALLY extreme but I think it's about time we northerners get to express our extreme cold temps as extreme negative numbers. 

Other positives include:

1) Freezing point of water is 0 and the same as in C. Boiling point of water is close to the boiling point of water in F. 

2) We get a span of 200 degrees between the freezing point and boiling point of water. This leads to slightly more accuracy than using F.

3) Body temperature, room temperature, and typical weather patterns are fairly reasonable to someone that grew up using F. Different yes, but I'm better able to wrap my head around it than switching to straight C. For example, converting human body temperature from F to DC requires multiplying by approximately 3/4 whereas converting human body temperature from F to C requires multiplying by approximately 1/3. 

4) It's true that I've just transferred most of the problem of common temperatures "seeming reasonable" from the Americans to everyone who is already using C.... but, all they have to do to convert is multiply by 2. This simple conversion will make the transition from C to DC super easy. 

5) Everyone has to switch. We all share the pain together!
6) Room temperature becomes 42 degrees. It truly is the answer to everything.

The solution is so simple it made me think that there must already be a movement started to make a global switch to Double Celsius. However, my Googling shows that there is not. So, let's start it! Let's adopt one global temperature scale. If you like my proposed new temperature scale, start using it wherever you can. Spread the word. Make it go viral.