Guest post: A modest proposal to achieve temperature justice
Guest post by Jonathan Gallant
Students of geography and climate have long known that the climate of western Europe is more temperate, on the whole, than the climate of Africa. Urban centers of government, finance, education, and culture in western Europe, such as London, Edinburgh, Paris, Amsterdam, and Geneva, are rarely as hot, and never hot for as long, as cities in Africa. This clearly has disparate impact on the inhabitants of cities in the two regions, in regard to health, activity, moods, ease of sleep, and so on. Worse still, public knowledge of these temperature differences could tend to marginalize those who are subject to systems of temperature oppression.
The principles of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion demand that this systemic inequity should be abolished as soon as possible. To this end, we propose two steps. First, notice that education systems have increased Diversity in various areas of advanced training by simply replacing numerical grades with pass/fail rating. Therefore, our first step should be to stop reporting temperatures in cities of the world in degrees either centigrade or fahrenheit. Instead, we should merely refer to the daily climate as inhabitable/uninhabitable, without the judgemental implications of using numbers. The rating of “inhabitable” would apply to any temperatures below that on the surface of the planet Mercury, and above that on the moons of Saturn.
In the next step, we will prohibit reporting outdoor temperatures in any way, thus eliminating public knowledge about different regions of the world that might have disparate impact, and thus cause harm to inhabitants of one region or another. To insure that the harmful effect of reported temperature inequities will be eliminated, we will ban the use of thermometers altogether.
The epistemic violence inherent in the dominant, hegemonic strand of temperature discourse is certainly much in need of deconstruction. I do, however, miss a more thorough queering of the inhabitable/uninhabitable binary.
The rating of “inhabitable” would apply to any temperatures below that on the surface of the planet Mercury, and above that on the moons of Saturn.
Do any of the moons of Saturn have tidal heating like Jupiter’s Io?
The night side of Mercury can be pretty damn cold, really. Down to −173 °C (−279 °F) at the equator, if you can believe Wikipedia (the night there is long (roughly 90 of our days), so little of the daytime heat remains through the night). With a daytime high of 427 °C (800 °F), one could just let those extremes define inhabitability. The atmosphere might be a bit thin, but in daytime you may enjoy the solar winds, I imagine. Remember to pack sunscreen for the trip, and an extra sweater for the night.
While you’re dispensing travel tips, are there food trucks, or should we bring a lunch?