Cry Me a River
Twenty years ago, Justin Timberlake broke up with Britney Spears and sang a song that has become a hallmark of “she done me wrong” weepy love songs. Cry Me a River has become the ultimate breakup song even though it was first sung in 1955 by Julie London. If you ask someone to define what the title means, they are likely to tell you that its about a public display of profuse weeping, a sappy display of uncontrolled emotion. Well, that pretty much defines the way I am starting to feel about the weather out here in San Diego. I want to bemoan the fact that I am feeling some cabin fever and wondering when this shitty weather is going to end. We are in something like our twelfth or thirteenth atmospheric river of the season and I have mentioned that building reality all too often in these stories. But its a little different this week for several reasons. First of all, we are moving into late March and the month that comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb is not looking very lamb-like as I look out the window this morning and see the trees violently swaying and the rain pelting down with vehemence. The water is actually sheeting down the big windows in the living room. Damn! In other words, come on, now, some bad weather in January or February is to be expected, but its almost springtime in the rest of the country and here in the land of eternal sunshine everything looks more waterlogged than spring fresh.
The other reason this week is different is that the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued its latest climate change report and it is not good. The headline in the Washington Post said, “World is on brink of catastrophic warming.” Ouch. The difference between us and the dinosaurs is supposed to be that, unlike them, we do not have a brain the size of a walnut. We are supposed to be able to anticipate disaster somewhat and get out ahead of it. Despite having made some progress in the past few decades, the report now states unequivocally that within the next decade (that would be within my likely lifespan) we are going to move into the zone of what the report calls “catastrophic warming”. Like all public service messaging, this report does give us readers a sliver of an out. We are told that if we can keep the warming to under 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2030, there is a possibility that we might avert total disaster. The problem (silly as it may sound) is that such a threshold does not supposedly resonate with Americans. Why? Because we are one of the few countries left in the world (we are only joined by Cayman Islands and Liberia in this lunacy) that has not adopted the Celsius versus Fahrenheit scale for measuring temperature. That seems trivial, but the reality is that where 1.5 degrees itself seems trivial to Americans, it is 2.7 degrees on the scale that they uniquely use. Even redneck mechanics in the sticks have a set of metric wrenches by now, but there is barely a thermometer in the land that reads in Celsius.
I am more fortunate than most Americans because growing up during high school in Italy, I had to accustom myself to Celsius. But not unlike my Italian language skills, I am only proficient and not really fluent. Fluency in a language means you can and do dream in Italian. When I hear Italian, I translate it, more or less instantaneously in my head, into English so that I can fully comprehend it. I’m sure most linguists would agree that true fluency means you can think in the foreign language, thereby rendering it not so foreign. When it comes to temperature conversion, I learned a little trick in high school that I use to this day and it serves me well. Its as simple as 20=68 and 30=86. That covers the vast majority of the weather I usually encounter. I have a secondary crutch of 10=50 and 40=104, but by those extremes I am already just using the 18 degree adjustment for every 10 degrees of Celsius. When someone says 25 or 35 I can very easily get to 77 and 95. From all my foreign travel with American friends who did not have the benefit of living in Rome in their youth, I can tell that it takes the monger to land on the temperature conversion than it does for me. And of course, since they are the Americans that DO travel, the rest of the country that doesn’t so much are even further perplexed by the whole Celsius thing.
Even 2.7 degrees doesn’t seem all that much or earthshaking when we think about a threshold climate change limit, but it needs to be contextualized. I read a piece lately about a climatologist that speaks to school groups in America about the impending impact of climate change and she uses body temperature as the contextualizing tool. We all know we are supposed to have a normal body temperature of 98.6 degrees (37 degrees Celsius). We have been trained to recognize that with body temperature the decimal point values are more important than when we talk about the weather. Having our temperature go up to 38.5 Celsius probably doesn’t sound so dramatic. But telling someone that their body temperature should not go above 101.3 degrees Fahrenheit is pretty startling. That’s the reaction the UN IPCC report is intended to have on our thinking and does for much of the world, but less so for us bone-headed Americans.
We live on a planet that has an average oxygen saturation of 21%. If oxygen levels dip lower than 19.5%, we can’t breath and we die. Other organisms can sustain life on as little as 2% oxygen, but not us big brain beasts, a 1.5% decrease from this level and we gotta find a Plan B pretty fast. As for temperature range, it is believed that humans cannot survive for long in anything higher than 108.14 degrees Fahrenheit or 42.3 degrees Celsius. At that temperature, on a sustained basis, the proteins in our body denature, which is to say that we are like the anti-drug commercials we see on TV. Here’s your brain (egg in pan) and here’s your brain on drugs (fried egg). I remember the high school science lessons on colloids that are reversible or irreversible and how our brains are an irreversible colloidal solution such that if our temperature gets too high, our egg fries and there is no reversal available. Our brain gets fried and we are fried.
Human life is a very fragile thing. We are used to thinking we are very robust and withstand all sorts of variation in temperature, humidity and atmospherics, but the truth is that we cannot. We, as humans operate in a far more narrow range of adaptability than most species and what makes us so unique is that our little blue planet is like Goldilocks porridge preference, it can’t be too warm or too cold and has to be juuuuuust right. It’s one of the arguments as to why we have such a hard time finding other life in the universe, much less intelligent life (that makes a big leap of faith that we humans are intelligent, much of this very discussion to the contrary indication).
So, here I am, at home on my cold and rainy hilltop in late March wondering what is becoming of my world. I just turned up the thermometer from 19.4 to 21.7 (that would be 67 to 71 for us moronic Americans). I don’t know if I’m really cold or if the visage outdoors is chilling me or maybe if the UN view of the future has chilled me to the bone. I didn’t know about atmospheric rivers before this year but now that I do and now that the UN has put us on climate notice for the impending apocalypse, I guess I will just hunker down and cry me a river over all of this mess.