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.