Same the other way around. I (european) regularly read about "100 degrees weather" somewhere in the US and my first thought always is "damn, that's as hot as boiling water".
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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In the UK you think "Oh yeah, my great granny used to use those measurements!"
European here! For me it's...
Celcius:
0 = Water freezes
100 = Water boils
Fahrenheit as far as I can tell:
~100 = Hot enough that it shows up on the news
~400-450 = Cooking, because our stove is in Fahrenheit for some unknown reason.
All other temperatures in F = no idea.
The main Fahrenheit I know is -40F.
Mostly because its also -40C.
Wait euro ovens are in Fahrenheit as well? I just thought it was our identity crisis measurements in Canada.
I don't know if they generally are, but ours is lol
No they are not
Having used a lot of Celsius and metric in college sciences, they don’t bother me so much. But when it comes to certain applications, I’m more used to farenheight. For example temperature as it relates to human comfort.
Like I know 35 c is hot, and anything in the 40+ is miserable. But I also know I prefer temperatures to be in the 72-75 range for optimum comfort and thus have to do a bit of math if I need that in Celsius.
Here's celcius
Water:
0° - freezes
100° - boils
Me:
10° - freezes
30° - boils
Why can't I be more like water?
Is this "celcius" a friend of you or what??
I will be controversial and say that I think Fahrenheit makes more sense when talking about the weather. Its scale simply makes more sense on human terms: 0 is fucking cold, 100 is fucking hot. This is about the tempurature range you can expect to experience between winter and summer throughout much of the world.
Celsius makes more sense for cooking (and everything else) since its scale is calibrated around the phase changes of water.
Celcius really isn't that hard to get used to if you stop getting hung up on conversions and just live in it for a while. Faherenheit also isn't as hard to get used to as people meme it to be. It's all about what you've spent a significant enough time in to get the data points for how stuff feels to you.
Either scale would be second nature to anyone after a year in a new home. I made the change np. I never do conversion math, I just know what it feels like outside and can ballpark the number I remember having a similar feeling in the other place. It's really not a big deal and not worth all the internet yelling that goes on about it.
Celsius is easy, everything important is a nice and rounded number: -40°C is freezing point of vodka; -30°C is fucking cold; -20°C is cold but tolerable; -10°C is pleasant winter weather; 0°C is when roads get icy, better be careful; 10°C is pleasant autumn weather; 20°C is room temperature and pleasant spring/summer; 30°C is haaawwt; 40°C is you-must-be-shitting-me hot; 80 to 100°C is good sauna; 110°C is those-crazy-Finns sauna; 120°C is the-bloody-Russians-joined-the-sauna-party; 250°C is pizza oven; 1000°C is ceramics oven; 1500°C is steel smelting. Everything above use K instead; substract 273 to get C if you must.
Fahrenheit is a fucking mess where nothing makes sense and nothing is a rounded number.
These numbers feel arbitrary to me, while a scale of 0 to 100 feels very intuitive.
The only “arbitrary” number to remember in Fahrenheit when talking about weather is the freezing point, 32 degrees.
It’s the natural intuitiveness of 0-100 scales that also makes me prefer Celsius for non-weather applications, since the phase changes of water become more important when talking about cooking or chemistry.
Celsius makes weather so much easier; freezing point of water is the one most important temperature for weather conditions, what kind of precipitation and surface conditions you can have. Having it as the reference point for temperature just makes so much sense. With celsius, you can understand the general weather from a single glance. Negative numbers? Ice and snow. Positive numbers? Rain and mud. Plan accordingly. And the general comfort zones are all at around 10° steps wich makes everything nice and round.
Fahrenheit on the other hand has the zero at some completely nonsensical reference point that has no relation to what weather conditions are possible.
Isn't the freezingpoint of water important for talking about the weather? I want to know when I have to expect snow and ice.
Nah it just makes sense to you because you grew up with it. I've used Celsius my entire life and Fahrenheit makes no sense whatsoever.
It just depends on what you are used to - Fahrenheit to you makes perfect intuitive sense, I however am fully used to Celsius and that makes perfect sense to me.
I’m used to both, which is why I have come to prefer both for different applications.
No argument here. Fahrenheit offers better granularity within the range of temps that humans are likely to experience.
Fahrenheit is too granular, imo. In day to day life I almost always hear people talk about it in ranges of temperature (eg. "mid 70s") which defeats the point of having a more granular system.
Even in Celsius you often "it's been 25 and 30" etc. Weather is just not a super accurate thing, it can be different up or down the hill, at the next town over, etc, so I don't get the granularity argument. Maaaybe I can understand the one about 0 to 100 making sense for weather related temperatures to people used to it, maybe.
Except you don't actually need that level of accuracy when talking about temperatures humans experience.
For example, has the ability to identify outside temperature of 72 fahrenheit, not 71 fahrenheit, ever made a single bit of difference to any persons day to day experience? I really can't believe that would be true.
Places that use Celsius have no problem referring to temperatures for weather so the argument that farhenheit scale is superior due to more precision doesn't hold up.
The best temperature scale for weather is always going to be the one that everyone in that area is familiar with and nothing more than that.
I talked with an american so i of course used ammo (9mm) as a scale
How many Bald Freedomeagles is that?
Cause 30C is warm but 39C is heat stroke. Bigger range than 80-89F (warm to really warm), 90-99F (hot to really hot), 100F+ (heat stroke hot).
In numerics we have decimal points for that :)
We don't even need that for weather. There's not that much of a difference between 21 and 22 C, and anyway with wind and shade you can quickly have a difference of a few degrees.
That's why weather is not just temperature, regardless of the used scale. But to ask you the same, what's the difference between 110°F and 111°F?
Oh no, I agree with you! I don't understand Farenheit at all. I like Celsius because it makes more sense in terms of definition, and having "negatives can have snow, positives can't" is convenient.
I very rarely hear anyone refer to air temperature with a decimal though.
I've never heard anyone casually refer to air temperature either; its mostly always how fast the wind is on the Beaufort scale.
In Minnesota yes. In Florida no.