Let’s ignore the fact that celsius is taught in American schools because “hAha AMeRiCa bAd beCauSe nO MeTric.”
It’s taught but not really for weather. So while I know the boiling and freezing points of various substances in Celsius, I don’t have instant recognition when I hear a Celsius temperature, I have to convert it in my head.
No need to convert. 0 to 40 is the part of the scale for weather, where 0 is dangerously cold and 40 is dangerously hot.
40 ain’t dangerously hot. Temperature reaches 50°C in some parts of the world.
It can reach almost 50C right here in the US, even.
56.7° C is the hottest temperature ever recorded. It was in the US.
35°C with 100% humidity can be fatal to humans
46°C with 50% humidity can be fatal to humans
Humans can not survive for extended lengths at these temperatures and humidities.
Saying “40 ain’t dangerously hot” is dumb.
No need to convert? What do you mean? Are you saying if I just intrinsically knew Celsius for weather I wouldn’t have to convert Celsius? Because that’s obviously true, but I’m just explaining I don’t intrinsically know Celsius in that way.
Also, even if I did get to know Celsius really well, I would still have to convert it every time someone uses Fahrenheit, which is pretty much all the time in the US.
Lastly, what do you mean, saying 0 C is “dangerously cold” and suggesting that below that temp is outside of the bounds of what is used for weather? Where I live the temperature stays below 0 C for long periods of time, never going above it.
If you know those two numbers, 0 and 40, you can get a general idea of what the temperature is in Celsius without doing any math. If you hear 20, you know that’s a moderate temperature because it’s right in between. If you hear 30, you know that’s fairly warm. If you hear 10, you know that’s chilly but not freezing. Below 0 or above 40 are extreme cold and extreme heat, respectively.
What’s 28° C? How can I envision in my mind what that means?
0-40 as a scale. 28 is about 3/4 between the two. So it’s towards the hotter side but how far into it?
It’s 82.4° F
Low 80s. I know exactly how low 80’s feel.
0-100 is easy to compare with %
82.4° F is 82% hot.
Humans like it around 75% hot between 50-100.
So 82° is hot but not pushing 90s
You can get a general idea of temperature very easy.
Then why don’t you USE IT?
Because for weather, °F is arguably better. 0°F - 100°F is the general range that most weather on the planet happens at (yes I know there are extremes where it gets to like -30°F or 120°F, but bear* with me). You can then further break those up into 10°F segments that are a bit more practical and granular than 10°C segments:
- under 0°F: stay inside
- 0°F - 10°F: really fucking cold, don’t stay out too long or you risk hypothermia
- 10°F - 20°F: still really cold, but you can stay out long enough to shovel your driveway without fear of losing fingers/toes, if you’re wearing winter gear
- 20°F - 30°F: cold but not bitterly so. Perfect weather for outdoor winter activities like sledding or snowball fights
- 30°F - 40°F: Snow starts melting here, and you can probably ditch the scarf, but you still need a winter jacket
- 40°F - 50°F: Too warm for your heavy winter jacket, to cold for your light spring jacket. It’s layering season baybee
- 50°F - 60°F: still layering season, but you can probably get by with just a light jacket at this point, especially if you’re doing something active outside. Some people start breaking out the shorts, but that’s not the norm.
- 60°F - 70°F: a more generally acceptable range to start wearing shorts and short sleeves. Perfect temps for doing yard work and sipping beers on the patio alike
- 70°F - 80°F: definitely shorts weather, and pools start coming into play. If you’re doing something rigorous outside, you’re probably sweating
- 80°F - 90°F: you’d probably rather be inside, if you’re not in a pool. You’ll be sweating just lounging in your deck chair.
- 90°F - 100°F: hot as balls, probably not worth going outside for very long, as the pool water feels like taking a dip in lukewarm soup
- Over 100°F: stay inside
Now I know you can do something similar with °C, but the workable range there is smaller, because you’re going from like -15°C to 40°C. It’s less granular, and the start/stop temps are more awkward.
Is it weird that water freezes at 32°F and boils at 212°F? Sure, absolutely. When you’re doing stuff in that context, it absolutely makes sense to use Celsius, where you’re working on a nice, neat 0°C-100°C range. But weather, the thing most people contextualize temperatures with, doesn’t happen in that range. It starts well below freezing, and (hopefully) doesn’t get anywhere close to the boiling point of water. For that, I’d argue °F is actually a little more useful.
All these arguments don’t really have any effect in reality. As someone born in Australia everyone is super comfortable with Celsius and the problems you describe just don’t exist because in the end it’s really just what you’re used to.
To me Fahrenheit seems incredibly awkward but then I wasn’t brought up using it.
Oh yeah I absolutely recognize that what you’re used to or brought up on is gonna have a huge impact on which system you prefer. That being said, I think a Fahrenheit user would have a harder time switching to Celsius, than a Celsius user would switching to Fahrenheit, at least for normal day-to-day weather applications. And for some of the same reasons that people prefer metric units in general - it’s more granular, has more resolution, is base 10 (for this application), etc.
I personally use metric as much as I can. The temperature on my phone for example is in celsius, try me.
Because it doesn’t have as much resolution as Fahrenheit.
There are 180 degrees between freezing water and boiling water in °F. But 100 degrees between the two in °C. So with Fahrenheit we can give mote accurate temperature info without resorting to decimal degrees. And if your response is “learn to handle decimals” then the same argument can be given for inches vs mm.
Is it weird that I use C for negative and F for positive? lol
Is 31° positive or negative?
That is honestly a good question lol
Americans: why would I care how water feels
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American kids wear hoodies in 30C+ for some bizarre reason.
It’s camouflage from perverts and Terfs.
That’s some serious dysphoria
Amateurs that do not know what 50°C in India feels like…
Multiply by 2 and add 30
The C is the grade those kids on got in “Temperature Understanding Class” because they’re almost failing.
I don’t know if they stopped, but American kids at least used to be taught both Celsius and Fahrenheit. At least in some parts anyway. I was taught both as a kid, with my school largely banning the use of Fahrenheit by staff on campus even, for instance.
If those Americans could read they’d be very upset.
I’d take offense if I could; but you’re right… I think… idk, I can’t think. I’m not upset, you’re upset!
What’s an up set?
Nothing, what’s an up set with you?
This line could’ve come out of Gob’s mouth
Oh my Gob! It’s adventure time… come’on grab your friends
Not just us not understanding Celcius. Where I come from, we wear shorts down to 0°C or lower.
Seriously, my first reaction was “10C isn’t even that cold.”
Americans know about °C, but what the hell is C°?
MY CAR GETS 18 FARTHINGS TO THE HOGSHEAD AND THAT’S THE WAY I LIKE ITOkay but explain fractional inches and why this proves that the imperial system is flawed
Whoever thought having to say “it’s 13/64 inches long” was a good idea needs to fuck right off.
Bruh when they invented the inches. They thought that quarter inch precision was good af.
American are like “cut 37/64 and 52 thousandths of an inch off your 2 by 4 inch piece of wood, that’s obviously not 2 by 4 inches”, and don’t get me started on wire gauge.
Ever bought 6/4 boards but in board feet?
No, I live in the metric world. I just watch some woodworking etc. videos by Americans for entertainment, and get horribly confused and annoyed.
It is not an ideal way to sell wood.
Americans do understand Celsius, although it is unfortunately not as commonly used for weather/room temperature as Fahrenheit
Not all of us do. Source: me
Honest question: other than the number of people using Celsius, what benefits does Celsius bring over Fahrenheit?
Even the scientific community felt the need to hollow out the Celsius scale, leaving the numerical values of Celsius in tact but otherwise completely decoupling the scale from the properties of water when it created kelvin. It instead moved to measured values, like basically all other SI/metric units.
Celsius is there to describe water. Well, it’s used to describe a mostly pure form of water. Well, it’s used to describe a mostly pure form of water at around sea level. So, why does that make Celsius more relevant or useful for temperatures than Fahrenheit?
Frankly, it feels like Celsius is, to the rest of the world, what the Imperial system is to the US: a vestige of times past that has been supplanted by a better, measurement-based standard, but has yet to be abandoned because it is so entrenched in popular culture.
Celsius and Kelvin are identical, just shifted scales.
Fahrenheit has an equivalent which is rankine. It’s not that one is evidence based over the other, one is just absolute temperature and one shifted to be useful, essentially.
Respectfully, I don’t think you are completely correct.
While you are right that Kelvin is tied to absolute zero, it is also defined in such a way that a change in 1K corresponds to a change of thermal energy kT by 1.380649×10−23 J (the Boltzmann constant).
It is the difference in what 0K describes, along with the fact that a change in temperature equals a specific change in thermal energy (the measured value to which I previously referred), that separate it from Celsius. In Celsius, zero is the freezing point of (mostly pure) water (at sea level), and a change in temperature has no relationship to a specific/prescribed change in thermal energy.
Celsius is literally Kelvin + 273.15. They measure the same thing.
Fahrenheit is as Celsius is to rankine, which is also a measure of absolute temperature.
I’m not quite clear on where this is confusing you, Celsius is improper in many non relative equations yes but that’s due to the math not a fundamental difference in what is being measured.
Ah, I guess I misread (in my own research) or somehow missed that a degree change in Celsius was directly pegged the same degree change in Kelvin (shifted by 273.15 ) when the Kelvin scale was updated to be pegged to the Boltzmann constant. Thank you for helping me understand where my understanding was flawed!
I guess I still don’t understand the utility of Celsius, though. If it’s really just an alias, shifted by 273.15, for Kelvin, what utility does Celsius offer? Why not just use Kelvin?
Tradition, culture, etc make Celsius a useful tool. Human perception if temperatures is also not well correlated to Kelvin, where a change in 1 K is less than 0.5%, but to a person it certainly feels more substantial. By relating the scale we use daily to freezing and boiling of water, you at least capture both an okay human sensitivity, and important temperatures to us as humans.
Fahrenheit arguably goes a step further, defining a much narrower range for humans specifically, with some landmarks for water.
No system is objectively better, it’s all convention and arbitrary. We could define an absolute temperature scale which puts human temperatures at 1 blorp, 0 as absolute 0. Clearly the resolution is pretty low, you’d have to define the weather with decimals. Oh well, that’s fine. Annoying maybe, but valid.
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