this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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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.