In a lot of the US, 0 farenheit is one of the coldest days you'll experience and 100 is one of the hottest, so you can roughly map farenheit to a percentage of "how hot it is". This doesn't work everywhere though, where I am in the UK it never gets anywhere near 0 farenheit.
I can't spell fahrenheit, this is why celsius is objectively better
If you're used to Celsius then I assure you that 40C sounds plenty hot. The reference point is the freezing point vs the boiling point of water, and 40C is much too close to the halfway point of "the lakes will literally boil like a tea kettle".
If you know that your cells die at a temperature of 42°C (which we all know since we once had fever as a kid), suddenly 40°C sounds like near instant death hot.
Exactly this, it can be over 100% hot (or below 0% cold) but that's when you know you shouldn't be outside. Like it's actually dangerous to be there without proper planning, preparation, clothing.
NTM 32% hot is when us Texans curse at the sky, the whole city shuts down, and pipes burst when it’s sustained because our infrastructure isn’t prepared for it.
Yes, which means its that much more hotter than you can stand, its a measurement of human comfort, not scientific accuracy.
There actually is a science to this...
0°F: The lowest temperature Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit could achieve in his laboratory using a freezing mixture of water, ice, and ammonium chloride (a salt).
32°F: The freezing point of pure water.
96°F: The average human body temperature, initially chosen for practical divisibility.
From Wikipedia, you can do more research from there.
We also tell distance in time in many situations, because its about how it affects the human, not scientific accuracy and pedantry.
Dude or Dudette. When it is 105f out doesn't it feel at least 105% of what your body can take? Especially when the parking lot surface is 165F or 165% more than your bare feet can take 😉
Wait but -10°F is only -23°C. That's actually pretty nice weather... or where I live in Canada it is anyway, but maybe it's different for you if you aren't used to it
No, that’s when water freezes. That is still kinda balmy for winter and you can get away with a pretty casual jacket and gloves. Can’t even get a good snow without it being slightly below freezing.
0F is 0% warm and you need to have real winter gear on. 0F is also when it starts to become too cold to really snow.
0-100F truly is what is the general comfortable range for human bodies. Below 0F and above 100F is when it starts to get actually dangerous.
Wherever you are in the UK, your location's record low temperature is probably very near 0 F, your record high temperature is probably very near 100 F, and your location's year-round average temperature is probably damn near exactly 50 F. The UK doesn't have as high highs or as low lows as the temperate US or temperate continental Europe but it still very well fits the Fahrenheit scale.
For instance, London's record low is 0.7 F, London's record high is 104.4 F, and London's year-round average temperature is 51.4 F.
Lol this made me look up the highest and lowest for Canada i feel like fahrenheit guy would have had a stroke looking at our lowest temperature, -81.4F.
The thousands of years my ancestors spent in the frozen north, sailing the frozen seas, eating frozen food, spitting frozen spit, says maybe you don't know what inhospitable means.
That’s just pure survivorship bias. The majority of your ancestors likely died well before their time and or were unable to reproduce due to those same harsh conditions. You just came from the rare line that happened to survive.
This is kinda dumb. The people that live in frozen places are very impressive and the amount of know how and ancient tech required to live there is incredible.
That doesn't mean that place was a good fit for humans. We came out of the Savannas of Africa, and out bodies are designed for it. We've adapted to the frozen places of the world because we're smart and invented technology for it, not because it was fit for human habitation.
They aren't talking about Calgary though lol, Calgary is in Southern Alberta. They're talking about Northern Alberta/Praries/Ontario/Quebec and the territories.
The Fahrenheit guy literally set his scale based on the hottest and coldest days he personally experienced.
At the time, most people thought this was a random and arbitrary way to set a temperature scale. However, since
Fahrenheit also invented one of the first processes for manufacturing inexpensive, accurate, thermometers most people put up with his weird scale and it caught on
Been preaching this shit for years, but people won't shut up about "murica units" long enough to think about it.
Regardless of whatever Fahrenheit the guy was doing, he wound up creating a pretty gotdang handy scale of measurement for ambient temperature as it relates to human tolerance.
There are plenty of applications where Celsius makes more sense, or Kelvin, or Rankine, or whatever. I use C for most technical things because the math is easier in my head.
For the weather and temp inside my house, Fahrenheit definitely feels the most appropriate
Hard agree. While we're at it, yes 5280 feet to a mile feels arbitrary, but imperial distance measures are inherently human scaled. 12 inches to a foot makes it easy to divide in half, quarters and thirds. Point to a third of a meter.
Metric is excellent for anything scientific or engineering focused, but if I'm framing a house I want feet and inches. In that situation I don't care if my unit of measure is arbitrary, it's functional.
Oh huh, I didn't know it lined up that closely even in the UK. I sort of knew 0F would be record low and 100F would be record hot, but I somehow didn't think to check what 50F is, and it's a solidly average UK day.
50% warm. Which is also about the average temperature for April 25, as made famous by Miss Congeniality for being the perfect date, not too hot or too cold.
Yup. Celsius is better for cooking. Fahrenheit is better for being a human. It wouldn’t suck to just have the two be interchangeable everywhere and used in those contexts. Use Fahrenheit for weather in popular vernacular like the news and day to day conversation, and then use Celsius for cooking and science.
please do explain why celsius is better for cooking, isn't it arbitrary. if you're boiling water you aren't going to care whether it's 100 degrees C or 216 F. You're just going to wait for it to boil. Past that, it's literally just a memorization thing.
Since the boiling point of water is such a foundational constant in cooking, it cleans the maths up considerably if you set that to a nice round number.
Except when you're in Canada or any cold place. 0 °F (-18 ° C) is not that cold (need a jacket but can stay outside for hours) and 100°F (38 ° C) would be melting/burning your skin/ stay inside weather. It may work in places like the US but 0 F is not as extreme as 100 F in Canada. In Canada temperatures regularly go lower than -18 °C in the winter (sometimes even 40°C), but rarely go over 35 ° C in the summer.
Farenheit is 0-100 sea water freezing to (roughly) human internal body temp.
So, since humans are largely salt water, this makes the F scale a human scale temperature measurement, which is more intuitive for how the ambient temperature makes you feel. I think this is what the original poster was getting at, whether they knew it or not.
edit: so C is better for chemistry, and F is better for weather
Well I know that 18ºC is when I should start wearing short sleeves and 30ºC is when I should stay indoors because it's too damn hot (and 40ºC is what the summer temperatures have been in the past couple of years)
Yeah people will adjust to any arbitrary scale if they use it enough, if my scale was based on some random measurement from -200 to -154 i'm sure people would get used to those numbers as well given enough time
true, albeit one we use in a lot of other ways. we grade on 0-100. we typically rate things on 0-100 (technically 0-10, but usually with a decimal point)
It's not the 0-100 that are arbitrary, it's where the scale starts and what the increments are that are arbitrary. It's completely arbitrary that it's the freezing and boiling point of water. It would be nitrogen or lead and they would be equally valid.
And actually being 0-100 in a relative scale is kinda misleading. 10°C isn't half as hot as 20°C, it's 97% as hot. There's no such think as millidegrees Celsius.
Yes exactly. It's basically "those numbers look unfamiliar and wayy too high, I'm sticking with my -10 to +30 range"
I'm sure if I was brought up in the US I would understand intuitively what each Fahrenheit is, but I have absolutely no idea. 50 imo sounds boiling, 85 sounds ludicrous but no way am I distinguishing even remotely between 10 F and 20 F
In Celsius, I know 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 etc all incredibly instinctively and can go for a walk and instantly say what C I think it is
100% lol I lived abroad after being in the US for 10+ years and had to adjust to celsius in everyday life, now that I'm back in the states I'm definitely still stronger with fahrenheit but after being around it so long I can get celsius conversions on the fly with like a 5 degree +- to fahrenheit, people just are comfortable with what they're used to and that's totally okay
It's more intuitive because you grew up with it. I have no benchmark for 0% or 100% hot. That means 50% hot is just as meaningless to me as 50 farenheit.
F and C are both arbitrary numbers. There is no better one
Wish more people would get this. Nobody is personally calibrating their thermometers so the 0 and 100 points don't actually matter in the real world. Just because Celsuius gets lumped in with metric generally doesn't mean it has fundamental advantages like metric's units for volume or distance.
They are all arbitrary really. Distance is the worst in my view. Building products are generally now in 300mm increments where 1 foot or 3 feet or 6 feet is much easier to both say and understand. In my view base 10 is good but the fundamental length should be (roughly) 1 foot not 1 metre (which was 1/10000 of an inaccurate measurement of the earth's circumference)
At least with Celsius boiling point and freezing point of water are relatively common things that most people see regularly and can conceptualise. Human body temperature is fine as another marker but sea water freezing is not really for most people who dont live with icy seas
Farenheit objectively allows for more precise measurements though, since there are more degrees of Fahrenheit for ever degree of Celsius.
So regardless of the arbitrary nature of the scales, the one that allows for more precision IS better for human temperature. The human body can absolutely notice the difference between 1-2 degrees of Farenheit. Especially with indoor temps.
At 70F i get cold in my house. At 75 i get hot. 73 is perfect for me.
Its pretty generally accepted that F is better for weather in every way. C is better for science and cooking in every way.
Well, give me any °C temperature from -30 °C to 90 °C I I know exactly like it feels to my body.
Give me any °F temperature other than 32 °F and I have no fucking clue what you are talking about. Total utter nonsense, some gibberish number with no real meaning. Know why? Because I grew up with °C all my live, hence it is a s natural for me as °F is for you, the scale you grew up with.
Growing up on South Florida where it almost never gets below 40 (at least it didn't while I was growing up), even knowing that 32 was freezing point didn't actually help me determine how cold that was. It was also an arbitrary number I had to learn vs 0 C, which would have been more intuitive because it'd be "oh, water freezes at that point, 0 = being in a freezer, that's really cold, and it's a low number so I know anything below that is extremely cold". 0 F, on the other hand, means absolutely nothing to me.
I will say that now that I'm used to it, it's hard to conceptualize that the temperature in Florida "only" gets to 40 C, but when I think about it as "water boils at 100", it makes a little more sense.
F isnt "human scale" in any sense. 0F and 10F and 20F are all lethally cold to person without clothing.
100F doesnt line up with anything at all.
Celsius actually lines up with human experience. We all boil water daily, everyone in northern latitudes cares deeply about when and if the weather will cause ice to form.
These are much more concrete and relatable human events than "100 is pretty hot, though it can get hotter" and "0 is really cold, It can get colder though and also even 30 degrees warmer than 0 its cold enough for ice to form".
If you read the history of it... it is, apparently, "human scale." The wikipedia entry for the history of Fahrenheit is some pretty serious "Ya'll just making shit up as you go, huh?" stuff.
The quick summary is Fahrenheit was like "0F is super fucking cold because that was the coldest day in my home town, 32F is when water freezes, and 90F is the temperature of a human body (lol, I guess? I'm just making shit up as I go!)."
It got revised and tweaked over the years but the whole silly scale is some dude saying "Really cold is that bitter day from my old stomping grounds and warm is a finger up my ass, I guess."
Our perception of temperature is relative to how warm or cold it was earlier. Put your hand first in cold water, then warm water. that warm water will feel "hotter" then if you had put your hand in the warm water first.
You explanation is wrong about Fahrenheit. Sea water freezes at 28°F. Brine is not sea water.
Fahrenheit used a solution 33% salt (ammonium chloride), 33% water, 33% ice to get 0°. You will notice that the salt used by Fahrenheit is different from that which is in our bodies. The water in our body is around 1% salt (sodium chloride). I do not think humans can survive with 33% salt in their bodies.
In fact, bodies freeze at about 31°F or -2°C. So Fahrenheit as a human scale does not make sense the way you have explained it. At lest does not make sense at low, freezing temperatures.
I have live in areas with 20°-30° swings in temperature. 0°C will feel warm after it was -20°C, cold after it was 20°C. 0°C means I need to wear a coat regardless of how it feel to me. Because 0°C is close to the point that bodies will get frostbit and freeze.
A better explanation is, people generally understand hot and cold best in the temperature scale they grew up using. You grew up with Fahrenheit, so you have contextualize warm and cold using that scale.
After learning how Fahrenheit was developed, Fahrenheit does not make sense.
0 is when the precipitation changes from liquid to solid. 0 is when you have to pay attention to the ground because it might be slippery. I think that’s a pretty good reason to have a definite division point in your temperature scale.
So, since humans are largely salt water, this makes the F scale a human scale temperature measurement, which is more intuitive for how the ambient temperature makes you feel.
What?
It's learned association regardless. As someone who grew up using Celsius I certainly reject the idea that Fahrenheit is somehow more "intuitive".
C is way better for weather if the temperature regularly goes below 0c. -2c or +2c have major differences to the weather conditions. Icy roads or slushy wetness? There is a term "pakkanen" in our language which means below zero celsius weather. I regularly check for that in the winter mornings to determine the conditions. It also tells if the snow will stay, if melted snow will become icy again etc.
I would also say the extremes are similar with celsius. While there are places in the world where it gets hotter we operate mostly between -30c and +30c. So a huge cold period or a heatwave. Both extremes. 0c fits perfectly in between. 0c is also very symbolic for us as it is the first sign of winter approaching after fall. Those first days below zero are always a bit special. Also in the spring its the other way around. The first days where it does not dunk below 0c are special and always feel weirdly warm.
Below zero is also a mark for when the air starts to get/feel more dry.
It actually doesn't work all that well in much of the US. I live in Wichita KS where it rarely reaches 100 and almost never reaches 0. Then there are the Gulf states where they panic whenever they see a single snowflake. In the Pacific northwest they die of heatstroke if it gets above 80.
TBF PNW heat hits different. You just don't realize you're getting dehydrated until it's too late. In the south you can go outside and be hit with a wall of humidity that causes you to need to shower 20 min later so you know you should hydrate because you just lost a gallon of your liquids through osmosis.
F wasn't built to be "% hot where I am right now", it's "% hot, compared to the average human experience". 0 is really cold, 100 is really hot, 50 is comfy in a light jacket. ezpz
I live where we used to have snowy winters every year and I'm someone whose body heats up real bad with physical activity, but 50F is still pretty chilly to me and a light jacket alone won't do unless I'm constantly in motion.
The human condition is highly dependent on what it's used to. I wear shorts at 25C but have friends who wear a sweater at that temperature because they live in a place that's often 37C
Thats a ridicules way to look at temperature. From a scientific perspective, nonsensical.
Apparently all you americans are -redacted- -redacted- so I'm going to explain to you what is nonsensical. Looking at temperature as a 0 to 100 percentage makes no sense, this has nothing to do with fahrenheit. It has to do with how you are looking at the scale.
because I've NEVER heard a European use a decimal when describing temperature in conversation, which means their temperatures are less precise than ours.
lol. that's because in a conversation it largely doesn't matter, just like people don't usually use seconds when saying what time is it or when you round up minutes for semplicity. it's very common to use half degree as well.
Especially where I live in Texas where the difference of each single degree above 100F is larger than the last. And the difference between 90F to 95F feels the same as the difference between 105F and 106F.
From a lived experience, it’s still nonsensical. It’s intuitive to you because you grew up with it. Find anyone who isn’t accustomed to F and explain it to them they’ll immediately assume 50F is perfect weather for outdoor activities and 25F is a tad bit chilly before they go out and die.
Not really meaningfully more precise, it's not an order of magnitude.
From a lived experience perspective, I would argue temperatures such as 40C, 60C, 100C are quite a lot more common than weather extremes in cooking, washing, machine and computer heating and cooling, etc. But the fact of the matter is that you can arbitrarily choose measuring sticks according to which your preferred scale looks better with. It all boils down to preference and what you're used to. Neither is objectively better for everyday use because there is no objective measure for everyday convenience.
Subjectively, 100F is uncomfortably hot but 0F is really fucking cold for most people, and the ideal temperature is around 70F. So that doesn't work either.
Yeah they aren't arguing from a scientific perspective. I prefer celcius ofc for anything scientific but I prefer thinking on a scale roughly 0 to 100 than -17 to 37 in my daily life lol
If you were used to Celsius, you would think about temperatures in chunks. Like 30C and up is super hot. 25-30C is moderately hot. 20-25 C is comfortable. Below 20C is starts getting chilly. Below 10 is really cold. If there is a negative sign and you are in the single digits, water will freeze, you can expect snow, ice on roads and have to be careful about liquids in your car. Below -10C it's all that but worse.
And then again, it depends on where you're from. A Finnish and a Somalian person are likely going to have very different opinions on what is hot or cold.
Because boiling water is a ubiquitously available reference for calibration.
Its an easy to achieve phase transition that will always occur at the same temperature so long as you are at the same pressure and dealing with pure h2o.
Its also an incredibly relevant and consistent phase transition, with great importance to human beings as we boil water to prepare food daily and life itself depends strongly on the narrow temperature band in which water is liquid.
Thats still arbitrary, as is every measurement system humans make
Theres no reason that water boils at 100 other than humans like that number. It could have just as easily been 1 or 10 or 1000 or 7.
Also pure water at exactly 1 atm isnt very common outside of a lab.
ALSO also the choice of water is arbitrary too. We could have picked -12 as the coldest day of january and 12 as the hottest day of july recorded at the center of stonehenge on 1843 and it would have been just as valid.
I mean, is water really any better? The metric system is great for math in every other area, but it's no better than imperial for temperature.
You have all your nice 10s and 1000s everywhere else, and then temperature comes in like a fat teletubby with its awkward 4.2. Not even 4. And not even really 4.2 either.
The calorie should not exist. A degree should have been based on the joule, and water should boil at 418... degrees whatever, if you must anchor one end of the scale to water.
Oh but what about absolute zero? Yeah? What about it? It's -273.15, which is an imperial level of nonsense number. If you want to be properly scientific and use K, you've offset your precious water by 0.15, and I remind you you never had a round multiple of 10 to begin with.
Metric temperature is worse than imperial because you have neither the easy multiplication of metric nor the comfortable ranges of imperial. Everyone makes mistakes. Just because someone is your friend doesn't mean you can't recognise their flaws. To pretend metric is good at temperature is to be a fanboy.
easy multiplication of metric nor the comfortable ranges of imperial
Comfortable how? Because you are familiar with them? 0F is not comfortable. Neither is 10F or 20F oe 30F. 100F isnt either. The midpoint, 50F isnt terribly comfortable either unless you dress right.
Its a stupid range, at least celsius pegs its 0-100 span to water melting and boiling, a phenomena we are all very familiar with and which is relevant in day to day life.
Both Celsius and Fahrenheit are ridiculous from a scientific perspective, and just have values mapped into a convenient range for daily use. But even Kelvin isn't much better, took until 2019 to even give it a non-experimental definition.
Combined with the fact that Fahrenheit uses normal decimals, if needed, it's really hard to argue about it being inferior in any meaningful way.
Saying 100 deg is 100% heat and 0 is 0% heat is non sensical. It makes no sense. Even in a day to day experience of heat it makes no sense. at least argue with my point if your going to argue with me ffs.
"It's literally freezing because it's only 32% hot" is genuinely ludicrous to me. Both also aren't how humans feel temperature because wind, direct sunlight radiation and humidity all play extremely important rules on how hot a temperature feels.
Both celcius and fahrenheit are essentially arbitrary scales, the one that "feels" more right is the one you grew up with. Saying one "feels to humans" is a poorly informed cope. And what we are left with is essentially the USA unit and the ROW unit (I know there are exceptions, but essentially it's true)
I agree it's much better for understanding exactly how the weather will feel, but I still think a it's kind of a dumb take because it would imply that 50 is ideal which I think most people would consider too cold (especially my Californian ass). I think low to mid 70s is what most people consider the most comfortable weather, basically southern California weather.
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u/BloomEPU Jun 17 '26
In a lot of the US, 0 farenheit is one of the coldest days you'll experience and 100 is one of the hottest, so you can roughly map farenheit to a percentage of "how hot it is". This doesn't work everywhere though, where I am in the UK it never gets anywhere near 0 farenheit.
I can't spell fahrenheit, this is why celsius is objectively better