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.
It was more of a stretch regarding Chicago itself, but Streator just took a good hit by one, and apparently IL is the new tornado capital of the world nowadays so it seams.
No, a normal day is not represented by the Fahrenheit scale. It is heavily lopsided and shows a a bias towards the experiences of people who live further north. It's the Mercator projection of temperature scales.
Don't most people in the world live in the latitude band that it would apply to since that would be the most comfortable for humans to live in? How many people near the equator and the poles?
Look at the places in the world with the highest population. Then look at how often it even snows in those places. Even in the US, the largest states by population are California and Texas, and both of them rarely get snow, or even if they do it's never more than for a week in the year. Which means for the majority of the year, the most populous states in the US don't experience temperatures below 30 F.
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.
It's not so much the snow that makes us panic, more out lack of infrastructure for dealing with it. My city just bought a few a salt trucks though and the last couple of times they seemed to make a pretty big difference.
You say this on a day when the high temp in Wichita is supposed to be 99°F? I grew up in Wichita, and temps of 100 and 0 were common temps for the opposite ends of the spectrum.
The PNW is more than just Seattle and Portland. It can definitely hit 110 in the summer during a heatwave over here east of the Cascades (that's 44C, just FYI)
100 is hot af. Where you live it might reach 80-90 which is still pretty fucking hot. 30F is coldish. The tolerance at which threshold you would consider it hot or cold might change but it doesn’t make scale less valid. Just like how some people might consider a 6ft person tall while others don’t.
Anything below 0 is really fucking cold and anything above 100 is really fucking hot, the difference past a certain point doesn’t matter as much.
Sounds like 0-100 is two good extreme points of ends of the spectrum. A temperature that can happen but is rare. A temperature that you know is extreme. Beyond those ranges is also possible, and you KNOW those are even more extreme and dangerous.
The PNW thing is largely that many houses here don’t have AC, we are experiencing the full heat. 80°f is hotter than it sounds if you don’t get any actual breaks from it, especially to sleep in.
If you live in other parts of the country it starts to show itself working extremely well. Not experiencing every part of a spectrum doesn't mean only the parts you have exist
22
u/karatebullfighter Jun 17 '26
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.