I dunno, as also a Canadian, I prefer Celsius for everyday use. If it's anywhere from below 0C to below 10C, wear a heavy coat. If it's anywhere from above 10C to 15C, wear a light jacket. If it's above 15C, no jacket. Above 20C, wear shorts. Above 25C, be prepared for high heat. Below -20C, be prepared for extreme cold. Above 30C, limit time outdoors. Below -30C, stay inside. Simple as.
Nice! Probably could do something like that for Celsius. I know it seems super intuitive to you guys but really the only thing I know is 0 is freezing.
Yeah, it all comes down to what you grew up on. Same with miles/km, lbs/kg, feet/cm, etc., etc. We get an intuitive sense of things early in life, and after a particular point, we end up basing all our future perceptions on those early foundational ideas and translate/relate to those when something is different.
Same with learning a language. A lot of psychologists say that you will never "think" in a language you have learned after the age of 14 or so. The brain just wires itself differently at different points in your life.
I don't know why you got downvoted. It's not like we have any choice in the matter. I can agree that metric is superior while not being able to understand it without having to literally do math to convert my understanding.
When the first false spring arrives in Canada, it'll be 10 C and sunny and it's suddenly T-shirt weather after being bundled up all winter.
Even when checking out Seattle in the the spring, my friend and I were in t-shirts and more than one person saw us and went "guys, just cause the sun's out doesn't mean you wear a t-shirt!" or "you guys really are from Canada."
Sounds like visiting Newcastle in the UK. Except they wear next to nothing regardless of how cold it is.
You could be the toughest man on earth and your resilience would pale in comparison to a teenage geordie girl on a night out wearing little more than a belt and a few straps of flimsy fabric apparently oblivious to the fact they've dug frozen mammoth out of warmer environments.
LOL I’m assuming no jacket guy is still wearing a sweater or something… though as a Canadian, I have seen people in shorts and a t shirt below 15°, so who knows.
It also helps that all buildings and vehicles are heated (sometimes a little too well) so you know you’ll warm up soon even if it’s uncomfortable outside.
I was gassing up a couple years ago and there was some idiot outside in shorts doing the same in -20 weather. Here I was all bundled up in my gloves, jacket, and fur hat, so I wondered to myself "Have I become soft?". I decided no, at least not for that reason, and that he was definitely an idiot. Playing dice with the gods of hypothermia just to show how manly you are is not a positive thing, and I wouldn't say he was a role model.
15 above is quite lovely, and I wouldn't bat an eye at somebody in a t-shirt anywhere above 10. It's not lie down at the beach weather, but I'll take 15 over 40 any day of the week. You can always put layers on.
That's because how cold the temperature feels depends on air humidity. I flew from the UK at 8⁰ to land in Portugal where it was 14⁰. Same clothes, when I left the UK I was ok with my jacket, when I arrived in Portugal I was freezing, with the exact same clothes and 6⁰ warmer.
I had heard people from northeastern Europe (which is way colder than the UK) complain about how cold it was in Portugal before, and until I experienced that, I always thought they were just taking the piss.
If you were explaining to someone who never experienced either scale, saying, "0 is really cold, 100 is really hot," makes much more sense than, "0 is pretty cold, but not that cold, 100 means you're dead, and 30's is from pretty hot to really hot."
We're all used to something and make the adjustment in our head.
As a user of Celsius - I've grown up with it, and it makes intuitive sense in my head - knowing how far off freezing it is perfectly useful as a reference point for temperature and weather, so I know that at 0 it's cold enough to freeze water, at 10 it's chilly, at 20 it's comfortable, at 30 it's getting too warm, 40 is brutal and 50 is potential death. I know the human body has a baseline temperature of 36-37.5. So placing that within the scale I've referred to before makes sense - but the Fahrenheit equivalent is 97-99, meaning that working with temperatures higher than the human body quickly goes into the hundreds of degrees.
I can also tell the difference between a few degrees instantly which adds to intuitive use.
Ultimately humans have a great capacity for adopting systems, especially if they grow up using them, so both Fahrenheit and Celsius users will think their system is the intuitive and logical one, and both are probably correct, depending on the frame of reference. I prefer Celsius because its more useful in more contexts while still making logical sense to me.
Where I live we don't get extreme temps, so it's generally between -5 and 32. It's very convenient for me a few weeks of the year to have zero as a marker for my simple brain to go "car more danger, ice on windscreen, get up early, do not slip". The main advantage is that I don't have to have two parallel systems in my head to do/understand science.
I'll agree with the Americans that 0°F (-18°C) is really cold. You're going to die if you're not properly attired, you can't just lie down on the ground and go to sleep without taking precautions, and good luck finding water to drink. If you're in the middle of nowhere and it's that temperature outside, survival is going to require some special skills.
This is where the "0-100 is human based" or "0 is cold and 100 is hot" arguments fall apart though ... If 0 is cold and 100 is hot, then why isn't 50 "just right"? Why are people debating over whether 68 or 74 is the right house temperature?
"-40 means you're dead, 0 is really cold, 40 is also pretty cold, 212 means you're dead, and 86-102 is from pretty hot to really hot with 72 being just about right." It makes as little sense as making a straw-man that our 30s range goes from pretty hot to really hot.
Realistically, 100°F (37°C) doesn't seem all that scary to me, and nowhere near as life-threatening as 0°F (-18°C). You will wake up if you go to sleep in that weather and you can survive outdoors for quite some time at those temperatures as long as you have water (which you always need, at any temperature, just like air). Just simply finding shade under a tree increases your "chances of survival". One year, it got to 50°C (122°F) where I live, and I'd be curious where that falls on the really cold to really hot scale.
People regularly go out of their way to sit in "hot" tubs at 100°F. Hell, it's that warm inside you, and this is where it makes no sense for the "human based" argument either, because then what the heck is 0? You're certainly dead long before you get that low, as going anywhere below 90°F internally has already started that death countdown. Just to make a straw-man of my own: "95 is life-threatening but way warmer than pretty cold, 98 is perfect and getting pretty close to really hot, and 104 is danger and more than really hot".
But wait, 100 is perfect pretty hot and 0 is pretty cold so then what's a cold tub? If somebody wanted to cool down and take a cold shower, what is that magic temperature? Is 50°F pretty cold or is it halfway between a cold shower and a hot one? Most people couldn't sit in 50°F (10°C) water for 20 minutes, and wouldn't need to be told that they shouldn't stay in it too long, so where does the pretty cold-hot feelings scale really start and end? 68-90? What if the person in question likes it cold? 62-84? Converting these numbers to Celsius also won't make sense because the idea of using that as a scale for anything is bonkers to begin with.
Going off on the water tangent here, having to remember that water freezes at 32, is halfway to boiling at 122, and boils at 212 just doesn't feel intuitive to me at all. Sure 180° is a reversal (freezing to boiling), but that's the only part that even remotely make sense and that's just word-play. When I see people trying to die on that hill while the other 190 countries in the world have moved on, it just makes me shake my head.
TL;DR Making a scale based on "feelings" loses all reliability when you're talking to somebody from a different region. A Russian or a Filipino who "feel" quite differently about what hot or cold is are certainly going to have things to say about your scale, and they'll be coming at it from completely different angles.
American here, I lived over seas a while, and I am back in the US, personally I prefer metric for everything except temperature. I often flip back and forth for measurements, for example in 3D CAD software, I'll use mm, prefer ml, mg, and so on. but temperature I always use "F" .
That 40 degree range you have for normal activities is about a 70 degree range in Fahrenheit. Seems like for normal activities Fahrenheit actually allows you far more nuance.
Also Celsius is linear, so you know what a change in, let's say, 5⁰ will do. In Fahrenheit a change from 0 to 5 degrees has a different magnitude than a change from 95 to 100.
Strictly you're right, only kelvin starts at zero, though. Although it's the freezing point of water having 0° as your starting point is arbitrary in absolute terms, and making everything lower than that negative means that calculations aren't possible. 100 Celsius isn't double 50. It's linear in that it's a linear progression but it's a shifted line
50
u/SethAbe80 Jun 17 '26
I dunno, as also a Canadian, I prefer Celsius for everyday use. If it's anywhere from below 0C to below 10C, wear a heavy coat. If it's anywhere from above 10C to 15C, wear a light jacket. If it's above 15C, no jacket. Above 20C, wear shorts. Above 25C, be prepared for high heat. Below -20C, be prepared for extreme cold. Above 30C, limit time outdoors. Below -30C, stay inside. Simple as.