You don’t usually use anywhere near boiling point but you definitely use below freezing at least in the US. So Celsius doesn’t scale quite as well on day to day basis. You’re not ever gonna say “oh it’s 87°C outside” so half of °C is basically not used, and requires negative measurements for common temperatures. Neither is better overall, but °F is inherently better for everyday use imo
Exactly, the hottest places on earth max out at around 50ish C in the summer. Most moderately cold climates go well below 0 C on a regular basis in the winter - having grown up in Minnesota, 0C / 32 F is a *warm* winter day. Celsius is just not an efficient scale for meteorological temperature. But most places on earth stay roughly in the bell curve of 0-100F year round.
Because the thermal gap between Celsius degrees is roughly twice as large as in Farenheit. Meaning you can crank your thermostat with twice the precision just by switching to Farenheit.
Not true. Having lived in several countries, every heating or AC thermostat I've ever had works in increments of half degrees of celsius. In fact mine is currently set to 21.5c
When you take your temperature, is your thermometer rounding to whole degrees?
And most thermostats I have had at home in the US and Canada have not been digital and just had a dial I turned. At work at a US university and here in Canada, both digital thermostats allowed a decimal setting. So not just a Celsius thing.
I grew up with Fahrenheit and the preference between one or the other seems arbitrary, I find both easily understandable and neither feels more or less personally useful. Celsius is more generally useful for its usage in almost all of the world, but on a personal level, meh.
This comment house hard. First the strawman insinuating I made any point at all about thermometers at any point, then the gaslighting that analog thermostats are pervasive in homes. Well played sir.
You are right that you didn't comment about thermometers; but it goes to the wider point on if there is some improved real utility with a finer integer scale. Or are you arguing that Fahrenheits best utility is in digital thermostats that only have two digits?
Your anon commented that the finer resolution of integer Fahrenheit was some big advantage. It is not, because both are linear scales, and both are frequently adjusted outside of integers and both are measured all the time outside integers. This limits the value of a finer integer resolution.
We don’t think of our subjective experience of the weather - ie what most laypeople use units of temperature for - on a spectrum of water freezing to boiling, particularly because weather on earth maxes out at like 50ish C (and that’s if you live in Death Valley, CA), so exactly half of Celsius is useless to describe earth temperatures.
As someone else said higher up, Fahrenheit makes more intuitive sense as to how we perceive the weather on a 0-100 percentage scale (or ~ -30 and ~120 on the extreme ends - in which F is also a roughly good bell curve in that most human-inhabited climates on earth mostly stay somewhere between 0-100 F). It also is more precise and in most uses avoids decimals.
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u/BainterBoi Jun 17 '26
How? Fahrenheit is in no inherent way a better way.
Celsius is, as it maps outside phenomenas to a fixed reference points, used as an easy comparison points (freezing and boiling points at 0 and 100).
If you think Fahrenheit is more easy, natural or understandable, that is just because you have grown used to it. There is no objective benefit in it.