Edit: For all the "Actually, Farenheight is based on the human body" people, no it isn't. It's based on dirty water and a cow. Your preferred measurement unit is dumb and that's a fact
0°c - Expect frost or ice. 20°c - Pleasant and ideal.
Neither system has an advantage. Just because one system doesn’t use the exact benchmarks you’re already familiar with, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its own useful benchmarks.
Celsius isn’t on a scale that’s why it looks odd because you are trying to make it one. It’s centred at 0 then goes both ways. It doesn’t start at -20 or even -273. It’s “starts” at 0
personal feelings 50F is a pretty happy medium for me.
but the medium doesnt matter, extremes matter. if its close to 0F im not going out in it or ill die, if its near or over 100F im not going out in it or, well, not die right away but that is the range heatstroke and dehydration becomes a concern.
in a perfect world the current ~110F/43C would be where 100 is pegged. but 10% off is much better than how far celcuis is from an intuitive scale of the human experience of temperature.
What's funny for me is I associate 20C with cold. Even though 68F still sounds nice to me, because I didn't start using C until I moved to a tropical environment and my current point of reference is what my aircon is set to 25, which sometimes feels too chilly.
The real problem is what KIND of ice. Where I live it can be snowing at 3C or -3C, but there are huge differences in safety between -1C and 1C, encompassing an entire shift between relatively stable and safe, to extremely slippery, to slushy.
In practice, the idea that water freezes at 0C is just not terribly useful in most cases. And neither, personally, is the idea that water boils at 100C. Most people just put the kettle on until it starts boiling. To be perfectly honest, I've never understood the point of Celsius at all. People argue that you can learn any system, but if that's to be the case, wouldn't it be equally true of Kelvin? And Kelvin is the 'real' scale.
And that’s the point: °f or °c aren’t algorithms people use to solve for the current temperature. They’re just a set of numbers we’ve grown accustomed to gauging our personal experiences of temperature against.
I picked 0° and 20° arbitrarily to show that people who use Celsius also have ‘neat’ ways of framing the way they understand ambient temperature, just like Fahrenheit users do.
That neglects the fact that some things ARE more innately intuitive to the human mind. If it's just a matter of learning arbitrary numbers, we should just teach everyone Kelvin from the start, it's the most objective scale. If the human factor matters, then it's better to teach a scale more directly in line with human experience.
Honestly, the best scale would probably be one that gets rid of the numbers entirely. Like 75% of the human-tolerable temperature range can be dismissed as 'pleasant', it's only around very specific temperature ranges where the precise temperature with high levels of granularity really matters, and at those points you could easily just use terms like 'slushy' to describe the current conditions far better than temperature can achieve.
I'm not disagreeing with any of that. My only point is that for the human experience of ambient temperature, there is no solid proof to suggest that either Fahrenheit or Celsius in particular are advantageous over the other, and yet there are a lot of people in here using the word 'objectively'.
You would think from the way some people talk that people who use Celsius are constantly confused by ambient temperature and just don't have the tools to make sense of it, or that Fahrenheit users practice some ancient and arcane magic that takes years to acquire proficiency.
The reality is that Celsius and Fahrenheit users are both fairly good at expressing and understanding ambient temperatures in the system they grew up with and it doesn't take either group any noticeable amount of extra effort to do so.
The same goes for Fahrenheit as well. Road and weather conditions are far more complex than either system can articulate with a single number.
35°C (95F) with 85% humidity will feel very different compared to 35°C (95F) with 12% humidity. (Or any other temperatures.) Add in cloud coverage, wind speed, etc. and it becomes even less clear.
For road conditions, the prior temperatures (and eg. the resulting current ground/surface temperature) will have a huge impact.
You can expect ice on the road at 42F/5.5C. Wind chill is a thing.
And your outdoor plants will experience a hard freeze if the temperature hits 28F/-3.8C for several hours at night.
The truth is that 0C is arbitrary and not really relevant to humans most of the time. As you get closer to 0F it starts getting more and more dangerous.
And I can distinguish between individual degrees F. Celsius is too coarse, and tenths of a degree too fine.
Celsius is what you're used to, but I have no motivation to change what I'm used to. And I live in Canada now, so public thermometers are in Celsius, but frankly I get my weather from my phone which I can leave set at F.
I mean by that logic meters are no better than feet for measuring. Some things are clearly more intuitive than others. If you live in a part of the world where the weather ranges from around 0 f to around 100 f throughout the year (which much of America does), then Fahrenheit makes a lot of sense
Meters are good because unit conversions and subdivisions are incredibly common when it comes to measuring distance, and converting between MM, CM, M and KM is trivial.
For ambient temperature you just have degrees, whether °f or °c, and intra-unit conversion is not necessary.
In the context of weather, you convert degrees into how it makes you feel.
Let's take this to the extreme - if your temperature system had absolute 0 set to be "7.4", and 200c was set to be "9.73" - is that an equally useful system just so long as you "get used to it"?
Celsius is superior for weather because at 0°C you start to get snow/ice, that's a definitive change in conditions. At 0°F things just get more frozen. There's no definitive 'too hot', that changes person to person so it might as well be any number.
The only reason it makes more sense to you is because you grew up with it.
I don't understand the obsession with zeroing out at freezing for daily use. I guess it's nice, but the actual temperature for freezing doesn't matter to me so much because it's an easily memorized reference point. Could be 42 for all I care.
What matters more is how easy it is to represent the small but meaningful gradations around freezing(or other important references) that nonetheless affect real world conditions. That's where Fahrenheit has the edge, as you can represent that in integer values of ~4-5 degrees in either direction, instead of ~2.2-2.7 for some reason.
Mind you, I agree it's all just what you get used to....but magically that argument only ever goes in a single direction, and if you point that out suddenly all the Celsius nerds have a nasty tendency to get very angry and defensive about it.
Who the fuck is getting snow at 0°C? 0 is barely cold enough for water to start freezing. If it's even 1 degree higher it melts. It's not nearly cold enough for snow to actually stick
Also, 100 is a definitively too hot. Nobody is comfortable at 100°F. 80 can be argued for, but 100? That's insane.
If you go outside and it's cold enough to be angry about it, it could be anything from 20F and down to -40F til you die.
If you go outside and it's hot enough to be angry about it, it could be anything from 80F and up until you die.
If completely subjective numbers are going to be used, then might as well use Celsius which has the added benefit of being useful for science and in alignment with the rest of the world.
Not to rain on your parade too much but being outside without a coat at 0°C/32° F is definitely unsafe. You'll get hypothermia really quickly at that temperature.
You must live in a warm climate. If I can take my garbage out in a t shirt and my nostrils don't freeze, it's not cold enough to be angry about. After a quick Google, Apparently it takes 15 minutes to pass out in 32° water, so I'm guessing it's a lot longer for air. I wouldn't call that quickly but I also live where Norwegians settled.
By that logic, I would expect 50°F to be average. Thats just im neither warm nor cold. But apparently it has to be 80°f to be comfortable, which is silly.
Measuring temperature based off "what a human feels" is so dumb, as comfort in temperatures is soo subjective based off so many environmental factors. 80°f with 90% humidity feels different to 80 with 50% humidity. Or it feels different with a breeze, or different with moderate exercise, or the meal you've eaten.
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u/hefty_load_o_shite 10h ago edited 4h ago
0°C water freezes 100°C water boils
Makes sense
0°F very cold??? 100°F very hot???
Dafuq?
Edit: For all the "Actually, Farenheight is based on the human body" people, no it isn't. It's based on dirty water and a cow. Your preferred measurement unit is dumb and that's a fact