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Comment by adriand | Hacker News Reader

It’s brutal, I live near Toronto and not only is the winter sun quite weak but sunny days are quite uncommon. Almost every day is grey and overcast. Combine that with short daylight periods and winter becomes quite the gruelling challenge in terms of mental health especially.

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Weeeellll :)

Toronto Harborfront Center is at 43.6397877,-79.3836877,17.12z according to Google. If I look for the southern most part of Germany, that seems to be Oberstdorf which is at 47.3997083,10.2805651,14.08z ;)

Or in other words, Germany in terms of natural sun light exposure in winter is way worse than Toronto. In fact, in Germany its dark much earlier and sun comes up much later for longer. I hear cloud cover is very comparable to the Toronto weather you describe so aptly.

One of the most populated areas of Germany is at around 51.5, if we wanted to "guess" where aldipower might be from. Going mostly straight up from Toronto, if you want to hit "civilization" at that level, that's Waskaganish, QC or Moosonee, ON a bit more south, right on our beautiful Hudson Bay.

I complain less and less about our beautiful country, the more I compare it w/ the world ;)

Wow, TIL. That’s kind of nuts, I just looked at latitude lines because I was sure you had to be wrong but it looks like where I live (which is actually Hamilton) is the same latitude as northern Italy. In fact, it’s almost exactly the same as Florence, where the forecasted highs over the next week are in mid- to high-teens (C). We have a blizzard and most days next week the high is 1 degree. I honestly didn’t realize how much climate is not strictly determined by latitude!

Wind and ocean currents make Western europe way warmer than Canada for a given latitude. Ottawa is only about 45 degrees north, same as Paris. Most of England is further North than that.

Minneapolis is also at 45 degrees; in fact there's a plaque in a public pathway that marks the exact spot. We just recently started getting sunlight at 5 PM again, but that will change soon once DST takes effect.

Europe is going to be in big trouble if the gulf current ever stops flowing.

Not just England, try Scotland and some of its Islands.

Not much chance of Vit D from sunlight for almost half the year.

Penzance 50.1 N London 51.5 N Berwick 55.8 N

Edinburgh 56.0 N Aberdeen 57.1 N Thurso 58.6 N

Kirkwall 59.0 N Lerwick 60.1 N Haroldswick 60.8 N

Cries in Nordic

I take 30 minutes longer lunch breaks in winter the days the sun is out, just to be able to get outside.

It's more or less impossible to get natural Vitamin D otherwise -- any spare time will be during the dark hours.

Paris is almost 49 degrees north. Even Ottawa is closer in latitude to Milan

You're welcome.

Also: Look up New York City ;)

And even then, Toronto gets about 2000 hours of annual sunshine, while London (a D swathes of Northern Europe) get about 1600 hours :(

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