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Comment by ep103 | Hacker News Reader

The thing that blew my mind was that they always report this in degrees Celsius.

I'm in America, even despite an engineering degree, I think in Fahrenheit.

1.5C sounds like a small number, until you remember that Fahrenheit is ~2x 1C.

So 1.5 degrees C is ~3 degrees F. Which, to me, just emotionally feels like a bigger number despite being the same empiraclly.

Similarly, it means when the IPCC is saying there might be a 7C change in 100 years, they mean a 15F change. 15F is emotionally terrifying to me. Its the difference between 85 degrees and 100. 7C is an abstract concept to me.

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The US is basically the only country in the world that uses the Fahrenheit scale.

This is false. Fahrenheit is commonly used in Canada to this day. Awareness of the scale still exists in the UK as well. Any commonwealth country is likely to have awareness because metrication happened so late in those countries.

That's certainly not true for Australia and New Zealand, numbers in Fahrenheit are basically meaningless for me.

Australia and NZ had much more successful conversions to the metric system than Canada but there are people alive today who would have used the Fahrenheit scale early in their lives. Contrast this with non commonwealth countries who converted to the metric system 100 years earlier than the commonwealth.

UK Metrication: 1978 (partial)

Canadian Metrication: 1976 (partial)

Australian Metrication: 1988

NZ Metrication: 1976

French Metrication: 1858

German Metrication: 1872

Mexican Metrication: 1857

My friends in Canada talk in degrees Celsius by default. They have a basic understanding of Fahrenheit (more than Americans do of Celsius), but it's not their native temperature scale.

Yes, they use both. Celsius primarily, but still both. Ask them how hot their oven is, or the temperature of the pool.

Canadians don't know what 15f is going to look like though

275, 375, 400, 425, and hot are arbitrary settings to me, not particular temperatures. They're comparable only in that they're ordered. This is not an understanding of the scale, beyond knowing that it's talking about temperature. I definitely could not tell you how 100f relates to a standard room temperature of 18C

Sure. I was just pushing back on the “America doesn’t metric system, lol” cliche.

As a Canadian I never use Fahrenheit. The only people I know who do are at least 70.

Edit: For weather.

Honest question: what temperature scale is on your oven? My understanding is that it is likely to be Fahrenheit but I don't actually know.

The metric system is everywhere but the kitchen :)

Sorry, I meant in terms of weather. The oven is Fahrenheit (presumably because its product being sold in America too) but I don't have a mapping for that vs weather.

Ah, yeah, that's a fair confusion.

I don't think Canadian ovens feature the Fahrenheit scale because they are sold in the US. The SKUs are likely to be different and changing the display is easy. Consider cars which are similar. I assume Canadian cars feature speedometers in KPH and external thermometers in Celsius. I am curious what units your engine coolant temp uses though!

Canada is a commonwealth country and the commonwealth didn't begin converting to the metric system in earnest until the 1970s. This is over 100 years later than the rest of the world. Canada paused metrication in 1988. Cooking is likely to have been one of the last things to change because it is so common.

Pre-metrication Canada used the Imperial system and the US used the US Customary system. This means the definition of units like the gallon was inconsistent. Units in Canada seem to be influenced more by the commonwealth than they are by their southern neighbor.

Canadian cars use KPH because they’re required to by law. My Canadian Hyundai showed the temperature in F when it was new off the lot and every time I disconnect the battery, and there’s a crazy secret set of button pushes I have to do in a particular order to switch it back to C which I can never find.

A lot of things in Canada are imperial because of the influence of the US. The Ontario building code says when framing a house, wooden studs need to be on 406.4mm centers. That sounds like a really weird number, until you realize it’s actually 16”. It has to be metric, but it also has to evenly divide 4 feet, because drywall here is 4 feet wide so we can import/export from/to the US.

That sounds reasonable but I’m not certain. You could be right, especially with lumber export. Does Mexico have similar mixed units for cross border trade?

Seems more likely to me Canadian sizes are the way they are because of the Imperial system and commonwealth history.

The US never used the Imperial system so even when both countries used gallons they were different sizes.

As a Brit, I concur.

Awareness is not the same thing as familiarity.

If you give temperatures in Fahrenheit, most people outside the US (and Canada) are going to need to convert that to Celsius.

Yes, most people will. But that’s more than just America being familiar with Fahrenheit and allows for a disproportionately larger population of Fahrenheit-literate people in the commonwealth.

> disproportionately larger population of Fahrenheit-literate people in the commonwealth

Fahrenheit-literacy, at least in Australia, is practically zero for anyone under 60-70 that has lived outside the US.

Even folks who grew up with it. In Australia they have have spent the last 40 years using Celsius for everything. You tell them something in Fahrenheit and they're going to pause, have to think "How do I convert that".

But anyway, the point was that it's not false to say "The US is basically the only country in the world that uses the Fahrenheit scale."

Basically everywhere else DOES use Celsius.

For day to day understanding of weather and climate, using anything other than Celsius is going to confuse or frustrate more people than it's going to help. Regardless of whether they're in or out of the Commonwealth.

That is unfortunately not correct. I grew up in a commonwealth country, have travelled to many others, and now live in the UK. Not a single person I know in either country has even the faintest idea what Fahrenheit numbers mean for temperature. It is never used in any way in these countries.

It is used for cooking in Canada even today. Here’s a UK weather report from 1987 that uses both Celsius and Fahrenheit: https://youtu.be/NnxjZ-aFkjs. Celsius is the default but there are living people in the UK who recall using the Fahrenheit scale. This is much less common outside the commonwealth.

An example from 1987 isn't particularly a good example.

The BBC's weather reports are all in Celcius: https://www.bbc.com/weather/2643743

It’s a good example of “living memory”. You won’t find an example like this outside the commonwealth.

> This is false. Fahrenheit is commonly used in Canada to this day.

At least where I am, Celsius is the unit of choice, even among the older generation.

Even in the kitchen?

You're right, our oven and most recipes are in Fahrenheit. My kettle though is in Celsius :)

Hah, how strange. An exception to the exception. I find all this history very interesting. The US gets a lot of blame for delaying Canadian metrication but looking at the timelines the opposite seems equally plausible.

UK tabloids apparently choose to use Fahrenheit to sensationalize heat waves.

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