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Comment by tetris11 | Hacker News Reader

It's an interesting article but I have to say that I've come out of it without any clear answer other than "the gulf stream would give a few degrees difference at max"

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The article explained that there are two roughly equal drivers: (1) Water is a better heat reserve than land, and winds tend to blow eastwards, so Europe gets air warmed by the sea and the US east coat gets colder air that's come from the land. (2) The joint effect of the altitude of the Rockies and the angular rotation of the earth mean that air currents are southeast over the Rockies and then northeast, so arctic air gets pulled down and then pushed back up over the US east coast.

I don't know how long I read looking for these answers. Tank-you for your service.

Does that mean that the air in Europe is warmed by the other seawater that is not part of the gulfstream myth and the cold arctic air gets pushed back to US while the warmer air stays in Europe? So in reality the mild weather in Europe is a result of the angular rotation of planet earth in combination with the Rockies altitude?

Or in short: Western Europe's climate is what you would expect from a place close to an ocean. Especially when by Europe you mean the island that's Great Britain. It's the US East coast that's weird, with a climate that's a lot more continental than you would naively expect.

When looking only at 3 continental coasts, 2 West coasts and one East coast, the East one is just weird seems like it is missing the point just stated.

It is worth noting that even for a West coast Europe is very maritime because in addition to the Atlantic it has the North Sea and Baltic kind of in the middle of it, and the Mediterranian to its South. And because people (including this article) like to take either Spain (sitting on a peninsular) or Great Britain (an island) as points of reference. And the (upper half of the) US East coast is very continental even for an East Coast, because of the effects of the Rockies mentioned in the article.

But overall the point the article tries to make is that people like to say that Europe is unusually mild when really people just compare it to the wrong places (with the US East coast being a popular and uniquely bad comparison du to the reasons summarized by GP).

Isn't a few degrees a lot though?

Yes, but the overall difference is more than a dozen degrees. Nearly all of it is accounted by the maritime weather (i.e. wind blowing from the water, which has more moderate variations in temperature than land) and by the "waving" of the prevailing winds caused by mountains in North America, which just so happens cause the winds to go south over land, and then turn Northeast over the Atlantic, bringing warm air to Europe... the relative contribution of the Atlantic Conveyor is much smaller than these other two.

a few degrees is a lot, globally a few degrees less means ice age

Or Paris getting about as cold on average in winter as Washington DC

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