But as a way to describe daily weather (and thermostats) it's woefully inadequate.
The sum total of "comfortable" temperatures in celsius has to be squeezed between maybe 17 to 24 - why? you never ever use anything above 40 except when talking about people that died from a heatwave.
It's based on the freezing and boiling point of water _at sea level_ which almost none of us ever encounter (whether it's sea level, or the boiling point of water).
Fahrenheit is a much more intuitive scale (again... to describe daily weather or human temperature) - 0 - 100 better models the temperatures we experience daily, and you can intuitively separate into 10s, the way you "feel"
For example...
100s - honey, please, let's move to a cooler place.
90s - uncomfortably hot
80s - hot in the sun, not too bad at night
70s - you'd probably want a light sweater at night
60s - light sweater all the time
50s - medium sweater
40s - sweater, maybe a coat
30s - coat
20s - sweater and coat
10s - why am i living in this region?
0s - honey, please, let's move to a warmer place.
The point is that there's enough resolution to describe the actual human experience with temperature.
For everything else, celsius is perfectly adequate, totally agree.
The difference between 20 C and 20.5 C is not generally noticeable. The difference between 20 and 25 really is.
You’ll just have to face the fact that you feel comfortable with a really weird system that nobody else can see the point of, but it’s what you’re comfortable with. That’s OK, you’re allowed.
Otherwise people turn to BOM (Bureau of Meteorology) hour by hour / day by day records and forecasts of temp. and rain with radar cloud coverage - these just use nearest whole Celsius numbers, eg: https://www.bom.gov.au/location/australia/western-australia/...
Almost everything you've conjectured about "how they do it in a metric country" has been wrong; builders don't use a third of a metre, for example, everything is typically in millimetres - 1200, 1600, etc (aka, 1.2 metres, 1.6 metres) along side usages of 1 mm and 5 mm for small tolerances, expansion gaps, etc.
People usually just say the temperature they’ve heard in the weather report, without giving a range. If you say “over 20”, people don’t assume “close to 30”, because then you would have said that.
30° is perfectly comfortable for me.
40 - scorching hot
35 - super hot
30 - sunny summer day
25 - nice warm weather
20 - nice breezy weather
15 - a little chilly
10 - bring a coat
5 - getting cold
0 - drivers be careful
-5 - is cold
-10 - seriously cold
Etc.
Body temperature also has a nice cutoff point of 37.0C before you start to worry.
The widest range of temperatures found in any country is the USA. In the continental US alone the temperatures easily exceed -50°C and 50°C in both directions (much colder if you include Alaska). The USA also has the largest temperature change ever recorded in a 24 hour period, at 57°C.
Merits of specific measurement systems aside, the USA is arguably the most representative single country on Earth when it comes to temperature and "how people feel". It has among the hottest, coldest, and most extreme temperature ranges ever recorded.
A few comments up, someone was saying F only makes more sense than C because you live somewhere with specific temperature ranges. But the US has all sorts of ranges.
What's so special about the number 50? Why aren't you comparing to 40°C instead? 40°C is a more useful boundary than both 50°C and 100°F.
50˚C is the highest temperature that regularly occurs in the hottest place I can think of, Death Valley. The point is, half the 0-100 range never gets used even in extreme settings. But yeah, in most places, more than half is unused.
I still don't get why are you so fixated on 50°C. Why not 125°F? You'd get even more unused range if you go 0-125.
Also, I get some measures being pointlessly precise just cause it lines up with the units, but they deliberately add a decimal place to the displays to support ˚C, even in countries where ˚C is default. The same display could support 0.5˚F increments, but they intentionally don't.
> I still don't get why are you so fixated on 50°C. Why not 125°F? You'd get even more unused range if you go 0-125.
The 0-125˚F range gets used though. Usually 0-100 though. It's perfect.
To be clear, I don't have strong feelings. Obviously in a lot of science/engineering fields we use Celsius degrees a lot. But we also us Kelvin absolute scale a lot which would be ridiculous for day-to-day usage.
I am used to Fahrenheit but it is also a finer scale and a nice round number for boiling is largely irrelevant for the vast majority of purposes. Yes, knowing the freezing point of water can be important but memorizing one simple number probably isn't a huge stretch especially that the reality differs based on a number of factors. Arguably, knowing that 0 degrees F means fricking cold is sort of a higher latitudes bias but I'm not sure the degree to which Celsius simplifies.
With literally everything else about those two scales being a matter of preference and getting used to, this is the only objective difference with real world impact. Very tiny impact but still. Focusing on this one thing is the only way to answer the question of which is better with anything other than "whichever you're used to, it doesn't matter whatsoever". And if you focus on this one thing, then by the slightest of margins, Celsius is objectively better.
As someone who lives in a northern US state, there are so many other factors that affect winter road safety that aren't a binary above/below freezing temperature at sea level. I'm not really going to argue against Celsius but F is a very workable scale that has some (minor) benefits at human scale.
All those other reasons are exactly why I said the difference is minimal. But that minimal difference is not zero. If you add every single such difference that exists between °C and °F, of which there's literally just one, then Celsius very clearly comes ahead, although by an amount way too small to matter.
Black ice is always dangerous. No matter how many other dangerous road conditions you can come up with, black ice is still one of them. And black ice happens exactly when the temperature crosses 32°F boundary multiple times. It's far more important to know if it was 31°F than to know if it was 30°F.
You mean shifted by 273.15 because Kelvin doesn't have tidy fixed points at the freezing and boiling point of water, unlike Celsius and Fahrenheit.
Celsius and Fahrenheit are both utilitarian systems. Kelvin is the scientific system. Arguments about the relative utility of C° and F° are subjective and neither is particularly optimal for science.
Secondly, the highest temperature ever recorded outdoors was 56.7˚C. So no matter where you are, from that to 99 is wasted.
> Celsius isn't granular enough.
This argument would be reasonable if we didn't have to cut inches into 16 or 32 parts to approach decent granularity. At least we use decimal for cutting Celsius up...