What pisses me off about this article is how it keeps talking about "degrees" and about Europe, but then you find out it's F degrees and not C degrees if you look at the graphs.
Please use SI units, but in any event, please place units next to numbers!
Did they just totally ignore units in the whole article? (Yes, they did). Anyway, in the comments author said it's in degrees Celsius, if anyone was wondering (as at that scale the difference is quite big).
Yeah, I hate this. The title (with the words "cold climate"), the numbers (below 20 degrees) and then talking about Finland (where degrees are definitely Centigrade) just creates too much cognitive dissonance.
If you're writing an article about temperatures, and you want to use Fahrenheit, please actually say so, otherwise you'll have all your readers from 90% of the world's population looking at you oddly.
I feel like if you went to a French article and it said "12 degrees" you would know to convert that to Fahrenheit, if you needed. And that's an even less common situation than second-language English speakers ending up on American articles.
@HN: If you use the word 'degrees' please add F or C to indicate which scale you are referring to. Many here are from the US and would interpret it as degrees Fahrenheit while many others read it as degrees Celsius.
> The Belgian town of Kleine Brogel hit 39.9C (102F), the hottest since 1833
OK...I'll be the pedantic nit-picker and bring this up: 39.9 C is 103.83 F. How the heck did they round that to 102 F? I can see 104F or 103F, but 102 F!?
Or maybe they got the report as 102 F and calculated C from that? No...that doesn't work either. 102 F is 38.889 C, so should have rounded to 38.9 C if they wanted one decimal place, not 39.9 C.
Also, might as well nit-pick this too...there is supposed to be a space between the number and the unit symbol according to the rules for SI units, except for °, ?, and ? when used to denote angles in degrees, minutes, and seconds, such as 14° 13? 41? [1].
I could see omitting the space if they included the circle, such as 39.9? and 102?, since the circle keeps the C or F from being unpleasantly close to the number.
The author lists the importance of a global temperature scale, then shows a map of North America overlaid with some dots.
> For many people that's Celsius, but for many others it's Fahrenheit.
That second 'many' is disingenuous. For about 90% of the planet's population it's Celsius, and for about 10% it's Fahrenheit.
Author also has some pretty arbitrary and bewildering requirements, including wanting a scale of 0 to 100, yet also avoiding any 3-digit numbers.
Any claims about 'intuition' are misguided -- Celsius makes more sense because a) most people use it, and b) it maps onto the rest of the SI units.
That I happen to feel comfortable at a somewhat arbitrary 21 (c) is not a sufficient or satisfactory reason for other people to let go of deprecated temperature scales.
> * Most of my use of degrees is either in cooking or weather. Having a larger scale means more accuracy, seeing as we don't use decimals in either.*
That's your choice though. Outside temperature cannot be measured precisely enough to warrant decimals (it's supposed to be 17.4°C outside but who can tell the difference with 17°C or 18°C...) but my car's A/C is set to 21.5°C and my home's heating is set to 19.5°C.
> -20 degrees Fahrenheit to 110 degrees Fahrenheit — a 130-degree range. On the Celsius scale, that range is from -28.8 degrees to 43.3 degrees — a 72.1-degree range
So, since in Celsius we (including the author) use a single decimal place we are comparing accuracy of 1 in 130 with 1 in 721! Maybe the author was a bit short on arguments.
It might be confusing global temperatures with European temperatures. The article it references doesn't say global for the 2C figure and probably means regional temps. The European 2C makes sense, and the global 0.5C matches other sources.
Was surprised the author didn’t bash Celsius degrees - because of their non-zero affine constant they don’t work in a system where units are supposed to multiply. (And so I would imagine they pose problems for Frink).
Ask any high school chemistry student struggling with PV=nRT. You stick Celsius degrees in there and you lose. And unlike other SI units, conversion requires an addition, not a multiplication.
Not really. Celsius maps to the boiling and freezing points of water in Paris. Live in Denver and you're screwed. And -- this is important -- nobody measures the freezing points and boiling points of water, because during its phase changes water holds to that temperature automatically.
Fahrenheit is also twice the resolution of Celsius. This is highly advantageoous for body temperature, medicine, cooking, and other functions. Celsius's integer resolution is horrible.
Please use SI units, but in any event, please place units next to numbers!
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