this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2026
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Celsius makes most sense in places that experience proper winter.
Is it above 0? Then the snow is melting. Is it below 0? Then the melted snow has turned into slippery ice. Have fun!
I actually really like Fahrenheit for proper winter. You've got the freezing temperature, sure, but that's it's own notable point that exists without a special number. But on those especially cold days, you get to say that it's below 0, and that means something for Fahrenheit.
Anybody who's lived anywhere that has a proper winter knows that it isn't as simple as below freezing = ice and above freezing = water.
Well yeah but you know that yesterday it was +3 and some snow melted, and froze overnight when it was -5. That tells you it's going to be slippery in the morning
On a scale of 0 to 100.
Celsius is water Fahrenheit is people
The Fahrenheit scale has only one point of reference for people and that is not 100.
Fahrenheit (the scientist) determined 0° at the coldest stable temperature he could achieve with a mixture of water, ice and ammonium chloride, then set the mean healthy body temperature (as it was known at that time, modern measuring equipment is more precise) at 96° and then as a third reference set 32° as the freezing point of water.
The reference points were later changed to 32° for water freezing and 180° higher at 212° for water boiling due to Anders Celsius work and influence.
Everything about this looks just random and devoid of any logic. Celsius for his scale referenced the temperatures at which water changes state and Kelvin uses the Celsius scale but sets 0 at the point of literally no energy. Behind both is an idea easily to grasp.
You literally just described the non-random logic.
They're talking about using Fahrenheit in a day to day capacity like for the weather, not as a scientifically rigorous definition. 0°F is very cold and 100°F is very hot. If you treat it as almost a percentage of how "very hot" it is then it can be a pretty good indicator.
Don't get me wrong if I had to choose between all of metric and all of imperial then I'd ditch Fahrenheit in a heartbeat, but it's not often in my day to day life that I think I'd ever use any temperature outside of (approximately) -15°C and 35°C. Therefore Fahrenheit in that specific regard offers more granularity and a nice 0-100 type of temperature scale for the temperatures I'd see on a day to day basis.
On a day-to-day base it's really just about what you're being used to. Who cares about granularity in weather forecast? You get out of the shadow and it's too hot for a jacket.
Also, weather is not the only daily use of tenperature, look at cooking and baking where younhave much higher temperatures and always go beyond 100°F.
In terms of distance and weight I feel that both systems offer equally arbitrary (to daily use) units. There's no fairly universal thing most everyone would experience in terms of either weight or distance that could be usefully measured on a similar 0-100 scale.
People working more industrial jobs are probably going to be more frequently dealing with things that weigh a significant amount than people working office types of jobs so no standard would satisfy both groups. The closest I can really think of is the weight of an average person, but that's variable based on region, has changed significantly over a short amount of time, and is very rarely ever a weight that most anyone would need to deal with, therefore wouldn't be very useful or relatable to most people.
Distances offer the same problem, since there's no singular distance that the majority of people are going to experience by which we could base a scale on.
That being said, I feel that weather is a fairly universal experience for everyone and a scale that fits all of the most frequently used values (for the weather) in the 0-100 range is quite nice.
I'm fully aware that the weather isn't the only use of temperature in a day to day context, however it's not often that I need to know how hot the inside of an oven feels. Therefore how far exactly it lies beyond the 0-100 very cold to very hot spectrum that Fahrenheit offers doesn't really matter.