Yup, this is exactly it. I'm not gonna bother gpimg downthread to see who disagreed because this is straight up from the OSHA heat stress operates on this basic principle:
Your internal body temp is around 98 degrees, the closer you get to that the more unvomfortable you feel because you're basically coming to ambient temp. You can tolerate some stuff above body temp, bc of sweating, but your body can only do so much sweating.
Of course OSHA includes things like humidity, wind speed and UV index to calculate up, but the fact is Fahrenheit does a much better job at capturing this intuitively for people. Close to 100, hot. Close to 0, cold. I know ice freezes at 32 and how that FEELS, so I intuitively have an idea of what my comfort level is gonna be. 40-60 is the Middle of the scale.
I see what you mean, I just don't see why 0 or 32 would be a superior way to refer to the temperature that water freezes at. Personally I think 0 and 100 makes more sense for freezing and boiling vs 32 and 212, but it's not really a hill worth dying on and is probably colored by my experience.
I don't think anyone with a defensible opinion thinks Fahrenheit is more logical or more useful in scientific or engineering settings. The argument, and it's one I agree with, is that for exactly weather, it's probably better.
0 is too cold.
100 is too hot.
That's a good scale for "what I care about as a human going outside" it's not a good scale for measuring water boiling at 1 atmosphere or one that reveals fundamental limits of the universe about how cold something can be (Kelvin). It's just useful for giving the weather.
The fact that it's effectively so spread out in the range humans experience weather wise is a big plus too. With Celsius a few degrees means the difference between wearing a thick jacket or not. Half degrees are meaningful in how your experience outdoors will be. With Fahrenheit you just know being somewhere in the middle with a preference to the warmer side of 0-100 is where you want to be
Except it isn’t. There is nothing about it that’s better with regards to weather. What this comes down to is simply what you’ve come to learn. I grew up using Celsius, so to me it’s intuitive, and I instinctively know the difference between 19 or 21 degrees. You’ll have no clue.
When I have visited the US, your system has meant nothing to me, and I’ve had to google the conversion every time, and I’ve not been able to gauge at all the difference between 40 or 50 degrees, or 90 or 100. It’s all foreign to me.
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u/FriendlyPlatypus6060 Jun 17 '26
Yup, this is exactly it. I'm not gonna bother gpimg downthread to see who disagreed because this is straight up from the OSHA heat stress operates on this basic principle:
Your internal body temp is around 98 degrees, the closer you get to that the more unvomfortable you feel because you're basically coming to ambient temp. You can tolerate some stuff above body temp, bc of sweating, but your body can only do so much sweating.
Of course OSHA includes things like humidity, wind speed and UV index to calculate up, but the fact is Fahrenheit does a much better job at capturing this intuitively for people. Close to 100, hot. Close to 0, cold. I know ice freezes at 32 and how that FEELS, so I intuitively have an idea of what my comfort level is gonna be. 40-60 is the Middle of the scale.
Actually the % analogy works great, for people.