The United States, including all its territories, The Bahamas, the Cayman Islands and Liberia are the only places still officially using the Fahrenheit temperature scale. For everywhere else, adopting the Metric System for measuring weather along with everything else was accomplished during the last century. America's failure to go metric can be blamed, at least in part, on our Congress, which in the 1970s made the conversion a voluntary process instead of making it law.

The need for engineers to convert between the two systems costs time and money and, occasionally, creates expensive mistakes. If Americans were using the Celsius temperature scale, they would find it equally accurate and slightly more useful. Each degree change in Celsius is 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, which is a more noticeable change. A single degree change in Fahrenheit is just too small to be noticeable. If we had made the change 40 years ago, we would all be used to the metric system by now, and happier for it.