“As a European, I am deeply offended by this article.” — lit comments section 😉

The bashing of Fahrenheit is readily found everywhere, while the usability concerns of Celsius are not discussed because it is a part of the sacred metric system. The metric system is great, but Celsius does not need to be a part of it. All arguments against Fahrenheit end up in the defense of the metric system. What if we could constructively criticize the Celsius scale without promoting the imperial system or attack the metric system and offer a solution?

Removing Celsius from the metric system

For this discussion, let’s separate Celsius from the metric system. Poof—it’s gone. You know why? Not all base units in the metric system interconnect with each other. Especially a temperature scale like Celsius. It’s considered miscellaneous. An entity in itself. When you reach 10°, 100°, 1,000° centigrade, nothing happens. Nobody adds kilo to their Celsius. So it’s really part of the family because they assigned some value to 0° and 100° and called it a day. They didn’t exactly crowd source this idea. And now we use it daily to describe the temperature in our environments and in our bodies.

Your precious 0°—100°C is arbitrary too

Fahrenheit gets a lot of flack for not pinpointing when water boils and freezes. You know what we don’t often do as humans, pop a thermometer in frozen or boiling water. We can see what’s going on with that water. We don’t need a temperature gauge on our ice trays to get ice. We don’t set our stove tops to 100°C (this would only work at sea level), we just turn it on high to get water to boil. Peak water temperatures shouldn’t dictate our life on land.

Yes, the invention of Fahrenheit’s 0° came from a bat-shit crazy unreproducible combination of salt, water, and ice. And 100°F is close to an average body temperature but a bit off. We know that’s not a great start for us, but hear us out. As Fahrenheit users, we’ve bench marked that negative temperatures are not fun, single digits are survivable but cold, double digits have a lot of range, and triple digits are hot. We know when it’s 32°F (0°C) it might snow, but it’s just not that cold—making it negative so early on in the scale seems a bit hasty for what our environment can offer. Imagine being a Canadian who has to keep referring to your habitable condition as a negative number. It doesn’t have to be that way. A good scale should reserve negative / approaching 0° conditions toward the numbing edge of their scale. We will always look up at what degree water boils because who cares, if it’s 212°F (100°C) outside we would all be dead. If we stepped into a 212°F pool, we’d be dead. And if our internal body temperature reached 212°F, we’d be dead. So really, who’s 0° — 100° is arbitrary?

Peak water temperatures shouldn’t dictate our life on land.

A problem of scale

Imagine turning up your radio one notch and having the volume increase 50 decibels—NPR ASMR to full death metal. It’s jarring. Similarly, Celsius as a scale, has decided to measure a huge range of temperatures inside it’s famous book ends. Freezing point to boiling point of water—these are not habitable human temperatures and a makes a jump in one degree a large environmental change.

That’s why Celsius uses decimal points

We get it, we know you default to decimal points when your scale needs to be finely tuned. But your scale should strive to avoid using them. It’s actually a great indicator that your scale isn’t suiting your situation because humans think in round numbers. Using decimal points is like having two volume dials. One increases 50 decibels at a time, and the other increases by 10. And imagine if more than half of the dial produced lethal sounds.