Once the USA finally gets rid of Fahrenheit we will be able to do this.
Interesting that the weather on TV always says degrees without qualifying them (they are always Fahrenheit). Carleton From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of John M. Steele Sent: Thursday, March 24, 2011 20:39 To: U.S. Metric Association Subject: [USMA:50184] Re: Does it matter if we specify Celsius? It depends. Generally, in the US, I would say no because both Celsius and Fahrenheit are used. In a country where ONLY Celsisus is used, and NOBODY would use Fahrenheit, I can see sloppy usage being OK. Maybe in Canada it would be OK; in the UK, they use Fahrenheit in the summer (???). Also in certain rigidly formatted reports, it may be OK. In aviation weather, a report known as METAR gives temperature and dewpoint separated by a slash (/), no units are included, but the report format requires °C, even in the US. --- On Thu, 3/24/11, Bill Hooper <[email protected]> wrote: From: Bill Hooper <[email protected]> Subject: [USMA:50182] Does it matter if we specify Celsius? To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]> Date: Thursday, March 24, 2011, 8:19 PM Recently, one of our correspondents (it doesn't matter who) wrote about temperatures and referred to values just in "degrees" without specifying Celsius or Fahrenheit. (See excerpt below.) I know most of us on this list are sufficiently aware of Celsius temperature values to know that he must have been referring to Celsius degrees. My question is two-fold and I only have a "one-fold" answer (for myself). (1) Is it proper, in general, to omit the qualifier "Celsius" when referring to temperature in Celsius degrees? (2) Is it proper to omit "Celsius", when conversing with those who are thoroughly familiar with Celsius temperatures, so that there would be no danger whatsoever that the reader would mistakenly think the temperatures were Fahrenheit? I think the answer to #1 should be "no", although I can imagine arguments to the contrary. I don't know what I think about #2. Is criticism of the omission of "Celsius" in this situation considered unnecessarily picky? Or is the use of "degrees" alone without specifying "Celsius" so wrong technically that it should be avoided even when there is no danger of misunderstanding? (I admit that the problem disappears if we use symbols, " ˚C " vs. " ˚F ", but there are always situations where writing things out is preferable.) Regards, Bill Hooper Fernandina Beach, Florida, USA ========================== Make It Simple; Make It Metric! ========================== On Mar 23 , a correspondents wrote: In the summer, though, you can have the following temperature gradients from the beach in San Francisco: 15 degrees at the beach, 20 degrees downtown, 25 degrees across the bay in Berkeley, 30 degrees east of the hills in Concord and Walnut Creek, and 35-38 degrees in Sacramento, over a distance of only about 120 km. As you can imagine this causes some REALLY fierce winds
