I know that in both Canada and the UK, where the use of the Celsius scale is now virtually universal (notwithstanding the anti-metric efforts of newspapers like the Daily Mail), people in casual conversation usually use only 'degrees', without identifying the scale. Even my 88 year old mother used to use, and understand, Celsius, without it having to be explained to her that they were Celsius degrees. On my travels through other countries, again, Celsius is a given, and only 'degrees' is mentioned, again in casual conversation. You will likely see 'C' in the written word. The use of 'degrees' only applied mostly to the weather and other household situations (do we pour the hot water into the coffee maker when it is still at 100 degrees or let it cool to 95?). It might be necessary to specify the scale in a technical or scientific context, such talking about how hot a soldering iron should be.
I think HAVING to specify which scale is used at all times is a problem unique to the US. And that suggests an idea to help with the US's conversion efforts. The near universal use of the Celsius scale by the population in general in both Canada and the US (and of course Australia etc) has been attributed to the difficulty in converting between the two scales. People, instead of converting, just decided it was easier to learn, and get used to, Celsius. Perhaps the US should concentrate on those lines. Incidentally, we've been enjoying some spring-like weather here in the UK, and at our local coffee shop yesterday where we meet some friends, everybody was talking about how warm it was - and all in Celsius, even though we are all retirees. Yet yesterday's Daily Mail (I glanced through the shop's customer reading copy while we were waiting for others to join us) just HAD to say that the predicted high for today was going to be "64f" [sic]. Sad - I really wonder why people buy that rag. John F-L ----- Original Message ----- From: John M. Steele To: U.S. Metric Association Sent: Friday, March 25, 2011 12:38 AM 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 <billhoope...@gmail.com> wrote: From: Bill Hooper <billhoope...@gmail.com> Subject: [USMA:50182] Does it matter if we specify Celsius? To: "U.S. Metric Association" <usma@colostate.edu> 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