Australia’s southern states are scorching in extreme heat that could break temperature records in Victoria and South Australia on Tuesday.
At Ouyen and Mildura in north-west Victoria, temperatures of 49C were forecast for Tuesday afternoon. If reached, they would break the state’s all-time temperature record of 48.8C, set in Hopetoun on Black Saturday in 2009. By 1pm, temperatures of 46.2C in Ouyen and 44.8C in Mildura had been recorded.
At Ouyen and Mildura in north-west Victoria, temperatures of 49C were forecast for Tuesday afternoon. If reached, they would break the state’s all-time temperature record of 48.8C, set in Hopetoun on Black Saturday in 2009. By 1pm, temperatures of 46.2C in Ouyen and 44.8C in Mildura had been recorded.
In Adelaide, the mercury hit 40C before 9.30am on Tuesday, after overnight lows of 35C, BoM observations showed.
Extreme heat is the most common cause of weather-related hospitalisations in Australia, and kills more people than all other natural hazards combined. What does exposure to extreme heat – such as a temperature of 49C – do to the body?
No one “forgets” temperatures dude, 17°C might be meaningless to you but to me it’s just shirt and light jacket weather. Nobody forgets what the body temperature in Celsius is. It’s two digits, your brain can do it.
Fahrenheit simply puts the human at the center where physical phenomena like water freezing and boiling happen at “random” points on its scale, while Celsius takes two simple, constant (as long as you’re not on a mountain), verifiable points based on physics, where the temperature of a human body falls on a “random” place on it.
The point is very simple: if you have an unlabeled thermometer and need to calibrate it, you stick it in freezing water, mark 0, stick it in boiling water, mark 100, divide into equal segments, and it will be exactly right. If you want to do the same for Fahrenheit, you need another reference thermometer. (Unless you happen to have the same unspecified mixture of water, ice, and ammonium chloride that Fahrenheit supposedly originally used to mark the 0 point)
I appreciate the elegance of your field calibration, but it will not be “exactly right.” The boiling point of water is readable repeatable but sensitive to altitude and the contents of the water. Freezing is also sensitive to salt and mineral content, but even more basically: where’s this “freezing water” you can stick your thermometer into, that’s reliably == 0 degrees? Ice keeps getting colder, and melted water can be any temperature above 0.
Good in theory, but even if field calibration were a real need, it’s not very exact. And anyway, if you can work all that out, you can do it for F or C. Since no one will every forget 212 and 32, as you point out.
A substance undergoing phase change will hold its temperature until the change is complete. That means that once water starts freezing, it will be 0°C until it is all ice. Same goes for ice thawing. Yes only pure H2O will freeze at exactly 0°, but unless you deliberately put some shit in it it will be very, very, very close. Boiling is a bit more sensitive, but still a lot less than the natural variance between body temperatures in normal conditions.
You’re taking the procedure literally, but it was just to get a point across. Also, using the freezing and water boiling points of water was used to define Fahrenheit too for most of the 20th century.
Well, that last point suggests that you don’t need the Celsius scale to use water’s phase changes as a reference / definition. Which undermines your entire case for Celsius being superior because it’s based on that.
All I’m saying is that F has some human usability merit in that the scale just happens to corresponds nicely to a human quality. Since any scale can use physical qualities as a definition, why shouldn’t we use one that’s more human-centric.
From my side, it doesn’t because what the fuck is 40 f? I have no clue. The human merit you’re referring to is all due to what you have been taught