this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] exocortex@discuss.tchncs.de 78 points 14 hours ago (9 children)

I find that so crazy. I'm German and for us Italy is always the sunny south where it gets much too hot for us. The USA iseems more like us climate-wise. I'd always thought New York would be a little like Berlin. Crazy to see how far south most of the US actually is.

[–] F04118F@feddit.nl 79 points 14 hours ago (3 children)
[–] SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 25 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Also the Mediterranean acts like a huge heat buffer. It basically stops the polar winds from reaching southern Europe.

[–] myserverisdown@lemmy.world 5 points 5 hours ago

In addition to there being a huge mountain range in the way. The Alps block/slow down a lot of the cold air currents that do make their way down from the polar regions. That's why cities like Turin and Milan still have cold climates in the north. Cold air still makes it's way over the Alps but is slowed and is reheated as it travels south so cities like Genoa/Florence/Rome are much milder in the winter.

[–] KurtVonnegut@mander.xyz 23 points 13 hours ago

A large part of it is also simply the fact that at the midlatitudes westerlies dominate, which means that western Europe receives mild air from the ocean, while the US east cost receives more extreme weather from the continent.

[–] tomiant@piefed.social 7 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

That one is getting phased out though.

[–] F04118F@feddit.nl 5 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

Yeah I've been getting deprecation warnings about that every time I start ./the-beach It still has a runtime dependency on AMOC

[–] pirateKaiser@sh.itjust.works 27 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

The crazy bit is how far north Europe is, relative to the climate we get. Almost everywhere else this far north is freezing

[–] Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca 9 points 5 hours ago

Imagine the chaos in Europe if the ocean currents fail to bring warm temps up from the tropics and the UK, Germany, etc all start to get weather similar to mid-northern Canada which even Canadians try their best to avoid.

[–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 16 points 11 hours ago (3 children)

The US is fucking huge. A lot of our weather up north is closer to yours, but we've got deserts, rainforests, Florida is just outside of the tropics, etc. There's a huge variety of climates here. The US is larger than all of Europe, by quite a margin. East to west it's wider than Lisbon, Spain to Moscow, Russia. North to South it's pretty much identical to Europe. (Technically Europe is slightly larger with the Scandinavian countries sticking out pretty far north.)

[–] foo@feddit.uk 10 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Lisbon is in Portugal btw. (But that doesn't change the distances.)

[–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 5 points 8 hours ago

Shit, you're right. Too much EU5 playing as Castile, and then Spain, capturing Portugal.

[–] Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 8 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

The US is fucking huge...The US is larger than all of Europe, by quite a margin

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It is hilarious to imagine if this were real. Like what would European explorers and Settlers have done if they started mapping it out and went "wait a minute..."

[–] explodicle@sh.itjust.works 5 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Looks like a huge improvement

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[–] BakerBagel@midwest.social 6 points 8 hours ago

I like to point out that New York to LA os essentially the same distance as Moscow to Lisbon, while Seattle to Miami os about the same as London to Baghdad. That's why St. Louis was the furthest west MLB team until the 50's. The logistics for US sports are insane

[–] nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

The weather in New England and upper New York is very much like German weather, and sometimes worse. We’ve had snow on the grounds since the 30th of November and it’s only barely reached 0C in the last week.

It was -15C a couple nights ago at roughly the latitude of Rome, next to the ocean too. And only about 50km northwest (inland) it went down to -25C.

This has been a colder December than average for the last decade, but we have mountains that regularly get meters of snow each winter, and they are way lower elevation than the alps too. Also as we all know the last decade has been stoopid warm.

Mt Washington has measured the highest wind speed in the world.

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[–] arin@lemmy.world 50 points 14 hours ago (3 children)

Ocean currents do a lot more to even out the weather

[–] yopyop@sh.itjust.works 29 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

Yeah thank you to the gulf stream. Too bad that global warming will make it disappear ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[–] KurtVonnegut@mander.xyz 15 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

Also wind patterns. At the midlatitudes westerlies dominate. So the east coast has a continental climate (receives cold air in the winters, hot air in the summers) while the west coast does not (the oceans make the summers and winters mild)

You'll see that the west coast cities on the same latitudes of their European counterparts have a very similar climate (as opposed to east coast cities, which have a very different climate than their latitude-counterpart).

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[–] friend_of_satan@lemmy.world 38 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

This is also a really great illustration of colorblindness. I actually didn't even see Italy until I read the comment about the boot.

[–] Ricaz@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 9 hours ago

Thanks, didn't realize until I read this lol

[–] AI_toothbrush@lemmy.zip 28 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

Comparing similar latitudes in north america to where i live in sweden is a wild experience. The average temperatures are double, sometines almost triple, during summer.

[–] fonix232@fedia.io 8 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

On which scale? Because that kinda matters.

Celsius? Kinda hot but not necessarily deadly.

Kelvin? You've turned your city into an air fryer.

[–] FishFace@piefed.social 15 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

They live in Sweden so Celsius

[–] foo@feddit.uk 12 points 9 hours ago (3 children)

It's still an odd way to compare temperatures:

  • Double of 1 degree is 2 degrees, so not very different.
  • Double of 30 degrees is 60 degrees, so wildly different.
  • Double of -20 degrees is -40 degrees, so a lot colder instead of warmer.
[–] ProfessorPeregrine@reddthat.com 5 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

This is an example I use when I teach data types. It happens because the scale (F or C) is an "interval" scale. Its zero is not based on the absence of the property it is measuring, so you can't apply a multiplicative transform to it like, "double".

It is like lining up by height, calling the shortest person the standard and measure height of everyone else from that. So, the next tallest might be 2 cm, the next 4cm. But clearly the person we are calling 4cm is not twice the height of the person we called 2 cm.

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[–] AI_toothbrush@lemmy.zip 3 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

I mean thats completely valid criticism but it had a lot of shock value still.

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[–] fonix232@fedia.io 4 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

You'd think so, but without specifying the scale... it could be anything. ANYTHING!

[–] Ricaz@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 9 hours ago

Probably bananas though, according to my middleschool math teacher

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[–] BakerBagel@midwest.social 5 points 8 hours ago

Which way? Because it gets incredibly hot in the Canadian prairie. There is no body of water to regulate temperature so the summers can get serious heat waves while the winter is absolutely frigid. Granted, Edmonton is still considerably further south than Stockholm.

[–] InvalidName2@lemmy.zip 27 points 8 hours ago (3 children)

Everybody's wrapped up in the climate / weather discussion, but the thing that surprised me a bit more was the difference in sunset / sunrise.

I was working on an international team (i.e. a bunch of Americans + one dude from France).

Back in those ancient times, video calls with everybody's face included weren't necessarily the standard, and even when we did them, everyone was typically in an office environment.

Anyway, one late afternoon (for us in the USA) we did a team video call and our French counterpart was sitting outdoors in his back yard and it was still light outside. Although we knew it was 10 p.m. where he lived, it looked closer to the amount of sunlight we'd typically see around 7 or maybe 8 p.m. here in mid-latitude US.

It was kind of interesting, because even in the height of summer at the very highest elevations, it's going to be very dark here at 10 p.m.

[–] BigDiction@lemmy.world 5 points 6 hours ago

Location in the time zone is also a factor. France is near the far west of CEST.

For example Michigan is in the far west of EST. The sun rises 30-40 minutes later than in New York, and you do get light at 10pm in the height of summer.

[–] Grabthar@lemmy.world 4 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Cameras are pretty good at taking in light and giving a false representation of how you'd experience it if you were actually there. You see it at televised sporting events where it looks like twilight but they have to tell the viewers at home that it's full dark there. I'd imagine at 10pm, his web cam was just doing a much better job seeing than a human eye could.

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[–] BanMe@lemmy.world 4 points 5 hours ago

This was a cool thing about living in Seattle and any further north - in the summer it'd be dusk until 10pm. And the in the winter the sun would basically never appear. I guess it was less "cool" and more "insanity producing" but locals were used to it.

[–] mech@feddit.org 22 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

All the immigrants from Southern Italy coming to New York:
"It's the same latitude, it'll be just like home!"

[–] BakerBagel@midwest.social 22 points 8 hours ago

That actually really fucked up the first French attempts to settle the St. Lawrence river. They knew it was a similar latitude as Paris so they were completely unprepared for their first winter in Quebec City.

[–] call_me_xale@lemmy.zip 22 points 14 hours ago (4 children)

Why... why is Philadelphia spelled with an "F"?

[–] bryndos@fedia.io 11 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Virginia Occidentale has a nice ring to it. It''d fuck up John Denver too.

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[–] hansolo@lemmy.today 9 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

It's translated into French it looks like.

Did you not notice "Virginia Occidental"?

[–] kungen@feddit.nu 6 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

It's Spanish, no? Philadelphia in French is Philadelphie.

[–] renzhexiangjiao@piefed.blahaj.zone 12 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

my guess is Italian, in Spanish it would have been "occidental"

[–] Martj9@piefed.social 9 points 13 hours ago

It is italian

[–] tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 4 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

They translated "west", but not "new".

[–] Martj9@piefed.social 4 points 10 hours ago

In Italian we said Nuova York until, let's say, the sixties. Virginia Occidentale is quite uncommon too, I have to say. It's more common simply West Virginia.

People used to translate more than today

[–] Denjin@feddit.uk 4 points 13 hours ago

The meme maker was threatened with a cease and decist order by Kraft-Heinz.

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[–] captainlezbian@lemmy.world 8 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

For context this puts Rome about north enough to get snow hurricanes were it on the American east coast

[–] Quill7513@slrpnk.net 7 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

oh, does Italy not usually get snowstorms with cyclone structures

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[–] s@piefed.world 6 points 10 hours ago

I thought the boot was supposed to go below the mitten

[–] Hope@lemmy.world 4 points 13 hours ago

The west coast city I live in is just a little further north than Philadelphia and has a very Mediterranean climate so this puts that into perspective for me.

[–] dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works 4 points 7 hours ago

This freaks me out.

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