zlacker

>>PaulHo+(OP)
It's an interesting article but I have to say that I've come out of it without any clear answer other than "the gulf stream would give a few degrees difference at max"

>>tetris+vc
The article explained that there are two roughly equal drivers: (1) Water is a better heat reserve than land, and winds tend to blow eastwards, so Europe gets air warmed by the sea and the US east coat gets colder air that's come from the land. (2) The joint effect of the altitude of the Rockies and the angular rotation of the earth mean that air currents are southeast over the Rockies and then northeast, so arctic air gets pulled down and then pushed back up over the US east coast.

>>datast+vk
Or in short: Western Europe's climate is what you would expect from a place close to an ocean. Especially when by Europe you mean the island that's Great Britain. It's the US East coast that's weird, with a climate that's a lot more continental than you would naively expect.

>>wongar+BH
When looking only at 3 continental coasts, 2 West coasts and one East coast, the East one is just weird seems like it is missing the point just stated.

>>patien+AP
It is worth noting that even for a West coast Europe is very maritime because in addition to the Atlantic it has the North Sea and Baltic kind of in the middle of it, and the Mediterranian to its South. And because people (including this article) like to take either Spain (sitting on a peninsular) or Great Britain (an island) as points of reference. And the (upper half of the) US East coast is very continental even for an East Coast, because of the effects of the Rockies mentioned in the article.

But overall the point the article tries to make is that people like to say that Europe is unusually mild when really people just compare it to the wrong places (with the US East coast being a popular and uniquely bad comparison du to the reasons summarized by GP).