Board Thread:Wiki Discussion/@comment-27104094-20171125215702/@comment-31763506-20171228175643

Climate is complicated.

Yes, the Gulf Stream makes coastal Europe warmer and wetter (in addition to making all the water on those Florida beaches nice and warm, drawing in the retirees and tourists), but St. Petersburg has the disadvantage of being close to a whole lot of the interior of Russia, and big stretches of land without nearby oceans make the climate more extreme. Hence places in the US like the Dakotas and Minnesota get lots more snow than the coasts on the same latitude. Cold water currents, like the ones off California and Chile make places cooler and drier.