For a long time, I had wondered why the climates of San Francisco, Sacramento, and Los Angeles are so different from those respectively of Richmond, DC, and Atlanta. I had read a few articles on Wikipedia on occasion, so I got a sense that it has to do in part with different ocean currents; this made sense to me, as I had become very comfortable (growing up in the DC area) with the warm waters at beaches along the East Coast in the summer, and I was always surprised by the comparatively much colder waters at beaches along the West Coast whenever I'd visit California even in the summer. I knew though that this wasn't the whole story, and I was surprised to see, for example, that even in South America, South Africa, Western Europe versus East Asia, and Australia, there were very similar contrasts in climates between cities along west versus east coasts in the middle latitudes. This made me more curious about the reasons for these similarities, so I recently went down a rabbit hole of Wikipedia articles to learn more and form an intuition about why different places have different kinds of climates. Follow the jump to see my explanation. I am not a trained climatologist or meteorologist; I can't guarantee that this information is accurate, and I can only say that my intuitions seem through my limited understanding to align with superficial aspects of more detailed explanations. I'm just putting this out there in case this intuition is helpful to anyone else as a starting point to learn more (and I recognize that an incorrect initial intuition could hurt rather than help when trying to learn more).