How to Survive Winter

The weekend just gone was clear and cold over most of Ireland, and we saw our first frost on Monday 7th of November. There were a few areas reporting frost on the 6th as well, so take your pick. That’s quite late, as first frost dates go; we’ve normally seen a few frosty mornings by early November, and it’s not impossible to have frost in late September, although I haven’t seen it for years.

The weather has returned to unseasonal warmth now, and that looks set to continue for about a week. There are indications of a colder period to follow then, although as ever, anything more than three days out should be treated as speculation.

I’m sitting here watching pelting rain and gusts of wind that send the trees outside near horizontal, and that’s in a sheltered mews in Dublin city. This particular event – a very tightly packed front moving over – can be said to really mark the end of the autumn, and the beginning of the winter, because the temperatures in the wake of the front are as much as 10°C lower than in front of it.

My guess of the 16th for the first frost date didn’t come off, but it does look like it may happen as early as the 19th, when there are temperatures down to about 4°C forecast. So if you have tomatoes or other frost-sensitive plants out, and they don’t get blown over, this might be a good time to bring them in.

EDIT: Snow has been confirmed on Mt. Errigal in Donegal, and in the Glenshane Pass in Derry in the last couple of hours.

I have a number of milestones that I mark off on a mental calendar as winter comes in. First morning I can see my breath, first frost, first mist on the canal, and the first time I’m glad of the heat on the train. This morning was the first one where it was too cold to have my phone in hand all the way to the train, so I had to give up on Twitter and switch over to podcasts instead. I think it was about 9°C, but with a fresh breeze that added a fair bit of wind chill.

So it’s soon going to be time to root out the scarf and gloves. I know where my scarf is – and it’s probably the first one to survive more than two winters without going missing – but I’m not at all sure where the gloves are. I’m enough of a mobile internet addict to be considering looking for a pair of gloves with a removable tip on the index finger, but I think I can resist. Besides, I use my thumb and long finger as much or more, so I’d need three removable tips.

Hats, as I think I mention every year, are essential, but I know exactly where my hat is, and it’s already had a few outings on the colder mornings. And I spotted a place on Talbot Street a few days ago which is selling ice grips; if they’re not horribly expensive, I might look to get a set of those – the worst of my travel difficulties last year were from having to walk on ice, rather than anything else.

Over on the Fire and Light page, I recommend wood fires. A recent visitor to this site asked if wood burning is not bad for the environment, and I went to do some research on it. The answer is essentially that wood burning is not environmentally unfriendly, although there are some aspects of it you should consider.

Burning wood releases the carbon that is “stored” or “sequestered” in the timber. This contributes to the presence of CO₂ in the atmosphere, which was originally “drawn down” by the growing tree. However, this carbon would have been released in the near future in any case, as the tree dies, rots, and decays in the normal manner, and it’s drawn down again by new trees growing where the old one was.

Because of that, it’s important to make sure that your wood for burning is coming from businesses that support sustainable forestry, which plant trees to replace the ones that are cut. Generally, this is a sensible use of land in the first place, so it’s not hard to find. Firewood is also often a side product of wood cut for lumber, and it makes sense to make use of it for fuel.

Something to watch out for is the amount of smoke. While wood does not give off as much smoke as coal, it can contribute in a small way to urban smog. On foggy or still days, wood smoke may hang in the air. Otherwise, it produces far less smoke, and less acidic smoke, than coal or other “smoky” fuels.

So: wood burning is environmentally sound, as long as it’s from sustainable forestry.

I’m currently reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Fifty Degrees Below, which is about climate change and economic and political responses, and is a sequel to Forty Signs of Rain. There’s a section of the book about the concept of getting ready for winter that I’m – obviously – interested in, and I’m going to quote some of it here.

Clothing and shelter. At work, Frank could see that civilized people did not really think about these things, they took them for granted. Most wore clothing suited to ‘room temperature’ all the year around, thus sweltering in summer and shivering in winter anytime they stepped out of their rooms – which however they rarely did. So they thought they were temperature tough-guys, but really they were just indoors all the time. They used their buildings as clothing, in effect, and heated or cooled these spaces to imitate what clothing did, no matter how crazy this was in energy terms. But they did it without thinking of it like that, without making that calculation.

That concept fascinates me, as does much of the rest of that character’s approach to life. Buildings as clothing! And they’re inefficient clothing too, unsuited to seasonal adjustments unless they’re built in very old-fashioned ways, with thick stone or earth walls, or of wood. No layers, no hats and gloves, in effect.