Seasonal Rant

[talon]

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2009/12/21/shortest-day-science-winter-solstice/

Once again, "science reporting" gets it wrong.

If you divide the year into 2 seasons, Winter and Summer, the seasons change at the Equinoxes (March and September) with the Solstices being the midpoint of each season. The hottest and coldest times happen after the seasonal midpoint.

If you divide the year up into 4 seasons (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter), the seasons begin on the cross quarter days: February 1st, May 1st, August 1st, and November 1st, with the Solstices and Equinoxes being the midpoints of each season. Each season is about 12 ½ weeks long (I could give you the exact length, but then you wouldn't have the fun of looking it up for yourself).

This holds true whether we're talking Northern Hemisphere or Southern Hemisphere. All that changes is the season, not the timing.

The reason the winter Solstice is called "midwinter" is becaues - duh! - it's the middle of winter! Get that, pseudo-scientists who write those erroneous articles? Middle as in "half-way through", not start. Otherwise, we'd be staging our midwinter plays and games and songs on February 1st instead of preparing for spring (or fall, if you're in the Southern Hemisphere).

Ditto for Midsummer. Midsummer is June 22nd, when Shakespeare set his famous play, "A Midsummer's Night" because, for England, the date was in the middle of summer (not winter, as it would be for Australia).

I think the blame lies in the fact that we don't seriously celebrate the start of the seasons as we once did when we were predominantly agragrian people. That and journalists have become inherently lazy people. The middles of the seasons have become conflated with the "start" of them because they are easier to pinpoint for the layperson. Days and nights of equal length and the longest day and longest night are easy to identify. Laziness, sheer, appalling laziness.

But we no longer celebrate Candlemas/Brigid's Day, St Lucia's Festival/Start of Spring on February 1st or 2nd any more. We do still have Groundhog's Day, which should be a clear indication that Spring is starting and winter is ending, but those pseudo-scientists who write the seasonal articles haven't picked up on that clue yet.

May 1st is the start of summer. We even have songs about it - "Summer's A-Coming In" is a traditional May Day song. Shakespeare most famously commemorated Midsummer, no need to go over that again.

The start of fall is Lammas/Lughnasad/First Harvest/Start of Fall on August 1st when the first loaves of bread from the new harvest are baked and the hard work of summer is winding to an end.

And winter starts on November 1st, when the final harvests are laid in and people slaughter the culls and the animals they can't feed over the winter.

The Quarter and Cross-Quarter Days are an agricultural calender related to the astronomical calender: Spring, Spring Equinox, Summer, Midsummer, Fall, Fall Equinox, Winter, Midwinter and back to Spring. The Quarter Days go right through the middle of each season, when that season is at its height. The Cross-Quarter Days hit just as the season changes. This makes the Cross-Quarter days the beginning of each season.

The temperature outside really has very little to do with it, weather is much more complicated than axial tilt.

Meteorologists are not the correct scientists to approach for a confirmation of the time of the season - astronomers are.

Sure, the coldest weather has yet to come for my part of the world. That will happen in January and February and possibly early March. Technically, then our "winter" doesn't start until New Year's Day and is mostly over by Valentine's Day. We get 6 weeks of miserably cold, sometimes icy or even snowy, weather, and then we're right back into the fluctuations of spring or fall, and our summer weather hits about mid-April and rides us until mid-October, giving us a "summer" that lasts about 9 months, with a brief spring and fall between. Other places have differing lengths of weathery seasons.

We can't rely on the weather to tell us when the seasons are.

We depend on the sun and the Earth's axial tilt to define the seasons regardless of the temperature and whether we wear bikins or parkas.

So, we're celebrating MIDwinter today, not the "beginning" of winter.