Do we have the capacity, as we live through climatological change to pick out a ‘season’ and characterise its preferential advantages? Scientists have to ensure, when they talk about a thing, that in order to measure how it changes exposed to possible change agents, it is precisely the same ‘thing’ measured each time. Hence Liz Bentley, the chief executive of the Royal Meteorological Society (RMS) in the UK, shows that it is necessary for her organisation to have a standard measure of a seasons based on unchanging criteria, that of the Julian calendar. She explained to a BBC interviewer that, ‘for meteorological reasons , “spring is March, April, May; summer is June, July, August; autumn is September, October, November; winter is December, January, February”. But, of course, few of us use such strict criteria for they differ between regions across the globe and sometimes between the subjective assessment of each individual within a reason. Of course there are also stereotypes of seasons based on expectations, they are the staple often of literary representations and combine within them various ideological symbols and metaphors of birth, dead, aging and resurrection, based on a supposed generalised cyclical measure of time. Liz Bentley says of the seasons her science uses that: “We keep it to whole months because it allows us to collate data and to compare one season to the next and to look at the climatology of the season.”
As I have suggested, if you ask a person to name a season they favour, they will rely at best on a generalised memory of various episodes of the season, say spring, to say why they favour it. At worst, they will invoke a stereotype, however beautifully conceived, as in Chaucer’s April in the introduction to The Canterbury Tales’, but in time even the stereotype in subjective memory can change and T.S. Eliot saw April as ‘the cruellest month’ because it ‘mixed memory and desire’ in ways that hurt the voice that speaks in his The Waste Land.
Ali Smith tried to counter this in her wonderful quartet of novels, each built on specific seasons (see, for instance my blog on her novel Summer at this link). Even the function in individual memory of seasons is changing in literature, though possibly more slowly than the real seasons. Lix Bentley and the RMS argue that: “The basic climatology of each of the seasons is changing, has changed, and will continue to change.”
In fairness then any season we proffer will be our memory of a season. Even discussing what a season is suggests that, because the criteria of assigning them to fixed months in one version of the calendar is not how people think, for instance, when people say, ‘we have barely had a winter this year’ or ‘we don’t get summers like we used to’. Of course such episodic memories have their own internal psychological functions but in part we know use the statements to register a sense of climatological change that is setting upon traditional or conventional ideas of the seasons.The BBC online article I cited, of course, reminds us that seasons have different measures and cites these of these, after saying:
First of all, what actually is a season? You may think that’s pretty obvious – summer is warm and around July, and winter is cold and around December, right?
Well, you’re not exactly wrong, but there are in fact multiple ways to define the seasons.
The following are then listed:
- Meterological seasons. These are those already described above by Liz Bentley. As we have seen it has ‘ixed points and strict start and finishing times, but then so do the second type:
- ‘Astronomical seasons are based on the equinoxes and the solstices. The summer and winter solstices are on or around 21 June and December respectively, and the spring and autumn equinoxes are on or around 21 March and September respectively. They mark the start of the astronomical seasons. And then finally in this list, which only deals with objective measures there are:
- Phenological seasons. The BBC article defines it thus: ‘Phenology is the reaction of plants and animals to weather and climate. So this could be when animals go in and out of hibernation, or when the leaves on trees start changing colour and falling off. The seasons are roughly measured by when certain groups of events happen within a certain time frame. The BBC article ends the list with the words of Lorienne Whittle, a citizen science officer at the Woodland Trust, who says:
… phenology allows for a more fluid definition of what the seasons are and what they mean to us: “Nature doesn’t really follow our calendar, it basically reacts to the weather, as we do as people… if we see it raining outside, we put a coat on.”
Nevertheless as the BBC finally concludes: ‘Whichever method you use, however, all of the historical data comparisons show the characteristics we use to define our seasons, whenever they may start, are noticeably changing’. There are climate-change deniers, although the reasons for denial are rarely based on nostalgia for what seemed an easier definition and verification of this definition to common sense as on the refusal to give up the wealth based on the supposedly more certain technologies and industries of fossil fuels. With this, I have not the scientific nous or will to argue. There is a consensus already on climatological season change in the published science but little or no heed is taken of it. Yet we should not need Greta Thunberg to remind us of this, but I am glad she keeps on doing so.
Of course as with the folk-saying: ‘One swallow doesn’t make a summer’ but the arrival of significant numbers is a signal of it in phenological terms. It is, Lorienne Whittle is quoted as saying, less reliable and speedy a sign than the plant and insect record which, not being migratory phenomena, respond first to local change. But swallows are a joy. I remember them diving around me in close proximity in a Tunisian part of the Sahara dessert one winter in the 1990s, as they chased after the insects attracted to my body heat but such memories hardly help me to favour winter, which I see in my version of folk memory as snowy. However, no doubt the signs of winter are different in the Sahara too, as it expands northwards, and snow is seen more in a literature that casts its mind back, as in John Banville’s detective thriller, Snow (see my blog at this link).
Even if I ask myself what ‘was’ my favourite season, I think my judgement coloured by literary memories, for ‘Spring’ is my first unconsidered answer, but I dare say that has as much to do with literature, folklore and mythology, as memory. After all memory is often primed by top-down mental images, not all based on direct physical seasonal phenomena. I do not like being over-cold and, as I age, I hate being over-hot more than cold. But these things don’t constitute a judgement on this question. I don’ like April Torrents of rain except as Turgenev’s novel April Torrents, or Chaucer’s ‘sweet showers’, which aren’t always ‘sweet’ except in slanted memory or ideology.
In the end are favourites of any moment in speaking of seasons? It is what it is, and, because seasons are changing faster than anyone thought possible, we need to shift human thinking from making sentimental choices to action on climate change. For soon it will be too late. Perhaps, it is already! But we need hope and after all:
With love
Steven xxxxxxxxxx
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