Frost factor is all about degrees of relativity

We’ve suffered a cold, bitter week around these parts. Ice is forming. Frost is spreading. Fingers are turning blue.

And that’s inside our house. In a desperate attempt to avoid another $400 Avista bill, we have been keeping the thermostat at 66 or 67.

Some of you will scoff at this wimpiness. We have friends who keep their thermostats at 64 or 65. In fairness, I must point out that they have wood-burning stoves chugging away like small locomotives.

Yet my point is this: Temperature is overrated. Degrees are a matter of degree. Celsius, like size, doesn’t matter.

As a case in point, I just returned from a walk over the High Drive bluff, during which the temperature was 19 degrees. I became so hot trudging up the hill that I took off my jacket. Didn’t matter. I was still sweating.

On the other hand, I am now sitting in my cozy, warm, 67-degree den and I am shivering uncontrollably and crying for my blankie. I fully expect hypothermic hallucinations to kick in shortly.

To sum up: When I was outside at 19 degrees, I was sweating like a pig, if only pigs actually had sweat glands. Now I am inside at 67, freezing my garbanzos off, if only people actually had these kinds of legumes.

Golly, Mr. Weather Wizard, that’s interesting. Could you please tell us why this is so?

Why, sure, Timmy, I’d be happy to.

At least three elements are nearly as important as temperature. The first is exertion, which is why you can get all sweaty even when the temperature hits single digits. Non-outdoors people don’t understand this, which is why you can always spot the novices on a cross-country ski trail. They’re the ones wearing coats.

The experienced skiers are all wearing little fleece vests and maybe, in extreme conditions, a sweater. Real racers don’t even wear those. They wear spandex, like your average super-hero.

The second factor is sun. If the sun is shining at 20 degrees, you’ll feel warmer than if it’s foggy and at 45 degrees. Never have I seen this proven more decisively than last winter when we went cross-country skiing near Glacier National Park at 20-below-zero. OK, I admit, it was a little nippy. For instance, I dared not heed a call of nature, for fear of suffering from a painful medical condition called exposure, or to be more precise, indecent exposure.

Yet the sun was blazing brightly that day. We could feel its warmth even through that bitter Arctic air. It probably had something to do with “radiant heat” and “convection,” but Mr. Weather Wizard doesn’t have the time, or the intelligence, to explain it right now.

The third factor is wind. Everybody knows that wind actually makes you feel colder, especially since the discovery of the wind-chill factor in the mid-1970s, for which weatherman Al Roker won the Nobel Prize for Physics.

So all three of these factors go a long way toward explaining how I spent the entire day Sunday at the Langlauf Cross-Country Ski Race on Mount Spokane, with temperatures in the 20s, and never once got cold. The sun was out, the air was calm and my heart was pounding due to numerous inconvenient uphills.

It also explains why the coldest I have ever been in my life was at a Wyoming high school football game, at night, with a brisk breeze, with a temperature in the mid-40s. This also involved a fourth factor: aluminum bleachers. People can turn to ice from sitting on them.

That reminds me, there’s also a fifth factor: aluminum boats. Every other time I have been the coldest-I-have-ever-been- in-my-life, it has involved steelhead fishing, an activity which involves both aluminum boats and a sixth crucial factor, lots of water.

So, by now I hope you get the idea. Temperature is relative. This explains why, even at 67 degrees, a person can have hypothermic hallucinations in which he believes he is (1) Mr. Weather Wizard, and (2) a person whose Avista bill will be under $400.