CHAPTER 1. EXPERIENTIAL
1. With apologies to those of you who are southern hemisphere dwellers, from this point on I am going to discuss everything from a “northern hemisphere” point of view. Those of you in the south will simply have to invert the information to make it apply to you. I figure that you have been doing this forever, while those in the north have seldom had to consider this point. While living for a few months in New Zealand, I bought a map that had south at the top of the page. It was so disorienting that I had to keep turning it upside down to read it.
2. This is my guess at the number of generations that have passed since people emigrated out of Africa to populate the rest of the earth. There is a new generation about every twenty years, so over the past forty thousand years there have been about two thousand generations. Now that's a family reunion I'd love to attend!
CHAPTER 3. COMPONENTS
1. At a height of about a hundred kilometers (62 miles) above the earth, individual molecules will be kilometers apart. Each molecule has quite a bit of energy here, but very little is transferred from one molecule to another because they seldom meet.
2. Early French visitors mistook the lodgepole pine trees (Pinus contorta lati -folia) for Jack pine (Pinus banksiana), which looks quite similar. The common name for this tree in French is Cyprés, and the misnomer stuck.
3. Well, almost the coldest weather. During the winter of 1819–1820, William Parry was searching for the elusive Northwest Passage around the top of Canada. He spent more than ten months frozen in the ice off Melville Island, and the cold was so intense at times that the mercury in the expedition's thermometers froze solid.
4. Despite Canada's officially mandating the use of the metric system more than a generation ago, certain measurements have never changed. Amount of rainfall is reported by climate stations in millimeters, but the general public knows the amounts only in inches. Similarly, the general public has never converted people's heights and weights, or oven temperatures, to metric.
5. Materials with high thermal admittances will readily allow heat to move into the material so the surface temperature doesn't change much as a result. Materials with low thermal admittance will not allow heat to move easily into and through them, so the energy collects at the surface and causes the surface temperature to rise. Surfaces with high thermal admittance will have only small temperature differences between day and night, while those with low values can have large diurnal temperature differences.
CHAPTER 4. MODIFICATION
1. There is no general agreement on the various scales of climate and the prefixes that describe them. It would be convenient if the scales related to the metric system, so I have devised a system that goes with the rule of ten. In this system, microclimates are all sizes up to 100 meters (328 feet) in dimension; mosoclimates are from 100 meters to 1,000 meters (328 feet to 3,281 feet), or 0.1 kilometer to 1 kilometer (.06 mile to 0.6 mile); misoclimates are from 1 kilometer to 10 kilometers (0.6 mile to 6.2 miles); mesoclimates are from 10 kilometers to 100 kilometers (6.2 miles to 62 miles); and macroclimates are larger than 100 kilometers.
2. There are many winter days in southern Ontario where it is very possible to sit outside and have a meal if the space has been microclimatically designed. When high-pressure systems prevail and the temperature is below freezing, there is often clear sky, allowing a high intensity of solar radiation, and light winds that can easily be reduced further by strategically placed windbreaks. Design of surface materials, colors, orientation, and so forth can create a wonderfully comfortable outdoor space for a few hours even in the midst of winter.