Are we in the right season?

ParkRunner

Forgive me if this is a bit abstract but I had a thought when I was not fully awake and it bugged me for a while.

Basically it takes Earth approximately 365.25 days to orbit the sun and we have a leap year every 4 years to compensate for the .25. Just say we got this calculation wrong by a half hour..it's not exactly 365.25 days to orbit the sun anyway but it is a nice round figure. That would mean over the last 2,000 years we would be about 42 days out from where we should be. Correct me if Im wrong, I never was great at maths.

But it does seem odd that you can still walk around in a t-shirt and jacket at the beginning of November, bar the cold snap there a week ago and winter usually doesn't truely hit us until the end of January/early February most years.

It's probably not a good place to talk about summer because it reality that could be condensed down to a 2 week period in this country, but it generally feels just as warm if not warmer to me in September than it does in May. Any thoughts?

Mr Benevolent

From Wikipedia:

The vernal equinox year is about 365.242374 days long (and increasing), whereas the average year length of the Gregorian calendar is 365.2425. The marginal difference of 0.000125 days means that in around 8,000 years, the calendar will be about one day behind where it is now.

I like the idea, but there isn't much of a chance of the calender slipping by a couple of months!

squonk

No, and as we are able to calculate the equinox and the summer and winter solstice, it'd be very easy to figure out of there was something out of wack if the shortest day of the year was happening in November or October!!