Shivers
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Over the next few months in much of North America, people will voluntarily change their behavior in an annual response to one simple aspect of weather - the cold.

Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow and today on The Weather Notebook, we look at an involuntary response to cold weather - shivering, and how it is the body's way of saying to the conscious brain "listen, if your not going to keep me warm then I'm just going to have to do something myself."

Our bodies generate heat in response to different things. Exercise, stress, anxiety, even a big dinner. But these methods of heat generation can't necessarily be called on when needed. So the most common response people have to cold weather is to keep themselves in an energy friendly environment in the first place, like inside some warm clothing, or a nice cozy cabin, or on the beach in Florida. But - being the mobile and active creatures that we are, there are times when we find ourselves out of doors, out of fuel, and running out of energy. So then, we shiver.

Shivering is the body's last ditch attempt to generate heat internally, before hypothermia sets in. But unfortunately, people aren't that good at shivering, compared to other members of the animal kingdom. Some birds for example, are better shiverers then we are...in fact they spend much of the winter shivering, in their main defense against the cold. So we humans are only armed with our common sense, most of the time, to know that when we start to shiver, it's time to come in out of the cold.

The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory, where we do our best to avoid shivering. Our show is underwritten be Subaru, the beauty of all wheel drive with major support provided by the National Science Foundation.