POLL: About two-thirds would opt for a mild winter, given a choice

"Everybody talks about the weather," quipped Mark Twain, "but nobody does anything about it."

Around this time of year, more or less, there is much discussion of what kind of winter we should expect, which can become a discussion of what kind of winter we might want. 

Over the last week or two, we had fun asking readers: imagining for a moment that you had Zeus-like powers to command the elements, would you choose:

• A warmer than average winter, without much snow, or strong outdoor ice, or
• A cold winter with lots of snow, but which is sometimes uncomfortably cold?

Here's how that looked:

Women preferred a mild winter, by a small margin:

Readers under 50 preferred Classic Winter(tm) though, again, not by a large margin:

One question I asked the data: What about geography? Winter can mean quite different things in northern and southern Ontario, in the Soo and in Sarnia, after all. If there's something there, though, I'm not seeing it.

Another way to work with geographical data is simply to look at longitude. As a reminder, here's what that looks like:

Here's how it transferred to the data:

To my surprise, there was only a modest relationship to whether people were worried about the cost of winter heating:

And nothing I can take to the bank related to whether there are under-18s in the household: