Dark Thoughts

More like Minecraft's TerraFirmaCraft but standalone.
Anyway...
It's not really that hard to be honest.
1. Farm enough food. Especially turnips are fast and easy to grow early on. From farming flax (which you want tons of) you should also get a bunch of grain as emergency food. If it gets too cold, wait for the crops to die before you rip them out - this gives you a guaranteed seed back (I don't know why they did it this way).
2. Pay attention to your farms nutrient levels. Each crop needs a different type, so make sure to rotate your crops around to have soil nutrients replenish over time.
3. Rooms! Make sure you have a valid cellar room! It caps the temperature at +5 degrees, slowing down spoilage times significantly.
4. More rooms! By winter you also want to make sure that your main rooms in your base are valid rooms. This gives a temperature bonus while protecting you from the cold). If you do not stay in valid rooms, it will count as outside and severely increase your hunger rate!
5. Speaking of hunger rate. Don't hold off-hand items if you don't need them. They increase your hunger rate by 20%. Same for heavy types of armor of course.
6. Turn your hides into pelts, especially huge ones, to make fur clothing and maybe even the new bear armor for extra heat protection.
7. Don't bother with wasting valuable fat on crocks or preserving crocks & food early on in general - this is a common noob trap. Raw veggies will last a long time in a storage vessel in a valid cellar - especially during winter. You really just need crocks for your prepared meals (I usually cook up 2x pots for 6 crocks in rotation).
8. If all things fail, you can always hunt. And hunt cleverly! A pit to trap animals in will make it much easier for them not to get to you or anywhere else, while you can throw spears at them. People survived even the polar regions that way.
9. Absolute worst case, move south and enjoy the warmer temperatures.

You don't need a converter, just learn some very basic ranges.
0 = freezing temperature of water, 10 is pretty cold, 20 is mild spring like temperature and roughly your average indoor & t-shirt temperature and 30+ is very hot summer / heat wave type of temps. Everything below 0 just gets more and more frozen wastelandy and is kinda irrelevant as far as the game goes anyway.