[URBAN NOTE] It will snow anyway

Toronto's Christmas might have been practically snowless despite my expectations, but it has more than made up for it lately with cold weather alerts and record snowfalls.

After two abnormally temperate winters, Jack Frost has returned to Toronto with his pockets full of snow – near-record amounts, to be precise.

Wednesday and yesterday's accumulated snow dump of 33 centimetres pushed this winter's total accumulation to 128 centimetres – 13 centimetres above Toronto's average snowfall for an entire winter.

But while this winter has been snowier than most, the actual amount that remains in town is closer to 50 centimetres because above-seasonal temperatures in January melted 78 centimetres that had accumulated from earlier dumps.

"Our climate tends to fluctuate, especially around the freezing mark. You can see a good snowfall and then five days later it's raining and five degrees. Then the snow disappears," says Geoff Coulson, Toronto-based meteorologist with Environment Canada.

With 128 centimetres this winter, the city has received roughly the same amount of snow since November as it did the previous two winters combined.

Even as I type, snowflakes are drifting quietly but insistently down.

Toronto is definitely on the wrong side of the Solar System's snowline.

[URBAN NOTE] One more Scientology post

Sunday's anti-Scientology protest got no small amount of attention. Not only did local blogospheric giants blogTO ("Toronto's Got a Hard-on for L Ron at Protest Against the Church of Scientology") and Torontoist ("Scientology's Legion of Doom") carry pieces, but CBC's national English-language Sunday evening news carried video of the protest and its roots about four or five pieces in.

One piece of information that surprised me was the information at the end of the piece that, according to a 2001 Statistics Canada report, only 1525 people claimed to practice Scientology in 2001, 875 men and 650 women. (Insert snarky note on the male-biased demographics of readers of science fiction here.) I'm not entirely unsurprised by this, since I've seen the same people administering stress tests on Yonge Street for the past few years, but this leaves open an interesting question: How does the Church of Scientology in Canada get enough funding to finance a multistory headquarters in the center of downtown Toronto?

[DM] "The demographics of bad politics"

I've a post up at Demography Matters exploring the interaction between certain brands of conservatism and apocalyptic fantasies about Europe, particularly of the family-hostile continent's demographic collapse and he flipside of Eurabia. Comments, here or there, are most welcome.

(Yes, I expanded upon this post.)