[CAT] Shakespeare, sitting

[PHOTO] Last Christmas trees at the lot, Dupont and Dufferin, Toronto

The Christmas tree lot on the southwest corner of Dupont and Dufferin, on the furthest corner of the Galleria Mall's parking lot, has been a presence as long as I've lived here. This is the scene there as it was this morning, just past 9 in the morning.

[BLOG] Some Saturday links

• Crooked Timber shares a John Quiggin blog post, originally from 2004, in which he considers the static nature of popular culture.


• The Dragon's Tales reports on a study of the rotating Luhman 16 brown dwarfs.


• The Dragon's Tales examines the archeology of the Mayans and of Amazonia.


• Far Outliers looks at the rise and fall of Baku as a capital of world oil.


• Language Log notes at the misogyny implicit in the construction of some Chinese characters.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money looks at this climate change Christmas.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer considers the new official names for various exoplanets.


• Transit Toronto notes the three-year anniversary of an online TTC simulator.


• The Volokh Conspiracy considers political ignorance on left and right.


• Window on Eurasia suggests Chechnya is nearly independent already and looks at non-productive Russian reactions to the ongoing collapse in the number of speakers of the Russian language.

[LINK] "The War on Jewish Christmas must be stopped"

Daniel Drezner's Washington Post opinion piece of the 24th of December touches on an interesting issue. The homogeneity with which North Americans of Christian background have celebrated this key holiday is no more.

[B]efore I wish you all a happy and healthy holiday season, I’d like to close the year with a plea to stop the War on Jewish Christmas.

Let me explain, As the short documentary film right below this paragraph demonstrates, many Jews have a very specific set of rituals when it comes to Christmas:

Chinese food and a movie. Perfectly pleasant rituals, made special by the fact that the Gentiles are all at home or at church. After a month or two of listening to Christmas music blasted everywhere, after weeks of avoiding malls and shopping centers because of frenzied Christmas shopping, finally the Jews can emerge and just enjoy a simple ethnic meal and a movie with the other minorities that make help make this country great.

No longer.

I don’t know when it became a thing for Christian families to also go see a movie on the day commemorating the birth of Jesus, but personal experience tells me this is a relatively recent phenomenon — i.e., the past 15 years or so. All I know is that what used to be a pleasant movie-going experience is now extremely crowded.

[LINK] "Warm December weather confuses even the flowers"

Kay Lazar and Astead W. Herndon's Boston Globe article looking at how ridiculously warm weather has caused plants to flower early, with possible long-term negative consequences, was worrying. What happens when a cold snap hits?

Fairy-pink roses unfold in summer-like splendor — right next to light poles wrapped in Christmas greens on Beacon Hill.

Cherry trees, bees humming around, bloom in the Public Garden — on the first days of winter.

And geraniums, sweet alyssum, and all sorts of summer flowers thrive in planters around Boston and beyond.

The unseasonably warm weather — the high on Christmas Eve is forecast to be 65 to 70 degrees — has many living things confused.

“The leaves are starting to appear on my viburnum” bush, said Marilyn Donati, who is worrying about the flowering shrub that typically blooms in the spring in her Hamilton yard. “My daylilies, the greens are starting to grow.”

[LINK] "Santa's Home Is Melting. Will We Ever Bring It Back?"

National Geographic's Tim Folger considers whether geoengineering could bring the Arctic icecap back.

Vast and white, easily visible from space, Earth’s Arctic ice cap seems such a permanent fixture—a frozen country at the top of the world—that the idea that it could ever vanish almost defies comprehension. But by the middle of the century most of it will in fact vanish, thanks to our burning of fossil fuels. The North Pole and most of the ocean around it will be free of sea ice in summer for the first time in thousands of years.

Will we ever bring the ice back?

That’s the question a team of researchers from Columbia University pondered in a presentation last week at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. It’s not as academic as it sounds. Most climate models suggest that our efforts to limit carbon dioxide emissions—starting with the steps agreed to in Paris on December 12—will not be enough to keep Earth from warming more than 2 degrees Celsius. To prevent even worse impacts than the loss of Arctic ice, by late in this century we’ll have to not only shut down emissions, but find a way to clean up massive amounts of carbon dioxide that we’ve already put in the atmosphere.

That technology, once developed, would give us the ability to cool the planet—which would put the future of the Arctic in play again. “The basic message,” says oceanographer Stephanie Pfirman of Columbia, “is that we will be able to bring the ice back as long as we bring the [planet’s] temperature down.”

[LINK] "Russia warming '2.5 times quicker' than global average: report"

Al Jazeera notes that Russia is experiencing far more rapid global warming than th rest of the world.

Russia is warming more than twice as fast as the average for the rest of the world, the country's environment ministry said Friday, sounding an alarm on the rise in floods and wildfires nationwide.

A government report on environmental protection said temperatures in Russia had warmed by 0.42 degrees Celsius per decade since 1976, or 2.5 times quicker than the global warming trend of 0.17 degrees.

"Climate change leads to growth of dangerous meteorological phenomena," the ministry said in a comment to the report published Friday.

There were 569 such phenomena in Russia in 2014, "the most since monitoring began," the ministry said, specifically mentioning last year's ravaging floods and this year's "water deficit" east of Lake Baikal, which led to a "catastrophic rise in fires."

Fires around Lake Baikal, including the nearby Irkutsk and Buryatia regions, tore through hundreds of square miles in the pristine area, with locals and campers forced to dig ditches as state media at one point offered the theory that fires were fueled by "self-igniting air" caused by ozone anomalies.

Climate change has contributed to unprecedented loss of water in the Baikal itself, dropping to minimal water levels allowed by the government several times this year, including this week.

[LINK] "Record-breaking warm weather stuns parts of Canada on Christmas"

Global News reports on the remarkable warmth across Canada yesterday.

Record-breaking weather has been welcoming the holidays in parts of Canada and the United States.

On Dec. 23 records dating back to the 1940s were broken in some Ontario communities. That trend largely continued the day before Christmas, with some areas within reach of 20C (that’s on the plus side, just to be clear.)

In Toronto it was the warmest Christmas Eve on record, breaking the old record of 12.2C in 1964, even warmer than sunny Los Angeles.

Areas of the Atlantic provinces and Quebec also reached balmy double-digits.

“This December and holiday season have been extraordinarily mild and snow-free,” reads a special weather statement from Environment Canada regarding southern Ontario’s oddly warm weather.

[URBAN NOTE] "The Old Cabbagetown Tree Lot"

In a great Torontoist photo essay, written by Edward Brown and with photos by Harry Choi, the site takes a look at a remarkable institution, the community Christmas tree lot at Spruce and Parliament.

In 1952 Louis St. Laurent was PM, Toronto got its first television station, Leafs games aired on Hockey Night in Canada for the first time and Gerry McDermott, an ambitious 20-year-old apprentice electrician, began selling Christmas trees at the corner of Spruce and Parliament Streets.

St. Laurent died and the Gardens became a grocery store but McDermott’s unadorned tree lot continues selling Fraser firs on the same Cabbagetown street corner, a neighbourhood institution for over 60 years.

A year into renting sidewalk space from the Power supermarket at 449 Parliament St. Gerry’s younger brother Dale and their father Elmer joined Gerry in his fledging venture. Responsibilities were assigned. Gerry and Dale preferred the operational side of business, growing, pruning and harvesting trees. Elmer tried his hand at sales. To Gerry’s delight his father, blessed with the gift of gab, was a natural salesman.

Elmer returned to the tree lot every December until 1996 when he died at the age of 91.

In the early days the McDermott lot sold a wide selection of trees including spruce, Scotch pine and juniper grown on the family’s 6,000 acre tree nursery north of Bracebridge. Early success led to additional lots around Toronto, in North York and Mississauga. Eventually the acreage was sold and all but one of the lots shuttered. The last remaining lot in Cabbagetown sells only Fraser firs harvested from a nursery north of Barrie.

[PHOTO] On the unnatural warmth and light of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, Toronto

I figured out yesterday what was particularly unsettling about the warmth of this Christmas season, late Christmas Eve afternoon. It was a matter of the quality of the light outside.











Canada is a higher-latitude country, entirely comparable latitude-wise to many other countries--northern Europe comes to mind. I've certainly been out on winter days just past the solstice before, I have certainly seen the light on those days, I've even taken photographs on those days. I have never before seen that kind of light against a verdant background: Toronto is quite comparable latitude-wise to nice, but Ontario in December never compared to Provence at the same time. At least, not before this year. At worst, it looked and felt like April outside.

The same was true on Christmas Day.









This all has been unsettling. What else can I say? It feels almost as if someone has switched out Canada and the world, perhaps transplanted us to a distant exoplanet with a different environment. Perhaps we're closer to our sun; perhaps we have less of an axial tilt; perhaps the atmosphere is different. My country just feels, and looks, terribly different from the way I know it should look, and I worry.

[FORUM] What do you think about the bizarrely warm Christmas weather?

Earlier this evening, I shared some photos from the bizarrely warm weather we've been having. Whether it's freakish or the new normal, it's the reality I've been experiencing. I don't think I like it: It reminds me that we humans have broken our planet.

What do you think? Discuss.