A Bit More Detail

• Smaller Ontario cities far from the GTA, like Kingston and London, are starting to see rising prices spilling over from the GTA real estate boom. The Toronto Star reports.


• Montréal is starting to see a strong rise in real estate prices, thanks to political stability, a strong economy. international interest, and limited supply. Global News reports.


• Guardian Cities notes that, with temperatures of 50 degrees Celsius likely to come about in many world cities as climate change progresses, many cities will become dangerous to inhabit.


• Looking for reasons for the high death toll in the recent Québec heat wave, Malcolm Araos at The Conversation suggests that people living isolated, by themselves without strong connections, are most at risk.


• At The Conversation, Caroline Shenaz Hossein and Semhar Asres explore the central role played by immigrant businesses in overcoming issues of unemployment and marginalization.

Residents of Rocky Point, a sleepy fishing village on Jamaica’s south coast, woke up one July morning this year to flooded streets and yards. The sea had washed some 200 metres inland, flooding drains and leaving knee-deep water on the streets and inside people’s home, a result of high tides and windy conditions.

“I’ve been here for 43 years and I have never seen it like this,” Sydney Thomas told the Jamaica Observer newspaper.

Over at the Hellshire Fishing Beach, a community several miles outside the capital city Kingston, fishermen watched as their beach disappeared over a matter of weeks. The sea now lapped at the sides of buildings. Boats that once sat on the sand were bobbing in the surf along the edge of what remained of the white sand beach.

An the far end of the Hunts Bay basin, the inner-city community of Seaview Gardens sat at the edge of the mangrove swamp. For decades, residents there lived with overflowing sewage systems, the result of a backflow that is caused when seawater enters outflow pipes, flooding the network and pushing waste water back into homes and into the streets.

Flooding in coastal communities around Jamaica is nothing new but in recent years, what used to be unusual has become a frequent occurrence.

The Atlantic Ocean has masked global warming this century by soaking up vast amounts of heat from the atmosphere in a shift likely to reverse from around 2030 and spur fast temperature rises, scientists said.

The theory is the latest explanation for a slowdown in the pace of warming at the Earth's surface since about 1998 that has puzzled experts because it conflicts with rising greenhouse gas emissions, especially from emerging economies led by China.

"We're pointing to the Atlantic as the driver of the hiatus," Ka-Kit Tung, of the University of Washington in Seattle and a co-author of Thursday's study in the journal Science, told Reuters.

The study said an Atlantic current carrying water north from the tropics sped up this century and sucked more warm surface waters down to 1,500 metres (5,000 feet), part of a natural shift for the ocean that typically lasts about three decades.

It said a return to a warmer period, releasing more heat stored in the ocean, was likely to start around 2030. When it does, "another episode of accelerated global warming should ensue", the authors wrote.

• BlogTO's Ed Conroy rights about the golden age of video stores in Toronto. (Apparently Toronto was the first city to have a video store, the Video Station on Eglinton Avenue, in 1977.)


• Eastern Approaches describes how the European Union is building up a viable relationship with Moldova. Is the possibility of Moldova being tracked for EU membership that far off?


• Far Outliers' Joel quotes from J.H. Elliott's Imperial Spain, noting how a devastating plague at the end of the 17th century not only created severe labour shortages but depressed the Spanish mood. The great dream of empire was falling apart.


• Geocurrents discusses the climate of Australia.


• GNXP's Razib Khan is among the many people who noted the genetic research tracing the ancestry of the Romani to northwestern India's lower castes and their arrival in Europe to a point a thousand years before present.


• Normblog's Norman Geras links to a review of a recent book on the devastating Great Leap Forward and its famine in early Communist China, making the point that although Mao may have driven the policies that created the catastrophe everyone around him collaborated in trying to minimize the disaster.


• Steve Munro describes a public meeting of GTA transit authority Metrolinx. He's unsatisfied with the extent to which policy changes were discussed, as opposed to past achievements.


• Supernova Condensate discusses, with pictures, the unusual wind patterns of Saturn.


• Torontoist noted the 1992 visit of Salman Rushdie to a PEN gathering in Toronto.


• Window on Eurasia's Paul Goble discusses the disaffection of many Tatar Christians in Tatarstan in being classed as ethnically Tatar, and the ways in which this complicates state-center relationships.

Eos, Vol. 89, No. 52, 23 December 2008

Dry Climate Disconnected the Laurentian Great Lakes

Recent studies have produced a new understanding of the hydrological history of North America’s Great Lakes, showing that water levels fell several meters below lake basin outlets during an early postglacial dry climate in the Holocene (younger than 10,000 radiocarbon years, or about 11,500 calibrated or calendar years before present (B.P.)). Water levels in the Huron basin, for example, fell more than 20 meters below the basin overflow outlet between about 7900 and 7500 radiocarbon (about 8770–8290 calibrated) years B.P. Outlet rivers, including the Niagara River, presently falling 99 meters from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario (and hence Niagara Falls), ran dry This newly recognized phase of low lake levels in a dry climate provides a case study for evaluating the sensitivity of the Great Lakes to current and future climate change.

[. . .]

Lakes without overflow, such as these lowstands in the GLB, can only be explained by a dry climate in which water lost through evaporation exceeded water gained from direct precipitation and catchment runoff. The dry regional climate that forced the lakes into hydrologic closure must have been substantially drier than the present climate. Hydrologic modeling of the present lakes shows that current mean annual precipitation would have to decrease by about 25% in the Superior basin and by about 42% in the Ontario basin, in conjunction with a 5ºC mean temperature increase, to achieve lake closure [Croley and Lewis, 2006]. Paleoclimate simulations and reconstructions using pollen [Bartlein et al., 1998] and stable isotopes [Edwards et al., 1996] indicate that climate in the GLB (Figure 2c) was drier than present at 7900 radiocarbon (8770 calibrated) years B.P. Termination of the lowstand episode about 7500 radiocarbon (8300 calibrated) years B.P. coincides with the onset of a wetter climate as atmospheric circulation adjusted to the rapidly diminishing ice sheet [Dean et al., 2002] and moist air mass incursions from the Gulf of Mexico became more frequent.

The discovery that the Great Lakes entered a low-level phase without having connecting rivers during the early Holocene dry period demonstrates the sensitivity of the lakes to climate change. The closed lakes of this phase occurred when the Great Lakes entered their present nonglacial state. Thus, the closed lakes afford a valuable example of past, high-amplitude, climate-driven hydrologic variation upon which an improved assessment of lake-level sensitivity in response to future climates can be based.