Spring is in the air . . .

First, my apologies for not being a better blogger as of late. Though, I have to admit, since no one actually reads this blog, my apologies go to my blog itself and, I suppose, to me.

At any rate, I have a few things I want to talk about today. My last in class semester of school is finally finished. On this blog much of the grueling work that made up this said semester can be found.

Now on to the real matter at hand. Very little time can pass these days without hearing something about how fucked up our climate is. From the West Coast being pummeled with storm, after storm, after storm to the Colorado area seeing three back-to-back blizzards. And all a Torontonian has to do is merely step outside into the balmy 10-degree January weather to see that something is amiss.

All of this strikes me as being very odd, probably bad news and possibly cataclysmic, but the other day I saw something that made me feel that the situation is probably a lot worse than I realized.



Not the best photo, I admit, but let me just explain to you what is going on in this picture. That pale green and out of focus thing you see there springing from that tree branch is a baby leaf. And surrounding that baby leaf are hundreds of little buds all primed to join their early bird brother and spring to life months ahead of schedule.

Make no mistake this photo was not taken in April of last year, but just yesterday, January 5, 2007. Not only that but it was taken on Ward's Island in Toronto, an area that is always two to five degrees colder than the city.

I don't know what kind of implications this has for the coming spring, though I can guess that if we do get another cold snap (if you remember we did have about four days of minus 15-degree weather in early December, accompanied by about a centimeter of snow), these young buds/leaves will surely die, leaving fewer leaves to cleanse our already putrid summer air.