Jerry is now on my banned senders list

"simon" wrote

You're entitled to your opinion Simon, but here in the north you'll find very few people who believe that Thatcher did much to help ordinary working people.

As far as I'm concerned the only thing she did to improve prosperity here in Hull was to abandon the National Dock Labour Scheme. Hull Docks benefited no end, but many many jobs were lost in the process.

I don't recall very many miners having much love for the woman either and I suspect that the privatisation of our nationalised industries and utilities have done little for the long term prosperity of the nation.

John.

I have to agree 100% with those sentiments John. She certainly savaged my life and that of a huge number of men aged over 50 at that time.

Still, the brown Jock charleton has cost me some 7500=80 each year since devaluation simply in exchange losses. As a pensioner that is not amusing and I just hope that I live to see him and others like him burn in hell!

Peter A

You too John. I recon the ordinary working people did really well out of her administration. She wouldnt have allowed the waste of money to Brussels - look at our rebate. She wouldnt have allowed the health and safety farce. She wouldnt have allowed the bloating of public services wastage. She wouldnt have sold the gold reserves for peanuts ....

The miners - now theres our favourite. When a fair appraisal is written then it will be the man that got most out of it that will take the blame - clue, he wasnt on the government, our (rest of the country) side, or indeed on the side of the mineworkers of this county (leicestershire).

Cheers, Simon

How about comment from Met office person that this will be the warmest winter in living memory. They take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average. As this was an unusually warm November all the readings this winter come from that month. Theres an interesting use of statistics to back up a wanted result.

Cheers, Simon

It's not his fault. If you want to blame anybody, blame the financial=20 "industry". The GBP has been overvalued for decades. I first noticed=20 this back in the 1970s, when I was paying $2.40 CAD per GBP, and was=20 getting about $1 CAD in purchasing power. The GBP's exchange value was=20 high because it was a "repository of value", an international currency=20 (along with the US dollar and Swiss frank.) People bought pounds because =

it was considered a "safe" currency. That's good for the financiers, but =

bad for everybody else. It meant that UK goods were overpriced, but=20 imports were cheap, and that means that the real economy is too=20 expensive to operate. That's the main reason the UK economy had to be=20 "restructured" during Thatcher's tenure. That she chose to hurt the=20 working people more than the ruling classes is no surprise.

The biggest mistake made by the UK was to stick with the pound. That=20 benefitted the UK banks (for a while), but hurt everybody else. Some of=20 that damage is both long-lasting and cumulative. When a country's=20 foreign income comes mostly from dealing in money, the real economy=20 slowly but steadily stagnates. When too much of the GDP is made up of=20 financial returns, there will be a crash - as the recent mess in the USA =

demonstrated. This is all Econ 101, BTW, there's nothing magical about it= =2E

I have a nest egg in the UK (inherited from my mother) in a fund. As the =

GBP has fallen, the value of that nest egg in CAD has dropped. But a=20 large chunk of it is invested in off-shore securities, the return on=20 which has increased as measured in pounds: the foreign currency buys=20 more pounds, you see. So the fund is yielding greater GBP returns. The=20 net effect is that I'm neither gaining nor losing much on this=20 investment: the reduction in value is more or less offset by the=20 increased returns. If the GBP rises to its former glory, this situation=20 will reverse.

Can politicians do anything about this? Maybe. Would it improve life as=20 we know it? Yes and no. We'd just exchange one mess for another. That=20 would be good for some, worse for others, and pretty much the same for=20 most of us. Just a different flavour, is all.

cheers, wolf k.

Yes. There's a reasonably good calculation showing that sea levels will rise at a rate of around 1m or more per century at the current rate of warming, other estimates are significantly higher.

At the lower estimate, by the end of this century Amsterdam will be a small island, Den Haag and Rotterdam will be underwater, New Romney will be gone, you'll need a bridge to Great Yarmouth.

Now here's a remarkable thing: a systematic literature review of peer-reviewed scientific articles on climate science found precisely

0% dissenting from the view that CO2 levels are rising and causing rises in global temperature. A simultaneous review of articles in the popular press found over 50% that were sceptical of this. The energy lobby has invested vast sums in promoting every single tiny piece of disagreement between scientists in an attempt to undermine what is, in reality, a pretty much unanimous consensus. There are differences around the details, but: "With the release of the revised statement by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists in 2007, no remaining scientific body of national or international standing is known to reject the basic findings of human influence on recent climate change." Guy

Climate change requires very large scale alterations - plus there were no humans 600,000 years ago. Guy

That's the difference between weather and climate, and the difference between local and global. If global warming goes one way, the gulf stream may stop flowing, which would reduce average temperatures here by around 5 deg. C. The "mini ice age" in Europe was caused by the meltwater from the Great Lakes region flowing into the Atlantic and changing the warm currents. Guy

Don't you know about marginal versus safe seats? Guy

No it isnt. In the nicest possible way I would like to point out that what you posted has very little in common with what I posted to the point of being a non-sequitor.

Cheers, Simon

SNIP....

It sounds a straight forward fact and therefore it is right. However, everyone in print has been wrong before. But perhaps more importantly I bet there was a few that said 'probably' in their papers. Then there would be wildly differing views on by how much CO2 is increasing and what effect this has had. Theres also a few that have said other factors must be taken into account but we dont know what is contributing what.

Then again, my biggest complaint is what we are doing about it in the country. Think it could be best described as pissing money into the wind.

Cheers, Simon

Believe a safe seat is most likely to give a predicted result and the other could go either way.

Cheers, Simon

What that means in practice is that the government is effectively elected by a very small proportion of the constituencies, and of course an extremely small proportion of swing voters in those constituencies.

That's why governments, including Thatcher's, fiddle with the boundaries. Park Street is in the Watford constituency, providing much-needed Tory support there, rather than the then-safe Tory seat of St Albans. It is 20 minutes' walk from the St Albans city boundary and half an hour or more by car to Watford.

And the idea of basing pretty much the entire economy on financial services is not looking quite such a good idea right now, to my eyes (virtually all my company's customers are banks, luckily we are better at judging risk than they are). Guy

Alternatively, perhaps people who don't want to believe it and don't want to take action, are burying their head sin the sand.

I can think of two other issues on which the scientific community has been as unanimous against such spirited opposition - the early days of the tobacco industry's defence against the cancer link and the idea of creationism being taught alongside evolution in schools.

Evolution is a good parallel. The scientific community reached pretty close to unanimous agreement decades ago, but the conservatives in the US still lead the way in "teaching the controversy" as if it is a matter of serious scientific dispute.

Not one single body of any national or international standing disputes the fundamentals of climate change. That is a very rare thing.

We're doing better than you might think. We have pretty good average fuel consumption in our cars, and the trend is the right way; we have a lot of trial schemes for mode shifting to light rail and so on; more people are cycling; we are reducing industrial and domestic energy consumption (we do a lot of work as a nation on energy efficiency in our datacentres, for example); we are slowly getting away from allowing the nuclear industry decide whether we should invest in renewables, as happened in the 70s. Think global, act local as they say. But the biggest polluter by far - by head and in total - is the USA.

Perhaps the most important thing we can do is to show them you can have a decent lifestyle (and speak English) without trying to burn the entire output of the Texas oilfields by the end of the year. Guy

Let's not get to assigning motives where there might simply be a misunderstanding of emphasis.

The cold weather this month is in no way incompatible with the average temperature over the year being part of a rising trend, and the mechanism for measuring what is warm vs. what is cold should not be changed to suit the fact that one month is unusually cold - that would indeed be deceitful. If the system is consistent the results are comparable year on year, to do otherwise would, I'm sure you'll agree, be pointless.

The problem as I understand it is that as global weather systems are affected by the warming of the planet, increasingly random and extreme weather events become more common. Very wet summers, very hot summers, very cold months, very warm months. The average power of tropical storms increases, droughts get drier, monsoons get wetter. A small spot on the globe had a cold couple of weeks, true enough, but it's still the same January in the same England and I was in shorts riding home the last couple of days. The temperature here has been consistently above zero since Tuesday, my weather station says. Not even any ground frost. The meltwater form the snow has not frozen overnight, and a foot of snow five days ago has nearly melted now. Guy

ed

These are popular bullshit stories. 35 years ago my submarine did a long transit through and east of the Kara Sea (Arctic). The latest charts available to us were made in 1888 by a long forgotten Lt RN. Needless to say they were spot on. It is the same with CO2 records -- almost non existant and mostly extrapolated from modern stuff and backed up by some ice cores. No one ever came back to answer the Q? why should there not be an ozone hole at the South Pole; The SP is positively charged, 03 (ozone) is not only very unstable but heavily charged in the negative polarity. O3 should not diffuse too easily ( Atomic Weight 48) indeed neither should CO2 ,it struggles to get there and then gets sucked down to sea level where it oxidises anything it can.

If you were to offer plate theory backed relative land height v. sea surface and volcanic activity v. air contamination then things might become rational once more. Todays hysteria is more suited to the era of witch hunts and bogy men ( not Gordo).

That does not answer the question. Do you think a bridge to Great Yarmouth is at all meaningful to the average Chinese. Or even the Chinese functionaries?

It is the first time in history that so much money has come their way with so much ease. I know. I worked in climate research in the late 1970s.

Hominids have been around for 8,000,000 years - +/- a fortnight.

Please look up a definition of climate and rethink your response.