On Tue 23 Apr at 7:01am Sussex Jim wrote:
A happy St. George's day to all English men and women. Enjoy the last sunny day following the glorious weekend.
It should be a Bank Holiday. Never mind; perhaps next year.
On Tue 23 Apr at 7:15am nancy wrote:
Too many bank holidays at this time of year. Perhaps we should adopt a saint that was British like Patrick or Alban.
On Tue 23 Apr at 12:58pm inthegutter wrote:
I've always found it curious that a Turkish (well, Greek Cappadocian) soldier who never set foot on Blighty is the national Saint of England.
On Tue 23 Apr at 2:35pm Sussex Jim wrote:
Well, never mind the reputed origin of the saint. The fact is we are a free country with the fifth largest economy in the world, practically full employment and the opportunity to lead safe and comfortable lives. And that goes for our Celtic cousins on these islands, as well as the English.
Despite the current political farce (it will all be over by the end of May) we can look forward to peace and prosperity; and hopefully another glorious summer. Cheers! My glass is half full- not half empty.
On Tue 23 Apr at 5:45pm Green Sleeves wrote:
Thank goodness for decades of wonderful integration and cooperation with our closest neighbours on this wonderful continent, this has helped all our countries prosper and remain secure. A toast to the European Union, and long may our membership be extended! Let's not allow blind patriotism, nationalism and misplaced British exceptionalism isolate and ruin this :-) happy planet earth Day for yesterday!
On Tue 23 Apr at 6:09pm Blatant Liar wrote:
Some nark always comes up with ‘well, he wasn’t English ‘
Do you you the st Patrick was a bog????
They still celebrate their saints day!!!!
If you hate England so much why don’t you leave ?
On Tue 23 Apr at 6:43pm just me wrote:
Apparently St. George’s day is next week on the 29th
On Tue 23 Apr at 7:21pm inthegutter wrote:
@Blatant Liar: your ramblings are not particularly clear.
But yes, it’s even more curious that the national saint of Ireland was a Brit abducted into slavery by Irish pirates.
On Wed 24 Apr at 9:42am Tom Pain wrote:
Yes good news for earth Day. Due to the increase in carbon dioxide the earth is getting greener from the evidence of NASA's spectrometer. This shows an extra 2 million square miles of plant leaves in vegetated regions every year since year 2000. So this is why the mass starvation predicted by the climate doom cult has not occurred. Good news indeed.
On Wed 24 Apr at 10:03am inthegutter wrote:
Nice cherry picking of one aspect of climate change there! Yep, the world is getting literally greener and while this is in part due to changes in temperature, precipitation, and CO2 level it's also due to human intervention particularly in China/India using different farming practices - see the link.
However, beneficial effects of greening are likely to be offset by the effects of more climate instability and higher sea levels.
Check it out here »
On Wed 24 Apr at 10:22pm Tom Pain wrote:
Since when has climate been stable, are you an ice age denier? In the late sixties and seventies there was so much ice in the Arctic they thought we were in for another mini ice age and predicted famines and catastrophic weather. Note that the ice sheet maps they show all the time start in the eighties and show a steady shrinkage -- thank goodness. In your link mention was made of soil erosion and bad farming practices in other places. I think people's attention should be directed at rectifying that sort of thing and the proliferation of plastic. That's tangible and we can do something about it. Climate is an abstraction ripe for exploitation by con men like Al Gore with his carbon credits and by the way, contrary to his prediction, there's still ice in the Arctic.
On Wed 24 Apr at 10:49pm Basil wrote:
'An enduring popular myth suggests that in the 1970s the climate science community was predicting “global cooling” and an “imminent” ice age, an observation frequently used by those who would undermine what climate scientists say today about the prospect of global warming. A review of the literature suggests that, on the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking as being one of the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales.'
Check it out here »
On Wed 24 Apr at 10:58pm Tipex wrote:
Blatant Liar - not everyone is proud to be British. Personally I'm tired of the stuck-in-the-past patriots getting misty-eyed over Brunel, Churchill and the Austin 7. Britannia ceased to rule the waves a long time ago and if she did today it would be in a well-built German ship crewed by a hard-working Polish crew. George should have been proud to be Turkish - could have been much worse...
On Thu 25 Apr at 8:30am inthegutter wrote:
@TomPain - Yes, the climate changes due to a variety of factors (including variation in the sun itself) but not on the short time scales witnessed over the last few decades. The changes we're seeing are not natural and the science is mostly unequivocal.
- Humans have significantly increased the atmospheric CO2/CH4 concentration through burning fossil fuels and other activities.
- Increased CO2 concentration increases global temperatures. Now, of course there are feedback mechanisms but these appear to be positive (i.e. they cause additional increases in CO2/CH4 concentration).
- What is less certain is the effect of increased temperatures on food production. Almost certainly some parts of the world will benefit (possibly including here) but it seems the consensus (I'm not a food scientist) is that overall production may fall, particularly in countries that already have food insecurity. If this is the case you might expect increased migration and conflict particularly as these regions also have increasing populations.
- What's very certain is that increases in temperature will lead to an increase in sea level both through thermal expansion and ice melt. Given that a huge amount of population live in coastal areas this is a concern and will likely lead to migration/conflict.
If event that's not enough to convince you that we need to curb the use of fossil fuels then also consider:
- burning fossil fuels is really bad for human health and leads to millions of early deaths worldwide.
- the UK is increasingly becoming dependent on imported fossil fuels from the Middle East and Russia. For our national security we should move to local renewables as quickly as possible.
On Thu 25 Apr at 8:11pm The Tooth Fairy wrote:
Climate fascists and self loathing Brits on the same thread. How glorious …
On Fri 26 Apr at 11:46am The Old Mayor wrote:
A million years from now Earth will still be here and all that will be left of the human race will be a layer of plastic, brick and concrete strata, but maybe a geologist will get excited about finding a Marks and Spencer fossil bag as most of them are Tesoc !! The planet isn't actually ours.
On Fri 26 Apr at 11:46am Buzzard wrote:
Tom Pain, this whole thing about "they thought we were in for another mini ice age" is a classic climate denial tactic. There have been repeated scare stories in the popular press, sure, based on the odd maverick, but never any mainstream view. It's just part of a hugely well funded campaign by oil interests like the Koch brother to confuse people. The consensus on human caused climate change is now so strong, to deny it is like denying tobacco causes cancer. Business as Usual means destroying the future.
On Fri 26 Apr at 11:49am The Old Mayor wrote:
However, the elephant in the room is over population, and is never discussed.
On Fri 26 Apr at 8:48pm Tom Pain wrote:
I was there in the six and seventies. I was passionately concerned about ecological matters. I went out of my way to find information. I would have been an extinction rebel, I suppose I was ,but it didn't exist then. It wasn't mainstream then you had to put up with the ridicule of the silent majority types who think the media tells the truth all the time. What an irony that now the same unthinking masses are following the same media in the opposite direction. I saw how the eco movement was taken over by the corporate globalists to further their agenda.George Orwell's 1984 has the government revising old documents to change the past.... well that is happening now for real. Tony Heller has a blog that shows how NOAA is doing just that,but Joe Average can't be bothered to check all that out , he'll just find some ready made debunk and leave it at that or maybe link it here . The big money's on climate change, I don't kid myself that I can compete with that, follow the money.
On Sat 27 Apr at 7:21am Green Sleeves wrote:
So now that climate change is taken seriously by the masses and the mainstream media and deemed a huge concern and priority....Tom Pain, a self proclaimed pioneer environmental activist in the 60s and 70s, decides it's too mainstream for his liking and instead prefers to listen to climate change deniers. Is that about right? Or am misrepresenting you, Painy?
On Sat 27 Apr at 10:04pm Tom Pain wrote:
Yes. I'm not and never have been an activist, I can't chant slogans and all that stuff. I don't deny climate change-- it always has and it always will. I was answering Basil then got distracted. In those days, I picked up the mini ice age meme (referring to his link) but it never grabbed my attention. It was there among the tiny amount of information that was out there in pre internet days. It was speculation that didn't come to anything. The media loves disaster,it gets attention and sells papers but no one had heard of the environment then so it wasn't covered in the news. I later became aware of the de-industrialisation of Britain and figured that environmental concern was a way of condoning it. When you get fed up with selling souvenirs to Chinese tourists sometime in the future,think about it. Also when you read about sabre rattling in the South China sea just think of the British capital invested in China (not here) and don't worry . But I'm distracting myself again.