The UK had a £26bn tourism deficit in the first half of the year:
Overseas residents made an estimated 7.2 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £4.7 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.
Overseas residents made an estimated 9.3 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £7.9 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 18.7 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £16.5 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 26.0 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £22.1 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.
Which is approximately how much money the government borrowed from foreign sources.
Just think if we could only create a giant sun and get rid of the excrement from the South Coast beaches we could have our own Cote d'Azur and all Rachel's problems would be over
That might happen, as tourists notice the traditional Mediterranean resorts are becoming unpleasantly hot, and look for alternatives.
I'll be investing heavily in a chain of paella shops across Margate, Blackpool and Yarmouth come 2035.
Back in the late 1980s, Jonathon Porrit of the Greens came on Radio 4 to tell us of the dangers of Global Warming.
He finished by saying that if nothing was done, “they will be growing palm trees on the beach at Bournemouth”.
I was very young but I remember thinking that that argument was a terrible way to convince people there was a problem.
In the UK and much of the world the initial problems are more the increase in extreme weather rather than the temperature rise. Not sure if they knew that was also coming back in the 80s or not.
They didn't. The assumption seemed to be, IIRC, that temperatures would increase all round, fairly evenly. In retrospect, the addition of energy into weather systems causing more extreme events should have been obvious.
I don't think it is immediately obvious that there will be more extreme events.
Every thermodynamic process has a heat source and a heat sink. If the sink warms as well as the source, then potentially there's no extra energy available.
There are various non-linearities (such as the saturation point of air) which make it more complicated than that, but the idea that all the extra energy is available is not true.
Butd surely extreme events by their definition are statistical extremes, and this brings into play the shifting of normal curves along the x-axis and all that.
The complication is that the shape of the normal distribution can change, as well as its centre point.
But people were aware of the risk of changes in extremes, though they didn't have any way to quantify that risk.
From physical first principles I think you'd expect more weather extremes from an increasing greenhouse effect.
As the greenhouse effect strengthens and heat is less readily rediated into space, it will increasing tend to move horizonally from the warmer to the cooler parts of the Earth. This is apparent from the fact that the poles are warming faster than the tropics. If more heat has to be transferred from place to place, then you'd imagine that the weather needed to do this would become more dynamic. This could manifest as increasing numbers of storms, or increasing storm intensity, or elements of both.
Edit: It is true though that variation in the incidence and intensity of storms as a result of climate change is a trickier prediction to make, especially at a local level. Unlike, say, sea level rise which is pretty much a certainty.
The poles are warming faster mainly due to the sea-ice feedback. Less sea ice, less sunlight reflected, more warming of the darker ocean.
This reduces the temperature gradient between tropics and poles, and so would be expected to reduce the strength of the jet stream (potentially making it more wavy and kissing to more blocking high breakdowns) and lower storm activity.
However, the warmer sea temperatures make more energy available for each individual storm.
Tentatively I would suggest that's what we're seeing. Fewer, but more intense, storms. More rain over the year, but falling in fewer events. That would tend to lead to more flooding, and it's not great for agriculture.
There's going to be quite the flu epidemic in those control towers. Just in time to mess up flights for Thanksgiving...
At what point do the Republicans in Congress see they are committing mass seppuku?
The issue is with the Democrats in the Senate, who have voted against the CR 14 times now.
The Senate needs 60 votes.
Why would Democrat Senators vote for things when Congress isn’t meeting because the Republicans refuse to let it meet.
Eh?
The Republican Senators have turned up every day to vote for the CR, and the Democrats senators (with the notable exception of Sen Fetterman) have voted it down.
The GOP controls every branch of government. Expecting the opposition to rubber stamp whatever they choose doesn't really wash, does it ?
The GOP has no interest in “negotiating” with the Dems re a further budget. It’s an absolute nonsense that the Dems will get anything out of voting for the CR other than giving Trump a win.
Okay, so the federal paychecks don’t go out and the SNAP benefits stop, with the Dem Senators clearly being the roadblock.
Dem Senators are already describing the loss of SNAP benefits as ‘leverage’ against Trump.
I love the smell of desperation in the morning. I'm afraid blaming this one on the Dems ain't gonna pass anyones sniff test.
Well the Republican Senators have turned up every day to vote in favour of the continuing resolution.
We now have the civil service union as well as two airlines imploring the Dem Senators to vote for the CR so that paychecks go out.
That's as may be, but the past year has been Trump and MAGA on a neverending gloat, so them not being able to pass a measly budget doesn't fit in with the messaging does it?
According to the Telegraph, Labour insisting that Mandy shouldn't lose his title over links to Epstein
Is this true? If so, a good move for Labour?
Maybe we should just abolish the peerage*.
Perhaps inadvertently, KCIII has now set a precedent that you can get your titles taken off you if you’ve been sufficiently naughty.
If he can take the titles off his brother why shouldn’t some Lord or Baroness who is caught doing something questionable get theirs removed too?
It is going to be a bit of a minefield. At the very least it may be the government has to set up some kind of independent forfeiture committee to avoid the monarch being dragged into the politics of scandal - every time there is one now, there will be a louder call for titles to be stripped.
*I would probably make an initial exception for some of the hereditaries, who at least have some history behind them holding a title.
I I was his recalcitrant grandson in California, I’d be more than a little worried this morning.
The precident has now been set.
Grandson? Has wee Archie been a naughty boy?
Archie will retain his titles and having a mixed race child in the line of succession has some advantages for the royals keeping Andrew with his titles now does not
Besides, Andrew has brought proper shame on the Family. Quite how bad that shame is, we will probably never find out, because the Family will make sure of it.
Harry just didn't want to play the game any more. And annoying as that is, he's the wrong nut to use the same sledgehammer on.
Yes. Harry is just annoying and (depending on your point of view) rather unfairly disloyal. I’m not sure what you could say he has done that is so awful that he shouldn’t hold his title though. One can perhaps question why someone who seems to be so disillusioned with the institution still uses his title (the same goes for his wife), but that’s a separate point entirely.
According to the Telegraph, Labour insisting that Mandy shouldn't lose his title over links to Epstein
Is this true? If so, a good move for Labour?
Maybe we should just abolish the peerage*.
Perhaps inadvertently, KCIII has now set a precedent that you can get your titles taken off you if you’ve been sufficiently naughty.
If he can take the titles off his brother why shouldn’t some Lord or Baroness who is caught doing something questionable get theirs removed too?
It is going to be a bit of a minefield. At the very least it may be the government has to set up some kind of independent forfeiture committee to avoid the monarch being dragged into the politics of scandal - every time there is one now, there will be a louder call for titles to be stripped.
*I would probably make an initial exception for some of the hereditaries, who at least have some history behind them holding a title.
Many, many titles were removed in the past, usually by separating the head from the body. It's probably best not to get Government/Parliament involved, tbh.
The UK had a £26bn tourism deficit in the first half of the year:
Overseas residents made an estimated 7.2 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £4.7 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.
Overseas residents made an estimated 9.3 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £7.9 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 18.7 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £16.5 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 26.0 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £22.1 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.
Which is approximately how much money the government borrowed from foreign sources.
Just think if we could only create a giant sun and get rid of the excrement from the South Coast beaches we could have our own Cote d'Azur and all Rachel's problems would be over
That might happen, as tourists notice the traditional Mediterranean resorts are becoming unpleasantly hot, and look for alternatives.
I'll be investing heavily in a chain of paella shops across Margate, Blackpool and Yarmouth come 2035.
Back in the late 1980s, Jonathon Porrit of the Greens came on Radio 4 to tell us of the dangers of Global Warming.
He finished by saying that if nothing was done, “they will be growing palm trees on the beach at Bournemouth”.
I was very young but I remember thinking that that argument was a terrible way to convince people there was a problem.
In the UK and much of the world the initial problems are more the increase in extreme weather rather than the temperature rise. Not sure if they knew that was also coming back in the 80s or not.
They didn't. The assumption seemed to be, IIRC, that temperatures would increase all round, fairly evenly. In retrospect, the addition of energy into weather systems causing more extreme events should have been obvious.
I don't think it is immediately obvious that there will be more extreme events.
Every thermodynamic process has a heat source and a heat sink. If the sink warms as well as the source, then potentially there's no extra energy available.
There are various non-linearities (such as the saturation point of air) which make it more complicated than that, but the idea that all the extra energy is available is not true.
Butd surely extreme events by their definition are statistical extremes, and this brings into play the shifting of normal curves along the x-axis and all that.
The complication is that the shape of the normal distribution can change, as well as its centre point.
But people were aware of the risk of changes in extremes, though they didn't have any way to quantify that risk.
From physical first principles I think you'd expect more weather extremes from an increasing greenhouse effect.
As the greenhouse effect strengthens and heat is less readily rediated into space, it will increasing tend to move horizonally from the warmer to the cooler parts of the Earth. This is apparent from the fact that the poles are warming faster than the tropics. If more heat has to be transferred from place to place, then you'd imagine that the weather needed to do this would become more dynamic. This could manifest as increasing numbers of storms, or increasing storm intensity, or elements of both.
The warming of the poles is quite likely to be making our weather (via the jet stream) less dynamic as it reduces the temperature contrast between latitudes.
I think that is inverting cause and effect. I'd say the reduction in temperature contrast is actually a consequnce of more dynamic weather; that is, you need more dynamic weather in order to reduce the contrast. Look at Venus, for example: runaway greenhouse effect; virtually no difference in temperature between equator and poles; extremely powerful winds.
Temperature difference where? At the surface or in the upper atmosphere? The two are very different.
We know very little about the weather on Venus below the clouds (at 45km or so?). The landers found almost no wind.
I've heard that temperatures around 50km up are reasonably comfortable. Shame about the rest of the hellishness.
According to the Telegraph, Labour insisting that Mandy shouldn't lose his title over links to Epstein
Is this true? If so, a good move for Labour?
Maybe we should just abolish the peerage*.
Perhaps inadvertently, KCIII has now set a precedent that you can get your titles taken off you if you’ve been sufficiently naughty.
If he can take the titles off his brother why shouldn’t some Lord or Baroness who is caught doing something questionable get theirs removed too?
It is going to be a bit of a minefield. At the very least it may be the government has to set up some kind of independent forfeiture committee to avoid the monarch being dragged into the politics of scandal - every time there is one now, there will be a louder call for titles to be stripped.
*I would probably make an initial exception for some of the hereditaries, who at least have some history behind them holding a title.
Many, many titles were removed in the past, usually by separating the head from the body.
It was a more efficient time. Henry VIII had no time for quangos, I'd bet.
There's going to be quite the flu epidemic in those control towers. Just in time to mess up flights for Thanksgiving...
At what point do the Republicans in Congress see they are committing mass seppuku?
The issue is with the Democrats in the Senate, who have voted against the CR 14 times now.
The Senate needs 60 votes.
Why would Democrat Senators vote for things when Congress isn’t meeting because the Republicans refuse to let it meet.
Eh?
The Republican Senators have turned up every day to vote for the CR, and the Democrats senators (with the notable exception of Sen Fetterman) have voted it down.
The GOP controls every branch of government. Expecting the opposition to rubber stamp whatever they choose doesn't really wash, does it ?
The GOP has no interest in “negotiating” with the Dems re a further budget. It’s an absolute nonsense that the Dems will get anything out of voting for the CR other than giving Trump a win.
Okay, so the federal paychecks don’t go out and the SNAP benefits stop, with the Dem Senators clearly being the roadblock.
Dem Senators are already describing the loss of SNAP benefits as ‘leverage’ against Trump.
I love the smell of desperation in the morning. I'm afraid blaming this one on the Dems ain't gonna pass anyones sniff test.
Well the Republican Senators have turned up every day to vote in favour of the continuing resolution.
We now have the civil service union as well as two airlines imploring the Dem Senators to vote for the CR so that paychecks go out.
@Sandpit, if your main argument for the Dems caving is that people who are not currently getting paid don't like not getting paid that's...not very convincing.
The F-35B in UK Service – A Story of Compromise and Challenge
Views my own, corrections and comments welcomed. I have written on F-35B before - I am agnostic to it, I am more interested in outcome than platform. My view, we have the wrong aircraft to deliver the required outcome (2010 decision supports this), it’s a great (if expensive) aircraft for the USMC and the balance sheet of RR and BAES but not in a finance constrained UK where the SDR tells us NATO first and looks to the NE Atlantic and not the dreams and aspirations of global expeditionary warfare in 1998... https://x.com/MtarfaL/status/1984226813766156658
Notable is the role of this character, who appear to have failed all the way up to Chief of the Defence Staff...
A recurring figure in this narrative is Air Chief Marshal Sir Rich Knighton, who has held roles as Senior Responsible Owner (SRO) for CEPP, Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff, Finance and Military Capability (FinMilCap), RAF Chief of the Air Staff (CAS), and now Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS) since September 2025. His career progression despite oversights raises questions about responsibility and accountability within the senior levels of the MoD (I have written about the MoD CIO and data leaks in detail, but he’s still in post). https://x.com/MtarfaL/status/1984226960663273828
According to the Telegraph, Labour insisting that Mandy shouldn't lose his title over links to Epstein
Is this true? If so, a good move for Labour?
Maybe we should just abolish the peerage*.
Perhaps inadvertently, KCIII has now set a precedent that you can get your titles taken off you if you’ve been sufficiently naughty.
If he can take the titles off his brother why shouldn’t some Lord or Baroness who is caught doing something questionable get theirs removed too?
It is going to be a bit of a minefield. At the very least it may be the government has to set up some kind of independent forfeiture committee to avoid the monarch being dragged into the politics of scandal - every time there is one now, there will be a louder call for titles to be stripped.
*I would probably make an initial exception for some of the hereditaries, who at least have some history behind them holding a title.
Many, many titles were removed in the past, usually by separating the head from the body.
It was a more efficient time. Henry VIII had no time for quangos, I'd bet.
If the Court of Augmentations wasn't a quango, I don't know what is.
According to the Telegraph, Labour insisting that Mandy shouldn't lose his title over links to Epstein
Is this true? If so, a good move for Labour?
Maybe we should just abolish the peerage*.
Perhaps inadvertently, KCIII has now set a precedent that you can get your titles taken off you if you’ve been sufficiently naughty.
If he can take the titles off his brother why shouldn’t some Lord or Baroness who is caught doing something questionable get theirs removed too?
It is going to be a bit of a minefield. At the very least it may be the government has to set up some kind of independent forfeiture committee to avoid the monarch being dragged into the politics of scandal - every time there is one now, there will be a louder call for titles to be stripped.
*I would probably make an initial exception for some of the hereditaries, who at least have some history behind them holding a title.
Many, many titles were removed in the past, usually by separating the head from the body.
It was a more efficient time. Henry VIII had no time for quangos, I'd bet.
Oddly enough there were loads of little ones for managing various rivers and roads and ferries and draining land and the like.
According to the Telegraph, Labour insisting that Mandy shouldn't lose his title over links to Epstein
Is this true? If so, a good move for Labour?
Maybe we should just abolish the peerage*.
Perhaps inadvertently, KCIII has now set a precedent that you can get your titles taken off you if you’ve been sufficiently naughty.
If he can take the titles off his brother why shouldn’t some Lord or Baroness who is caught doing something questionable get theirs removed too?
It is going to be a bit of a minefield. At the very least it may be the government has to set up some kind of independent forfeiture committee to avoid the monarch being dragged into the politics of scandal - every time there is one now, there will be a louder call for titles to be stripped.
*I would probably make an initial exception for some of the hereditaries, who at least have some history behind them holding a title.
Many, many titles were removed in the past, usually by separating the head from the body.
It was a more efficient time. Henry VIII had no time for quangos, I'd bet.
According to the Telegraph, Labour insisting that Mandy shouldn't lose his title over links to Epstein
Is this true? If so, a good move for Labour?
Maybe we should just abolish the peerage*.
Perhaps inadvertently, KCIII has now set a precedent that you can get your titles taken off you if you’ve been sufficiently naughty.
If he can take the titles off his brother why shouldn’t some Lord or Baroness who is caught doing something questionable get theirs removed too?
It is going to be a bit of a minefield. At the very least it may be the government has to set up some kind of independent forfeiture committee to avoid the monarch being dragged into the politics of scandal - every time there is one now, there will be a louder call for titles to be stripped.
*I would probably make an initial exception for some of the hereditaries, who at least have some history behind them holding a title.
Many, many titles were removed in the past, usually by separating the head from the body.
It was a more efficient time. Henry VIII had no time for quangos, I'd bet.
If the Court of Augmentations wasn't a quango, I don't know what is.
Ref + Green are averaging 45% in the polls atm. Not good for the anti-populists.
Are Greens populists? I mean I disagree with them but I would not really accuse them of populism, just naivity and lack of common sense. Indeed some of the actions they are proposing would strike me as roundly anti-populist and driven by ideology not populism.
According to the Telegraph, Labour insisting that Mandy shouldn't lose his title over links to Epstein
Is this true? If so, a good move for Labour?
Maybe we should just abolish the peerage*.
Perhaps inadvertently, KCIII has now set a precedent that you can get your titles taken off you if you’ve been sufficiently naughty.
If he can take the titles off his brother why shouldn’t some Lord or Baroness who is caught doing something questionable get theirs removed too?
It is going to be a bit of a minefield. At the very least it may be the government has to set up some kind of independent forfeiture committee to avoid the monarch being dragged into the politics of scandal - every time there is one now, there will be a louder call for titles to be stripped.
*I would probably make an initial exception for some of the hereditaries, who at least have some history behind them holding a title.
Many, many titles were removed in the past, usually by separating the head from the body.
It was a more efficient time. Henry VIII had no time for quangos, I'd bet.
He had an admirable disdain for bureaucracy.
Which is odd for someone who reign centralised government, and saw the creation of a pretty poweful bureaucracy.
According to the Telegraph, Labour insisting that Mandy shouldn't lose his title over links to Epstein
Is this true? If so, a good move for Labour?
Maybe we should just abolish the peerage*.
Perhaps inadvertently, KCIII has now set a precedent that you can get your titles taken off you if you’ve been sufficiently naughty.
If he can take the titles off his brother why shouldn’t some Lord or Baroness who is caught doing something questionable get theirs removed too?
It is going to be a bit of a minefield. At the very least it may be the government has to set up some kind of independent forfeiture committee to avoid the monarch being dragged into the politics of scandal - every time there is one now, there will be a louder call for titles to be stripped.
*I would probably make an initial exception for some of the hereditaries, who at least have some history behind them holding a title.
I I was his recalcitrant grandson in California, I’d be more than a little worried this morning.
The precident has now been set.
Grandson? Has wee Archie been a naughty boy?
Archie will retain his titles and having a mixed race child in the line of succession has some advantages for the royals keeping Andrew with his titles now does not
Besides, Andrew has brought proper shame on the Family. Quite how bad that shame is, we will probably never find out, because the Family will make sure of it.
Harry just didn't want to play the game any more. And annoying as that is, he's the wrong nut to use the same sledgehammer on.
Harry still does play the game, he kept use of his titles and place in line of succession, he just couldn't be bothered with more royal duties unless he was King
Ref + Green are averaging 45% in the polls atm. Not good for the anti-populists.
Are Greens populists? I mean I disagree with them but I would not really accuse them of populism, just naivity and lack of common sense. Indeed some of the actions they are proposing would strike me as roundly anti-populist and driven by ideology not populism.
The Greens now are populist, anti capitalist, anti corporation, anti Israel and anti monarchy and anti House of Lords. The Greens when they cared mainly about the environment weren't, the Polanski Greens are far left populists on most definitions, populism is basically anti elites
Ref + Green are averaging 45% in the polls atm. Not good for the anti-populists.
Are Greens populists? I mean I disagree with them but I would not really accuse them of populism, just naivity and lack of common sense. Indeed some of the actions they are proposing would strike me as roundly anti-populist and driven by ideology not populism.
I wouldn't have said so until the new leader took over. He seems like one to me.
The UK had a £26bn tourism deficit in the first half of the year:
Overseas residents made an estimated 7.2 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £4.7 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.
Overseas residents made an estimated 9.3 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £7.9 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 18.7 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £16.5 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 26.0 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £22.1 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.
Which is approximately how much money the government borrowed from foreign sources.
Just think if we could only create a giant sun and get rid of the excrement from the South Coast beaches we could have our own Cote d'Azur and all Rachel's problems would be over
That might happen, as tourists notice the traditional Mediterranean resorts are becoming unpleasantly hot, and look for alternatives.
I'll be investing heavily in a chain of paella shops across Margate, Blackpool and Yarmouth come 2035.
Back in the late 1980s, Jonathon Porrit of the Greens came on Radio 4 to tell us of the dangers of Global Warming.
He finished by saying that if nothing was done, “they will be growing palm trees on the beach at Bournemouth”.
I was very young but I remember thinking that that argument was a terrible way to convince people there was a problem.
In the UK and much of the world the initial problems are more the increase in extreme weather rather than the temperature rise. Not sure if they knew that was also coming back in the 80s or not.
They didn't. The assumption seemed to be, IIRC, that temperatures would increase all round, fairly evenly. In retrospect, the addition of energy into weather systems causing more extreme events should have been obvious.
I don't think it is immediately obvious that there will be more extreme events.
Every thermodynamic process has a heat source and a heat sink. If the sink warms as well as the source, then potentially there's no extra energy available.
There are various non-linearities (such as the saturation point of air) which make it more complicated than that, but the idea that all the extra energy is available is not true.
Butd surely extreme events by their definition are statistical extremes, and this brings into play the shifting of normal curves along the x-axis and all that.
The complication is that the shape of the normal distribution can change, as well as its centre point.
But people were aware of the risk of changes in extremes, though they didn't have any way to quantify that risk.
From physical first principles I think you'd expect more weather extremes from an increasing greenhouse effect.
As the greenhouse effect strengthens and heat is less readily rediated into space, it will increasing tend to move horizonally from the warmer to the cooler parts of the Earth. This is apparent from the fact that the poles are warming faster than the tropics. If more heat has to be transferred from place to place, then you'd imagine that the weather needed to do this would become more dynamic. This could manifest as increasing numbers of storms, or increasing storm intensity, or elements of both.
Edit: It is true though that variation in the incidence and intensity of storms as a result of climate change is a trickier prediction to make, especially at a local level. Unlike, say, sea level rise which is pretty much a certainty.
The poles are warming faster mainly due to the sea-ice feedback. Less sea ice, less sunlight reflected, more warming of the darker ocean.
This reduces the temperature gradient between tropics and poles, and so would be expected to reduce the strength of the jet stream (potentially making it more wavy and kissing to more blocking high breakdowns) and lower storm activity.
However, the warmer sea temperatures make more energy available for each individual storm.
Tentatively I would suggest that's what we're seeing. Fewer, but more intense, storms. More rain over the year, but falling in fewer events. That would tend to lead to more flooding, and it's not great for agriculture.
Arctic amplification has a number of causes; these include both the ice albedo effect you mention and other processes, including increased transport of water vapour (and hence heat) from the equatorial regions.
The poles would still be warming more rapidly even in the absence of ice, given that the more you insulate an unevenly heated body, the more even its temperature will become and the more heat will need to be transported across it.
According to the Telegraph, Labour insisting that Mandy shouldn't lose his title over links to Epstein
Is this true? If so, a good move for Labour?
Maybe we should just abolish the peerage*.
Perhaps inadvertently, KCIII has now set a precedent that you can get your titles taken off you if you’ve been sufficiently naughty.
If he can take the titles off his brother why shouldn’t some Lord or Baroness who is caught doing something questionable get theirs removed too?
It is going to be a bit of a minefield. At the very least it may be the government has to set up some kind of independent forfeiture committee to avoid the monarch being dragged into the politics of scandal - every time there is one now, there will be a louder call for titles to be stripped.
*I would probably make an initial exception for some of the hereditaries, who at least have some history behind them holding a title.
Many, many titles were removed in the past, usually by separating the head from the body.
It was a more efficient time. Henry VIII had no time for quangos, I'd bet.
He had an admirable disdain for bureaucracy.
Which is odd for someone who reign centralised government, and saw the creation of a pretty poweful bureaucracy.
I was thinking of the monks and priests. All those quill pens and parchments. 😄
As it is Halloween, I had the pleasure of seeing a body wrapped in bin liners, hanging from a gibbet outside a nearby house.
This year they've made a special effort, and included a hessian sack over the head.
Truly heartwarming.
Delightful to see how the Brits have really taken to Halloween. Just had a pub lunch and a very excited coven of maybe 6-year old witches came in. The overlap with half-term has worked well this year.
The UK had a £26bn tourism deficit in the first half of the year:
Overseas residents made an estimated 7.2 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £4.7 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.
Overseas residents made an estimated 9.3 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £7.9 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 18.7 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £16.5 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 26.0 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £22.1 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.
Which is approximately how much money the government borrowed from foreign sources.
Just think if we could only create a giant sun and get rid of the excrement from the South Coast beaches we could have our own Cote d'Azur and all Rachel's problems would be over
That might happen, as tourists notice the traditional Mediterranean resorts are becoming unpleasantly hot, and look for alternatives.
I'll be investing heavily in a chain of paella shops across Margate, Blackpool and Yarmouth come 2035.
Back in the late 1980s, Jonathon Porrit of the Greens came on Radio 4 to tell us of the dangers of Global Warming.
He finished by saying that if nothing was done, “they will be growing palm trees on the beach at Bournemouth”.
I was very young but I remember thinking that that argument was a terrible way to convince people there was a problem.
In the UK and much of the world the initial problems are more the increase in extreme weather rather than the temperature rise. Not sure if they knew that was also coming back in the 80s or not.
They didn't. The assumption seemed to be, IIRC, that temperatures would increase all round, fairly evenly. In retrospect, the addition of energy into weather systems causing more extreme events should have been obvious.
I don't think it is immediately obvious that there will be more extreme events.
Every thermodynamic process has a heat source and a heat sink. If the sink warms as well as the source, then potentially there's no extra energy available.
There are various non-linearities (such as the saturation point of air) which make it more complicated than that, but the idea that all the extra energy is available is not true.
Butd surely extreme events by their definition are statistical extremes, and this brings into play the shifting of normal curves along the x-axis and all that.
The complication is that the shape of the normal distribution can change, as well as its centre point.
But people were aware of the risk of changes in extremes, though they didn't have any way to quantify that risk.
From physical first principles I think you'd expect more weather extremes from an increasing greenhouse effect.
As the greenhouse effect strengthens and heat is less readily rediated into space, it will increasing tend to move horizonally from the warmer to the cooler parts of the Earth. This is apparent from the fact that the poles are warming faster than the tropics. If more heat has to be transferred from place to place, then you'd imagine that the weather needed to do this would become more dynamic. This could manifest as increasing numbers of storms, or increasing storm intensity, or elements of both.
Edit: It is true though that variation in the incidence and intensity of storms as a result of climate change is a trickier prediction to make, especially at a local level. Unlike, say, sea level rise which is pretty much a certainty.
The poles are warming faster mainly due to the sea-ice feedback. Less sea ice, less sunlight reflected, more warming of the darker ocean.
This reduces the temperature gradient between tropics and poles, and so would be expected to reduce the strength of the jet stream (potentially making it more wavy and kissing to more blocking high breakdowns) and lower storm activity.
However, the warmer sea temperatures make more energy available for each individual storm.
Tentatively I would suggest that's what we're seeing. Fewer, but more intense, storms. More rain over the year, but falling in fewer events. That would tend to lead to more flooding, and it's not great for agriculture.
Arctic amplification has a number of causes; these include both the ice albedo effect you mention and other processes, including increased transport of water vapour (and hence heat) from the equatorial regions.
The poles would still be warming more rapidly even in the absence of ice, given that the more you insulate an unevenly heated body, the more even its temperature will become and the more heat will need to be transported across it.
The last part is wrong.
More insulation, more evenly heated - yes. More evenly heated, more heat transfer - absolutely not.
Ref + Green are averaging 45% in the polls atm. Not good for the anti-populists.
Are Greens populists? I mean I disagree with them but I would not really accuse them of populism, just naivity and lack of common sense. Indeed some of the actions they are proposing would strike me as roundly anti-populist and driven by ideology not populism.
I wouldn't have said so until the new leader took over. He seems like one to me.
Indeed, I think even Corbyn would be a better PM than Polanski
According to the Telegraph, Labour insisting that Mandy shouldn't lose his title over links to Epstein
Is this true? If so, a good move for Labour?
Maybe we should just abolish the peerage*.
Perhaps inadvertently, KCIII has now set a precedent that you can get your titles taken off you if you’ve been sufficiently naughty.
If he can take the titles off his brother why shouldn’t some Lord or Baroness who is caught doing something questionable get theirs removed too?
It is going to be a bit of a minefield. At the very least it may be the government has to set up some kind of independent forfeiture committee to avoid the monarch being dragged into the politics of scandal - every time there is one now, there will be a louder call for titles to be stripped.
*I would probably make an initial exception for some of the hereditaries, who at least have some history behind them holding a title.
Many, many titles were removed in the past, usually by separating the head from the body.
It was a more efficient time. Henry VIII had no time for quangos, I'd bet.
He had an admirable disdain for bureaucracy.
Which is odd for someone who reign centralised government, and saw the creation of a pretty poweful bureaucracy.
I was thinking of the monks and priests. All those quill pens and parchments. 😄
Ah - that was someone else's bureaucracy. Not to be tolerated.
The UK had a £26bn tourism deficit in the first half of the year:
Overseas residents made an estimated 7.2 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £4.7 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.
Overseas residents made an estimated 9.3 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £7.9 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 18.7 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £16.5 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 26.0 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £22.1 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.
Which is approximately how much money the government borrowed from foreign sources.
Just think if we could only create a giant sun and get rid of the excrement from the South Coast beaches we could have our own Cote d'Azur and all Rachel's problems would be over
That might happen, as tourists notice the traditional Mediterranean resorts are becoming unpleasantly hot, and look for alternatives.
I'll be investing heavily in a chain of paella shops across Margate, Blackpool and Yarmouth come 2035.
Back in the late 1980s, Jonathon Porrit of the Greens came on Radio 4 to tell us of the dangers of Global Warming.
He finished by saying that if nothing was done, “they will be growing palm trees on the beach at Bournemouth”.
I was very young but I remember thinking that that argument was a terrible way to convince people there was a problem.
In the UK and much of the world the initial problems are more the increase in extreme weather rather than the temperature rise. Not sure if they knew that was also coming back in the 80s or not.
They didn't. The assumption seemed to be, IIRC, that temperatures would increase all round, fairly evenly. In retrospect, the addition of energy into weather systems causing more extreme events should have been obvious.
I don't think it is immediately obvious that there will be more extreme events.
Every thermodynamic process has a heat source and a heat sink. If the sink warms as well as the source, then potentially there's no extra energy available.
There are various non-linearities (such as the saturation point of air) which make it more complicated than that, but the idea that all the extra energy is available is not true.
Butd surely extreme events by their definition are statistical extremes, and this brings into play the shifting of normal curves along the x-axis and all that.
The complication is that the shape of the normal distribution can change, as well as its centre point.
But people were aware of the risk of changes in extremes, though they didn't have any way to quantify that risk.
From physical first principles I think you'd expect more weather extremes from an increasing greenhouse effect.
As the greenhouse effect strengthens and heat is less readily rediated into space, it will increasing tend to move horizonally from the warmer to the cooler parts of the Earth. This is apparent from the fact that the poles are warming faster than the tropics. If more heat has to be transferred from place to place, then you'd imagine that the weather needed to do this would become more dynamic. This could manifest as increasing numbers of storms, or increasing storm intensity, or elements of both.
Edit: It is true though that variation in the incidence and intensity of storms as a result of climate change is a trickier prediction to make, especially at a local level. Unlike, say, sea level rise which is pretty much a certainty.
The poles are warming faster mainly due to the sea-ice feedback. Less sea ice, less sunlight reflected, more warming of the darker ocean.
This reduces the temperature gradient between tropics and poles, and so would be expected to reduce the strength of the jet stream (potentially making it more wavy and kissing to more blocking high breakdowns) and lower storm activity.
However, the warmer sea temperatures make more energy available for each individual storm.
Tentatively I would suggest that's what we're seeing. Fewer, but more intense, storms. More rain over the year, but falling in fewer events. That would tend to lead to more flooding, and it's not great for agriculture.
Arctic amplification has a number of causes; these include both the ice albedo effect you mention and other processes, including increased transport of water vapour (and hence heat) from the equatorial regions.
The poles would still be warming more rapidly even in the absence of ice, given that the more you insulate an unevenly heated body, the more even its temperature will become and the more heat will need to be transported across it.
The last part is wrong.
More insulation, more evenly heated - yes. More evenly heated, more heat transfer - absolutely not.
But yes! It's helpful again to consider Venus as an extreme example. Like the other planets, it receives far more heat in the form of solar radiation at its equator than it does at its poles. Yet, because it is so well insulated, the poles are only very slightly cooler than the equator. This means that both the equator and the poles must be radiating about the same amount of heat. This can only happen if heat is transported from the equator to the poles.
In summary, the more you insulate an unevenly heated body, the more even (and of course hotter) its temperature becomes. The more even its temperature becomes, the more evenly it radiates heat. The more evenly it radiates heat, the more heat has to be transported from the more strongly heated areas to the more weakly heated areas.
‘The money machine is misfiring’: City blames Brexit for UK’s £20bn productivity headache https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/oct/31/city-brexit-uk-productivity-eu-rachel-reeves-budget ..For Rob Rooney, the impact of Brexit for the City of London is clear. “Frankfurt, Madrid, Milan and Paris are all doing better than they were. It has been at London’s expense. There is no question about that.”
In his time as Morgan Stanley’s top executive in London, Rooney led the US investment bank’s relocation of hundreds of bankers and billions of pounds of assets to Frankfurt to sidestep Britain’s shock EU departure. More than 440 other City companies followed suit, moving almost £1tn between them – roughly 10% of the entire UK banking system – to financial hubs across the EU.
“I have friends and family who moved to Barcelona, Madrid and Paris. And these cities are all booming.”..
Ref + Green are averaging 45% in the polls atm. Not good for the anti-populists.
Are Greens populists? I mean I disagree with them but I would not really accuse them of populism, just naivity and lack of common sense. Indeed some of the actions they are proposing would strike me as roundly anti-populist and driven by ideology not populism.
I wouldn't have said so until the new leader took over. He seems like one to me.
Indeed, I think even Corbyn would be a better PM than Polanski
Except Corbyn wouldn't really have been PM, McDonnell would have been. And he'd have been much worse.
According to the Telegraph, Labour insisting that Mandy shouldn't lose his title over links to Epstein
Is this true? If so, a good move for Labour?
Maybe we should just abolish the peerage*.
Perhaps inadvertently, KCIII has now set a precedent that you can get your titles taken off you if you’ve been sufficiently naughty.
If he can take the titles off his brother why shouldn’t some Lord or Baroness who is caught doing something questionable get theirs removed too?
It is going to be a bit of a minefield. At the very least it may be the government has to set up some kind of independent forfeiture committee to avoid the monarch being dragged into the politics of scandal - every time there is one now, there will be a louder call for titles to be stripped.
*I would probably make an initial exception for some of the hereditaries, who at least have some history behind them holding a title.
Many, many titles were removed in the past, usually by separating the head from the body. It's probably best not to get Government/Parliament involved, tbh.
Er, the titles weren't removed. Just the heads. The titles remained in the family, AFAIK.
Ref + Green are averaging 45% in the polls atm. Not good for the anti-populists.
Are Greens populists? I mean I disagree with them but I would not really accuse them of populism, just naivity and lack of common sense. Indeed some of the actions they are proposing would strike me as roundly anti-populist and driven by ideology not populism.
I wouldn't have said so until the new leader took over. He seems like one to me.
Indeed, I think even Corbyn would be a better PM than Polanski
Except Corbyn wouldn't really have been PM, McDonnell would have been. And he'd have been much worse.
No, McDonnell at least has more understanding of economics than Polanski and some respect for tradition too being a practising Roman Catholic.
If Polanski became PM, still admittedly very unlikely, would anyone not left of centre stay in the UK rather than emigrate?
As it is Halloween, I had the pleasure of seeing a body wrapped in bin liners, hanging from a gibbet outside a nearby house.
This year they've made a special effort, and included a hessian sack over the head.
Truly heartwarming.
Delightful to see how the Brits have really taken to Halloween. Just had a pub lunch and a very excited coven of maybe 6-year old witches came in. The overlap with half-term has worked well this year.
For towns like Wigan (not coincidentally Ms Nandy's constituency, but it's a nice idea). Apparently towns are smaller than cities. But let's not get into that debate again ...
Not sure Wigan has been written out. It's got a major literary classic by a great writer about its Pier.
In a moment of idle curiosity before going off and doing something else, I looked on google maps and there are three of them. Aldborough, Norwich and Royston. No idea why the cluster.
Imagine having to change your address for that man ...
Edit: moral is, never name a public park or street after a living person, or anyone who hasn't been dead for say 6 years. Just in case.
For towns like Wigan (not coincidentally Ms Nandy's constituency, but it's a nice idea). Apparently towns are smaller than cities. But let's not get into that debate again ...
Not sure Wigan has been written out. It's got a major literary classic by a great writer about its Pier.
Wigan Pier has been gentrified - mix of uses such as cultural events, commercial spaces, as well as leisure, retail, and community facilities.
According to the Telegraph, Labour insisting that Mandy shouldn't lose his title over links to Epstein
Is this true? If so, a good move for Labour?
Maybe we should just abolish the peerage*.
Perhaps inadvertently, KCIII has now set a precedent that you can get your titles taken off you if you’ve been sufficiently naughty.
If he can take the titles off his brother why shouldn’t some Lord or Baroness who is caught doing something questionable get theirs removed too?
It is going to be a bit of a minefield. At the very least it may be the government has to set up some kind of independent forfeiture committee to avoid the monarch being dragged into the politics of scandal - every time there is one now, there will be a louder call for titles to be stripped.
*I would probably make an initial exception for some of the hereditaries, who at least have some history behind them holding a title.
Many, many titles were removed in the past, usually by separating the head from the body. It's probably best not to get Government/Parliament involved, tbh.
Er, the titles weren't removed. Just the heads. The titles remained in the family, AFAIK.
Titles were removed by the Act of Attainder. The act itself included the loss of thr right to pass on the title. So when the Duke of Monmouth was attaindered in 1685 his family lost the titles of Monmouth, Buccleuch and Doncaster.
The UK had a £26bn tourism deficit in the first half of the year:
Overseas residents made an estimated 7.2 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £4.7 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.
Overseas residents made an estimated 9.3 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £7.9 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 18.7 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £16.5 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 26.0 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £22.1 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.
Which is approximately how much money the government borrowed from foreign sources.
Just think if we could only create a giant sun and get rid of the excrement from the South Coast beaches we could have our own Cote d'Azur and all Rachel's problems would be over
That might happen, as tourists notice the traditional Mediterranean resorts are becoming unpleasantly hot, and look for alternatives.
I'll be investing heavily in a chain of paella shops across Margate, Blackpool and Yarmouth come 2035.
Back in the late 1980s, Jonathon Porrit of the Greens came on Radio 4 to tell us of the dangers of Global Warming.
He finished by saying that if nothing was done, “they will be growing palm trees on the beach at Bournemouth”.
I was very young but I remember thinking that that argument was a terrible way to convince people there was a problem.
In the UK and much of the world the initial problems are more the increase in extreme weather rather than the temperature rise. Not sure if they knew that was also coming back in the 80s or not.
They didn't. The assumption seemed to be, IIRC, that temperatures would increase all round, fairly evenly. In retrospect, the addition of energy into weather systems causing more extreme events should have been obvious.
I don't think it is immediately obvious that there will be more extreme events.
Every thermodynamic process has a heat source and a heat sink. If the sink warms as well as the source, then potentially there's no extra energy available.
There are various non-linearities (such as the saturation point of air) which make it more complicated than that, but the idea that all the extra energy is available is not true.
Butd surely extreme events by their definition are statistical extremes, and this brings into play the shifting of normal curves along the x-axis and all that.
The complication is that the shape of the normal distribution can change, as well as its centre point.
But people were aware of the risk of changes in extremes, though they didn't have any way to quantify that risk.
From physical first principles I think you'd expect more weather extremes from an increasing greenhouse effect.
As the greenhouse effect strengthens and heat is less readily rediated into space, it will increasing tend to move horizonally from the warmer to the cooler parts of the Earth. This is apparent from the fact that the poles are warming faster than the tropics. If more heat has to be transferred from place to place, then you'd imagine that the weather needed to do this would become more dynamic. This could manifest as increasing numbers of storms, or increasing storm intensity, or elements of both.
Edit: It is true though that variation in the incidence and intensity of storms as a result of climate change is a trickier prediction to make, especially at a local level. Unlike, say, sea level rise which is pretty much a certainty.
The poles are warming faster mainly due to the sea-ice feedback. Less sea ice, less sunlight reflected, more warming of the darker ocean.
This reduces the temperature gradient between tropics and poles, and so would be expected to reduce the strength of the jet stream (potentially making it more wavy and kissing to more blocking high breakdowns) and lower storm activity.
However, the warmer sea temperatures make more energy available for each individual storm.
Tentatively I would suggest that's what we're seeing. Fewer, but more intense, storms. More rain over the year, but falling in fewer events. That would tend to lead to more flooding, and it's not great for agriculture.
Arctic amplification has a number of causes; these include both the ice albedo effect you mention and other processes, including increased transport of water vapour (and hence heat) from the equatorial regions.
The poles would still be warming more rapidly even in the absence of ice, given that the more you insulate an unevenly heated body, the more even its temperature will become and the more heat will need to be transported across it.
The last part is wrong.
More insulation, more evenly heated - yes. More evenly heated, more heat transfer - absolutely not.
But yes! It's helpful again to consider Venus as an extreme example. Like the other planets, it receives far more heat in the form of solar radiation at its equator than it does at its poles. Yet, because it is so well insulated, the poles are only very slightly cooler than the equator. This means that both the equator and the poles must be radiating about the same amount of heat. This can only happen if heat is transported from the equator to the poles.
In summary, the more you insulate an unevenly heated body, the more even (and of course hotter) its temperature becomes. The more even its temperature becomes, the more evenly it radiates heat. The more evenly it radiates heat, the more heat has to be transported from the more strongly heated areas to the more weakly heated areas.
I don't know much about the climate of Venus but if, for example, not much heat is entering the system, and not much heat is leaving the system, then you don't need to transport much heat to even out the temperature. And the albedo of Venus is pretty high.
The UK had a £26bn tourism deficit in the first half of the year:
Overseas residents made an estimated 7.2 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £4.7 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.
Overseas residents made an estimated 9.3 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £7.9 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 18.7 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £16.5 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 26.0 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £22.1 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.
Which is approximately how much money the government borrowed from foreign sources.
Just think if we could only create a giant sun and get rid of the excrement from the South Coast beaches we could have our own Cote d'Azur and all Rachel's problems would be over
That might happen, as tourists notice the traditional Mediterranean resorts are becoming unpleasantly hot, and look for alternatives.
I'll be investing heavily in a chain of paella shops across Margate, Blackpool and Yarmouth come 2035.
Back in the late 1980s, Jonathon Porrit of the Greens came on Radio 4 to tell us of the dangers of Global Warming.
He finished by saying that if nothing was done, “they will be growing palm trees on the beach at Bournemouth”.
I was very young but I remember thinking that that argument was a terrible way to convince people there was a problem.
In the UK and much of the world the initial problems are more the increase in extreme weather rather than the temperature rise. Not sure if they knew that was also coming back in the 80s or not.
They didn't. The assumption seemed to be, IIRC, that temperatures would increase all round, fairly evenly. In retrospect, the addition of energy into weather systems causing more extreme events should have been obvious.
I don't think it is immediately obvious that there will be more extreme events.
Every thermodynamic process has a heat source and a heat sink. If the sink warms as well as the source, then potentially there's no extra energy available.
There are various non-linearities (such as the saturation point of air) which make it more complicated than that, but the idea that all the extra energy is available is not true.
Butd surely extreme events by their definition are statistical extremes, and this brings into play the shifting of normal curves along the x-axis and all that.
The complication is that the shape of the normal distribution can change, as well as its centre point.
But people were aware of the risk of changes in extremes, though they didn't have any way to quantify that risk.
From physical first principles I think you'd expect more weather extremes from an increasing greenhouse effect.
As the greenhouse effect strengthens and heat is less readily rediated into space, it will increasing tend to move horizonally from the warmer to the cooler parts of the Earth. This is apparent from the fact that the poles are warming faster than the tropics. If more heat has to be transferred from place to place, then you'd imagine that the weather needed to do this would become more dynamic. This could manifest as increasing numbers of storms, or increasing storm intensity, or elements of both.
Edit: It is true though that variation in the incidence and intensity of storms as a result of climate change is a trickier prediction to make, especially at a local level. Unlike, say, sea level rise which is pretty much a certainty.
The poles are warming faster mainly due to the sea-ice feedback. Less sea ice, less sunlight reflected, more warming of the darker ocean.
This reduces the temperature gradient between tropics and poles, and so would be expected to reduce the strength of the jet stream (potentially making it more wavy and kissing to more blocking high breakdowns) and lower storm activity.
However, the warmer sea temperatures make more energy available for each individual storm.
Tentatively I would suggest that's what we're seeing. Fewer, but more intense, storms. More rain over the year, but falling in fewer events. That would tend to lead to more flooding, and it's not great for agriculture.
Arctic amplification has a number of causes; these include both the ice albedo effect you mention and other processes, including increased transport of water vapour (and hence heat) from the equatorial regions.
The poles would still be warming more rapidly even in the absence of ice, given that the more you insulate an unevenly heated body, the more even its temperature will become and the more heat will need to be transported across it.
The last part is wrong.
More insulation, more evenly heated - yes. More evenly heated, more heat transfer - absolutely not.
But yes! It's helpful again to consider Venus as an extreme example. Like the other planets, it receives far more heat in the form of solar radiation at its equator than it does at its poles. Yet, because it is so well insulated, the poles are only very slightly cooler than the equator. This means that both the equator and the poles must be radiating about the same amount of heat. This can only happen if heat is transported from the equator to the poles.
In summary, the more you insulate an unevenly heated body, the more even (and of course hotter) its temperature becomes. The more even its temperature becomes, the more evenly it radiates heat. The more evenly it radiates heat, the more heat has to be transported from the more strongly heated areas to the more weakly heated areas.
What's the mechanism for transferring heat faster with a smaller temperature difference? All heat transfer is driven by ΔT.
There's a bad assumption here.
Remember that your insulation also rejects heating.
As it is Halloween, I had the pleasure of seeing a body wrapped in bin liners, hanging from a gibbet outside a nearby house.
This year they've made a special effort, and included a hessian sack over the head.
Truly heartwarming.
Delightful to see how the Brits have really taken to Halloween. Just had a pub lunch and a very excited coven of maybe 6-year old witches came in. The overlap with half-term has worked well this year.
Swings and roundabouts for me. I think Bonfire night is waning as Halloween is waxing. I suppose if I had to choose one of the other I'd go with Halloween - its a lot of fun and less annoying than fireworks for four weeks either side of Nov 5th. But I like my year to have its milestones and Halloween followed by Bonfire night followed by Nov 11th is part of that. And then its the run up to Christmas
As it is Halloween, I had the pleasure of seeing a body wrapped in bin liners, hanging from a gibbet outside a nearby house.
This year they've made a special effort, and included a hessian sack over the head.
Truly heartwarming.
Delightful to see how the Brits have really taken to Halloween. Just had a pub lunch and a very excited coven of maybe 6-year old witches came in. The overlap with half-term has worked well this year.
It's a British festival.
Well it was, but the commercial elements have overridden the pagan and dark green religion elements of it. What we need is an Irish billionaire, a standing stone, and some masks with a hummable tune...
("...one more day to Halloween, Silver Shamrock...")
So I reckon Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was the last Duke of York because no future monarch will bestow that title again given what the title is associated with.
So what title will the second child/son of a monarch be awarded in the future.
So I reckon Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was the last Duke of York because no future monarch will bestow that title again given what the title is associated with.
So what title will the second child/son of a monarch be awarded in the future.
I’d go for the Duke of Stoke/Earl of Glasgow.
Duke of Edinburgh will be a popular one to keep in use. It has an award.
They already had to create a new one for Harry because the previous generation was hanging around, so they won't be shy about creating new ones.
So I reckon Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was the last Duke of York because no future monarch will bestow that title again given what the title is associated with.
So what title will the second child/son of a monarch be awarded in the future.
So I reckon Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was the last Duke of York because no future monarch will bestow that title again given what the title is associated with.
So what title will the second child/son of a monarch be awarded in the future.
I’d go for the Duke of Stoke/Earl of Glasgow.
Duke of York is the historic title going back to the fourteeenth century for the second eldest son of the monarch, hence why so many of them became Kings, James II, George VI. George V was never Duke of York though.
"Farage is comparable to Hitler, Zarah Sultana suggests Reform UK leader is a danger and shares features with fascist leaders, says Left-wing party founder
So I reckon Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was the last Duke of York because no future monarch will bestow that title again given what the title is associated with.
So what title will the second child/son of a monarch be awarded in the future.
I’d go for the Duke of Stoke/Earl of Glasgow.
Duke of Edinburgh will be a popular one to keep in use. It has an award.
They already had to create a new one for Harry because the previous generation was hanging around, so they won't be shy about creating new ones.
Prince Edward is the Duke of Edinburgh and is likely to be around when William’s kids start getting married and expecting titles.
So I reckon Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was the last Duke of York because no future monarch will bestow that title again given what the title is associated with.
So what title will the second child/son of a monarch be awarded in the future.
I’d go for the Duke of Stoke/Earl of Glasgow.
Duke of Edinburgh will be a popular one to keep in use. It has an award.
They already had to create a new one for Harry because the previous generation was hanging around, so they won't be shy about creating new ones.
Prince Edward is the Duke of Edinburgh and is likely to be around when William’s kids start getting married and expecting titles.
"Farage is comparable to Hitler, Zarah Sultana suggests Reform UK leader is a danger and shares features with fascist leaders, says Left-wing party founder
So I reckon Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was the last Duke of York because no future monarch will bestow that title again given what the title is associated with.
So what title will the second child/son of a monarch be awarded in the future.
I’d go for the Duke of Stoke/Earl of Glasgow.
The City of York should sue for reparations.
Just as well the poor old RN doesn't have a HMS Duke of York. Rather surprisingly a very infrequent ship name, but it did have unfortunate associations given the only one to have much of a naval career in command, aka James VII and II to be. Weren't the others mainly brown jobs anyway?
EXCLUSIVE: After Trump took over the Kennedy Center in Feb, he vowed to make it "hot" again. So, how's it doing? @jeremybmerrill.com and I used data from the center's ticketing website to find out. Ticket sales are lowest they've been since the pandemic.
So I reckon Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was the last Duke of York because no future monarch will bestow that title again given what the title is associated with.
So what title will the second child/son of a monarch be awarded in the future.
I’d go for the Duke of Stoke/Earl of Glasgow.
Duke of York is the historic title going back to the fourteeenth century for the second eldest son of the monarch, hence why so many of them became Kings, James II, George VI. George V was never Duke of York though.
He got his own KGV-class 14" x 9 gun battleship though.
So I reckon Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was the last Duke of York because no future monarch will bestow that title again given what the title is associated with.
So what title will the second child/son of a monarch be awarded in the future.
I’d go for the Duke of Stoke/Earl of Glasgow.
Duke of Edinburgh will be a popular one to keep in use. It has an award.
They already had to create a new one for Harry because the previous generation was hanging around, so they won't be shy about creating new ones.
Does he get the East or West Sussex bit? That'll mean one left over.
The UK had a £26bn tourism deficit in the first half of the year:
Overseas residents made an estimated 7.2 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £4.7 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.
Overseas residents made an estimated 9.3 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £7.9 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 18.7 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £16.5 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 26.0 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £22.1 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.
Which is approximately how much money the government borrowed from foreign sources.
Just think if we could only create a giant sun and get rid of the excrement from the South Coast beaches we could have our own Cote d'Azur and all Rachel's problems would be over
That might happen, as tourists notice the traditional Mediterranean resorts are becoming unpleasantly hot, and look for alternatives.
I'll be investing heavily in a chain of paella shops across Margate, Blackpool and Yarmouth come 2035.
Back in the late 1980s, Jonathon Porrit of the Greens came on Radio 4 to tell us of the dangers of Global Warming.
He finished by saying that if nothing was done, “they will be growing palm trees on the beach at Bournemouth”.
I was very young but I remember thinking that that argument was a terrible way to convince people there was a problem.
In the UK and much of the world the initial problems are more the increase in extreme weather rather than the temperature rise. Not sure if they knew that was also coming back in the 80s or not.
They didn't. The assumption seemed to be, IIRC, that temperatures would increase all round, fairly evenly. In retrospect, the addition of energy into weather systems causing more extreme events should have been obvious.
I don't think it is immediately obvious that there will be more extreme events.
Every thermodynamic process has a heat source and a heat sink. If the sink warms as well as the source, then potentially there's no extra energy available.
There are various non-linearities (such as the saturation point of air) which make it more complicated than that, but the idea that all the extra energy is available is not true.
Butd surely extreme events by their definition are statistical extremes, and this brings into play the shifting of normal curves along the x-axis and all that.
The complication is that the shape of the normal distribution can change, as well as its centre point.
But people were aware of the risk of changes in extremes, though they didn't have any way to quantify that risk.
From physical first principles I think you'd expect more weather extremes from an increasing greenhouse effect.
As the greenhouse effect strengthens and heat is less readily rediated into space, it will increasing tend to move horizonally from the warmer to the cooler parts of the Earth. This is apparent from the fact that the poles are warming faster than the tropics. If more heat has to be transferred from place to place, then you'd imagine that the weather needed to do this would become more dynamic. This could manifest as increasing numbers of storms, or increasing storm intensity, or elements of both.
Edit: It is true though that variation in the incidence and intensity of storms as a result of climate change is a trickier prediction to make, especially at a local level. Unlike, say, sea level rise which is pretty much a certainty.
The poles are warming faster mainly due to the sea-ice feedback. Less sea ice, less sunlight reflected, more warming of the darker ocean.
This reduces the temperature gradient between tropics and poles, and so would be expected to reduce the strength of the jet stream (potentially making it more wavy and kissing to more blocking high breakdowns) and lower storm activity.
However, the warmer sea temperatures make more energy available for each individual storm.
Tentatively I would suggest that's what we're seeing. Fewer, but more intense, storms. More rain over the year, but falling in fewer events. That would tend to lead to more flooding, and it's not great for agriculture.
Arctic amplification has a number of causes; these include both the ice albedo effect you mention and other processes, including increased transport of water vapour (and hence heat) from the equatorial regions.
The poles would still be warming more rapidly even in the absence of ice, given that the more you insulate an unevenly heated body, the more even its temperature will become and the more heat will need to be transported across it.
The last part is wrong.
More insulation, more evenly heated - yes. More evenly heated, more heat transfer - absolutely not.
But yes! It's helpful again to consider Venus as an extreme example. Like the other planets, it receives far more heat in the form of solar radiation at its equator than it does at its poles. Yet, because it is so well insulated, the poles are only very slightly cooler than the equator. This means that both the equator and the poles must be radiating about the same amount of heat. This can only happen if heat is transported from the equator to the poles.
In summary, the more you insulate an unevenly heated body, the more even (and of course hotter) its temperature becomes. The more even its temperature becomes, the more evenly it radiates heat. The more evenly it radiates heat, the more heat has to be transported from the more strongly heated areas to the more weakly heated areas.
What's the mechanism for transferring heat faster with a smaller temperature difference? All heat transfer is driven by ΔT.
There's a bad assumption here.
Remember that your insulation also rejects heating.
Heat transfer is probably one of the most complex parts of Physics, difficult to teach and difficult to understand. But when you get an appocalyptic analysis thrown in by those who profit from projecting doom them any rationality leaves the room. To suggest Anthroprogenic Global Warming is not how a once teenager who skived more science lessons in school than she attended is to invite vilification. The earth is always in change and only for a short part of its 4.6B years have there been global icecaps. We are coming out of an ice age and earth would have been doing that whether we humans existed or not. Yes we will be affecting the speed, maybe, but not the final outcome. Eventually the sun will expand to the orbit of Jupiter and for earth the prospect is sub-optimal. Let us live in the World as it is ruled by the scientific laws as they are, not as a particularly ugly late adolescent might in her fantasies want them to be.
So I reckon Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was the last Duke of York because no future monarch will bestow that title again given what the title is associated with.
So what title will the second child/son of a monarch be awarded in the future.
I’d go for the Duke of Stoke/Earl of Glasgow.
Duke of Edinburgh will be a popular one to keep in use. It has an award.
They already had to create a new one for Harry because the previous generation was hanging around, so they won't be shy about creating new ones.
Prince Edward is the Duke of Edinburgh and is likely to be around when William’s kids start getting married and expecting titles.
Yes. They're always going to need to have a larger set to rotate through because of the number of generations alive at the same time is greater.
As it is Halloween, I had the pleasure of seeing a body wrapped in bin liners, hanging from a gibbet outside a nearby house.
This year they've made a special effort, and included a hessian sack over the head.
Truly heartwarming.
Delightful to see how the Brits have really taken to Halloween. Just had a pub lunch and a very excited coven of maybe 6-year old witches came in. The overlap with half-term has worked well this year.
Swings and roundabouts for me. I think Bonfire night is waning as Halloween is waxing. I suppose if I had to choose one of the other I'd go with Halloween - its a lot of fun and less annoying than fireworks for four weeks either side of Nov 5th. But I like my year to have its milestones and Halloween followed by Bonfire night followed by Nov 11th is part of that. And then its the run up to Christmas
What I term my 'Sacred Season'. Traditionally for me it starts with Harvest Festival/Last Night of the Proms and runs through to Candlemass on February 2nd. My favourite time of year by far. Most of my family birthdays (mine and my son's excepted) fall within that period so its a succession of celebrations including Michaelmas, Halloween, Bonfire Night, Yule, Christmas, New Year, Wassailing and Plough plays in early January.
As it is Halloween, I had the pleasure of seeing a body wrapped in bin liners, hanging from a gibbet outside a nearby house.
This year they've made a special effort, and included a hessian sack over the head.
Truly heartwarming.
Delightful to see how the Brits have really taken to Halloween. Just had a pub lunch and a very excited coven of maybe 6-year old witches came in. The overlap with half-term has worked well this year.
It's a British festival.
A spot of human sacrifice at Stonehenge, or Glastonbury, would enliven the festival.
As it is Halloween, I had the pleasure of seeing a body wrapped in bin liners, hanging from a gibbet outside a nearby house.
This year they've made a special effort, and included a hessian sack over the head.
Truly heartwarming.
Delightful to see how the Brits have really taken to Halloween. Just had a pub lunch and a very excited coven of maybe 6-year old witches came in. The overlap with half-term has worked well this year.
It's a British festival.
A spot of human sacrifice at Stonehenge, or Glastonbury, would enliven the festival.
Can I recommend Prince Andrew Mountbatten Windsor for a starring role? A new spin on Its A (Royal) Knockout?
So I reckon Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was the last Duke of York because no future monarch will bestow that title again given what the title is associated with.
So what title will the second child/son of a monarch be awarded in the future.
I’d go for the Duke of Stoke/Earl of Glasgow.
Duke of York is the historic title going back to the fourteeenth century for the second eldest son of the monarch, hence why so many of them became Kings, James II, George VI. George V was never Duke of York though.
George V was created Duke of York in 1892, following his elder brothers death (the one some people think was Jack the Ripper!)
The UK had a £26bn tourism deficit in the first half of the year:
Overseas residents made an estimated 7.2 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £4.7 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.
Overseas residents made an estimated 9.3 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £7.9 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 18.7 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £16.5 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 26.0 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £22.1 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.
Which is approximately how much money the government borrowed from foreign sources.
Just think if we could only create a giant sun and get rid of the excrement from the South Coast beaches we could have our own Cote d'Azur and all Rachel's problems would be over
That might happen, as tourists notice the traditional Mediterranean resorts are becoming unpleasantly hot, and look for alternatives.
I'll be investing heavily in a chain of paella shops across Margate, Blackpool and Yarmouth come 2035.
Back in the late 1980s, Jonathon Porrit of the Greens came on Radio 4 to tell us of the dangers of Global Warming.
He finished by saying that if nothing was done, “they will be growing palm trees on the beach at Bournemouth”.
I was very young but I remember thinking that that argument was a terrible way to convince people there was a problem.
In the UK and much of the world the initial problems are more the increase in extreme weather rather than the temperature rise. Not sure if they knew that was also coming back in the 80s or not.
They didn't. The assumption seemed to be, IIRC, that temperatures would increase all round, fairly evenly. In retrospect, the addition of energy into weather systems causing more extreme events should have been obvious.
I don't think it is immediately obvious that there will be more extreme events.
Every thermodynamic process has a heat source and a heat sink. If the sink warms as well as the source, then potentially there's no extra energy available.
There are various non-linearities (such as the saturation point of air) which make it more complicated than that, but the idea that all the extra energy is available is not true.
Butd surely extreme events by their definition are statistical extremes, and this brings into play the shifting of normal curves along the x-axis and all that.
The complication is that the shape of the normal distribution can change, as well as its centre point.
But people were aware of the risk of changes in extremes, though they didn't have any way to quantify that risk.
From physical first principles I think you'd expect more weather extremes from an increasing greenhouse effect.
As the greenhouse effect strengthens and heat is less readily rediated into space, it will increasing tend to move horizonally from the warmer to the cooler parts of the Earth. This is apparent from the fact that the poles are warming faster than the tropics. If more heat has to be transferred from place to place, then you'd imagine that the weather needed to do this would become more dynamic. This could manifest as increasing numbers of storms, or increasing storm intensity, or elements of both.
Edit: It is true though that variation in the incidence and intensity of storms as a result of climate change is a trickier prediction to make, especially at a local level. Unlike, say, sea level rise which is pretty much a certainty.
The poles are warming faster mainly due to the sea-ice feedback. Less sea ice, less sunlight reflected, more warming of the darker ocean.
This reduces the temperature gradient between tropics and poles, and so would be expected to reduce the strength of the jet stream (potentially making it more wavy and kissing to more blocking high breakdowns) and lower storm activity.
However, the warmer sea temperatures make more energy available for each individual storm.
Tentatively I would suggest that's what we're seeing. Fewer, but more intense, storms. More rain over the year, but falling in fewer events. That would tend to lead to more flooding, and it's not great for agriculture.
Arctic amplification has a number of causes; these include both the ice albedo effect you mention and other processes, including increased transport of water vapour (and hence heat) from the equatorial regions.
The poles would still be warming more rapidly even in the absence of ice, given that the more you insulate an unevenly heated body, the more even its temperature will become and the more heat will need to be transported across it.
The last part is wrong.
More insulation, more evenly heated - yes. More evenly heated, more heat transfer - absolutely not.
But yes! It's helpful again to consider Venus as an extreme example. Like the other planets, it receives far more heat in the form of solar radiation at its equator than it does at its poles. Yet, because it is so well insulated, the poles are only very slightly cooler than the equator. This means that both the equator and the poles must be radiating about the same amount of heat. This can only happen if heat is transported from the equator to the poles.
In summary, the more you insulate an unevenly heated body, the more even (and of course hotter) its temperature becomes. The more even its temperature becomes, the more evenly it radiates heat. The more evenly it radiates heat, the more heat has to be transported from the more strongly heated areas to the more weakly heated areas.
I don't know much about the climate of Venus but if, for example, not much heat is entering the system, and not much heat is leaving the system, then you don't need to transport much heat to even out the temperature. And the albedo of Venus is pretty high.
Venus certainly does have a high albedo, but it's also closer to the sun, which means it probably absorbs a similar amount of solar radiation as the Earth does. That's not really relevant though. The point is that equator receives more radiation than the poles, yet they both emit radaition at similar rates (being similar temperatures). The only way that can happen is because heat is being transported from the equator to the poles.
As Flatlander points out, though, rate of heat transfer is generally proportional to ΔT: P = kΔT. so if ΔT is getting smaller, the "constant" of proportionality k must be getting bigger. Other effects on which k depends, such as weather, must change to compensate for the reduced ΔT.
As it is Halloween, I had the pleasure of seeing a body wrapped in bin liners, hanging from a gibbet outside a nearby house.
This year they've made a special effort, and included a hessian sack over the head.
Truly heartwarming.
Delightful to see how the Brits have really taken to Halloween. Just had a pub lunch and a very excited coven of maybe 6-year old witches came in. The overlap with half-term has worked well this year.
The UK had a £26bn tourism deficit in the first half of the year:
Overseas residents made an estimated 7.2 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £4.7 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.
Overseas residents made an estimated 9.3 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £7.9 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 18.7 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £16.5 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 26.0 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £22.1 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.
Which is approximately how much money the government borrowed from foreign sources.
Just think if we could only create a giant sun and get rid of the excrement from the South Coast beaches we could have our own Cote d'Azur and all Rachel's problems would be over
That might happen, as tourists notice the traditional Mediterranean resorts are becoming unpleasantly hot, and look for alternatives.
I'll be investing heavily in a chain of paella shops across Margate, Blackpool and Yarmouth come 2035.
Back in the late 1980s, Jonathon Porrit of the Greens came on Radio 4 to tell us of the dangers of Global Warming.
He finished by saying that if nothing was done, “they will be growing palm trees on the beach at Bournemouth”.
I was very young but I remember thinking that that argument was a terrible way to convince people there was a problem.
In the UK and much of the world the initial problems are more the increase in extreme weather rather than the temperature rise. Not sure if they knew that was also coming back in the 80s or not.
They didn't. The assumption seemed to be, IIRC, that temperatures would increase all round, fairly evenly. In retrospect, the addition of energy into weather systems causing more extreme events should have been obvious.
I don't think it is immediately obvious that there will be more extreme events.
Every thermodynamic process has a heat source and a heat sink. If the sink warms as well as the source, then potentially there's no extra energy available.
There are various non-linearities (such as the saturation point of air) which make it more complicated than that, but the idea that all the extra energy is available is not true.
Butd surely extreme events by their definition are statistical extremes, and this brings into play the shifting of normal curves along the x-axis and all that.
The complication is that the shape of the normal distribution can change, as well as its centre point.
But people were aware of the risk of changes in extremes, though they didn't have any way to quantify that risk.
From physical first principles I think you'd expect more weather extremes from an increasing greenhouse effect.
As the greenhouse effect strengthens and heat is less readily rediated into space, it will increasing tend to move horizonally from the warmer to the cooler parts of the Earth. This is apparent from the fact that the poles are warming faster than the tropics. If more heat has to be transferred from place to place, then you'd imagine that the weather needed to do this would become more dynamic. This could manifest as increasing numbers of storms, or increasing storm intensity, or elements of both.
Edit: It is true though that variation in the incidence and intensity of storms as a result of climate change is a trickier prediction to make, especially at a local level. Unlike, say, sea level rise which is pretty much a certainty.
The poles are warming faster mainly due to the sea-ice feedback. Less sea ice, less sunlight reflected, more warming of the darker ocean.
This reduces the temperature gradient between tropics and poles, and so would be expected to reduce the strength of the jet stream (potentially making it more wavy and kissing to more blocking high breakdowns) and lower storm activity.
However, the warmer sea temperatures make more energy available for each individual storm.
Tentatively I would suggest that's what we're seeing. Fewer, but more intense, storms. More rain over the year, but falling in fewer events. That would tend to lead to more flooding, and it's not great for agriculture.
Arctic amplification has a number of causes; these include both the ice albedo effect you mention and other processes, including increased transport of water vapour (and hence heat) from the equatorial regions.
The poles would still be warming more rapidly even in the absence of ice, given that the more you insulate an unevenly heated body, the more even its temperature will become and the more heat will need to be transported across it.
The last part is wrong.
More insulation, more evenly heated - yes. More evenly heated, more heat transfer - absolutely not.
But yes! It's helpful again to consider Venus as an extreme example. Like the other planets, it receives far more heat in the form of solar radiation at its equator than it does at its poles. Yet, because it is so well insulated, the poles are only very slightly cooler than the equator. This means that both the equator and the poles must be radiating about the same amount of heat. This can only happen if heat is transported from the equator to the poles.
In summary, the more you insulate an unevenly heated body, the more even (and of course hotter) its temperature becomes. The more even its temperature becomes, the more evenly it radiates heat. The more evenly it radiates heat, the more heat has to be transported from the more strongly heated areas to the more weakly heated areas.
What's the mechanism for transferring heat faster with a smaller temperature difference? All heat transfer is driven by ΔT.
There's a bad assumption here.
Remember that your insulation also rejects heating.
Heat transfer is probably one of the most complex parts of Physics, difficult to teach and difficult to understand. But when you get an appocalyptic analysis thrown in by those who profit from projecting doom them any rationality leaves the room. To suggest Anthroprogenic Global Warming is not how a once teenager who skived more science lessons in school than she attended is to invite vilification. The earth is always in change and only for a short part of its 4.6B years have there been global icecaps. We are coming out of an ice age and earth would have been doing that whether we humans existed or not. Yes we will be affecting the speed, maybe, but not the final outcome. Eventually the sun will expand to the orbit of Jupiter and for earth the prospect is sub-optimal. Let us live in the World as it is ruled by the scientific laws as they are, not as a particularly ugly late adolescent might in her fantasies want them to be.
I have a first class degree in Astrophysics and a PhD in Plasma Physics. Heat transfer, especially radiative heat transfer, is one of the admittedly few areas in which I am reasonably knowledgeable.
That of course doesn't make my argument correct, and I'm happy to concede the point to a coherently framed counter argument.
The UK had a £26bn tourism deficit in the first half of the year:
Overseas residents made an estimated 7.2 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £4.7 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.
Overseas residents made an estimated 9.3 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £7.9 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 18.7 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £16.5 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 26.0 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £22.1 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.
Which is approximately how much money the government borrowed from foreign sources.
Just think if we could only create a giant sun and get rid of the excrement from the South Coast beaches we could have our own Cote d'Azur and all Rachel's problems would be over
That might happen, as tourists notice the traditional Mediterranean resorts are becoming unpleasantly hot, and look for alternatives.
I'll be investing heavily in a chain of paella shops across Margate, Blackpool and Yarmouth come 2035.
Back in the late 1980s, Jonathon Porrit of the Greens came on Radio 4 to tell us of the dangers of Global Warming.
He finished by saying that if nothing was done, “they will be growing palm trees on the beach at Bournemouth”.
I was very young but I remember thinking that that argument was a terrible way to convince people there was a problem.
In the UK and much of the world the initial problems are more the increase in extreme weather rather than the temperature rise. Not sure if they knew that was also coming back in the 80s or not.
They didn't. The assumption seemed to be, IIRC, that temperatures would increase all round, fairly evenly. In retrospect, the addition of energy into weather systems causing more extreme events should have been obvious.
I don't think it is immediately obvious that there will be more extreme events.
Every thermodynamic process has a heat source and a heat sink. If the sink warms as well as the source, then potentially there's no extra energy available.
There are various non-linearities (such as the saturation point of air) which make it more complicated than that, but the idea that all the extra energy is available is not true.
Butd surely extreme events by their definition are statistical extremes, and this brings into play the shifting of normal curves along the x-axis and all that.
The complication is that the shape of the normal distribution can change, as well as its centre point.
But people were aware of the risk of changes in extremes, though they didn't have any way to quantify that risk.
From physical first principles I think you'd expect more weather extremes from an increasing greenhouse effect.
As the greenhouse effect strengthens and heat is less readily rediated into space, it will increasing tend to move horizonally from the warmer to the cooler parts of the Earth. This is apparent from the fact that the poles are warming faster than the tropics. If more heat has to be transferred from place to place, then you'd imagine that the weather needed to do this would become more dynamic. This could manifest as increasing numbers of storms, or increasing storm intensity, or elements of both.
Edit: It is true though that variation in the incidence and intensity of storms as a result of climate change is a trickier prediction to make, especially at a local level. Unlike, say, sea level rise which is pretty much a certainty.
The poles are warming faster mainly due to the sea-ice feedback. Less sea ice, less sunlight reflected, more warming of the darker ocean.
This reduces the temperature gradient between tropics and poles, and so would be expected to reduce the strength of the jet stream (potentially making it more wavy and kissing to more blocking high breakdowns) and lower storm activity.
However, the warmer sea temperatures make more energy available for each individual storm.
Tentatively I would suggest that's what we're seeing. Fewer, but more intense, storms. More rain over the year, but falling in fewer events. That would tend to lead to more flooding, and it's not great for agriculture.
Arctic amplification has a number of causes; these include both the ice albedo effect you mention and other processes, including increased transport of water vapour (and hence heat) from the equatorial regions.
The poles would still be warming more rapidly even in the absence of ice, given that the more you insulate an unevenly heated body, the more even its temperature will become and the more heat will need to be transported across it.
The last part is wrong.
More insulation, more evenly heated - yes. More evenly heated, more heat transfer - absolutely not.
But yes! It's helpful again to consider Venus as an extreme example. Like the other planets, it receives far more heat in the form of solar radiation at its equator than it does at its poles. Yet, because it is so well insulated, the poles are only very slightly cooler than the equator. This means that both the equator and the poles must be radiating about the same amount of heat. This can only happen if heat is transported from the equator to the poles.
In summary, the more you insulate an unevenly heated body, the more even (and of course hotter) its temperature becomes. The more even its temperature becomes, the more evenly it radiates heat. The more evenly it radiates heat, the more heat has to be transported from the more strongly heated areas to the more weakly heated areas.
What's the mechanism for transferring heat faster with a smaller temperature difference? All heat transfer is driven by ΔT.
There's a bad assumption here.
Remember that your insulation also rejects heating.
Heat transfer is probably one of the most complex parts of Physics, difficult to teach and difficult to understand. But when you get an appocalyptic analysis thrown in by those who profit from projecting doom them any rationality leaves the room. To suggest Anthroprogenic Global Warming is not how a once teenager who skived more science lessons in school than she attended is to invite vilification. The earth is always in change and only for a short part of its 4.6B years have there been global icecaps. We are coming out of an ice age and earth would have been doing that whether we humans existed or not. Yes we will be affecting the speed, maybe, but not the final outcome. Eventually the sun will expand to the orbit of Jupiter and for earth the prospect is sub-optimal. Let us live in the World as it is ruled by the scientific laws as they are, not as a particularly ugly late adolescent might in her fantasies want them to be.
Thanks pal that's made feel so much better about the next 60 years of my life. Best sit back and enjoy the popcorn.
The UK had a £26bn tourism deficit in the first half of the year:
Overseas residents made an estimated 7.2 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £4.7 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.
Overseas residents made an estimated 9.3 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £7.9 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 18.7 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £16.5 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 26.0 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £22.1 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.
Which is approximately how much money the government borrowed from foreign sources.
Just think if we could only create a giant sun and get rid of the excrement from the South Coast beaches we could have our own Cote d'Azur and all Rachel's problems would be over
That might happen, as tourists notice the traditional Mediterranean resorts are becoming unpleasantly hot, and look for alternatives.
I'll be investing heavily in a chain of paella shops across Margate, Blackpool and Yarmouth come 2035.
Back in the late 1980s, Jonathon Porrit of the Greens came on Radio 4 to tell us of the dangers of Global Warming.
He finished by saying that if nothing was done, “they will be growing palm trees on the beach at Bournemouth”.
I was very young but I remember thinking that that argument was a terrible way to convince people there was a problem.
In the UK and much of the world the initial problems are more the increase in extreme weather rather than the temperature rise. Not sure if they knew that was also coming back in the 80s or not.
They didn't. The assumption seemed to be, IIRC, that temperatures would increase all round, fairly evenly. In retrospect, the addition of energy into weather systems causing more extreme events should have been obvious.
I don't think it is immediately obvious that there will be more extreme events.
Every thermodynamic process has a heat source and a heat sink. If the sink warms as well as the source, then potentially there's no extra energy available.
There are various non-linearities (such as the saturation point of air) which make it more complicated than that, but the idea that all the extra energy is available is not true.
Butd surely extreme events by their definition are statistical extremes, and this brings into play the shifting of normal curves along the x-axis and all that.
The complication is that the shape of the normal distribution can change, as well as its centre point.
But people were aware of the risk of changes in extremes, though they didn't have any way to quantify that risk.
From physical first principles I think you'd expect more weather extremes from an increasing greenhouse effect.
As the greenhouse effect strengthens and heat is less readily rediated into space, it will increasing tend to move horizonally from the warmer to the cooler parts of the Earth. This is apparent from the fact that the poles are warming faster than the tropics. If more heat has to be transferred from place to place, then you'd imagine that the weather needed to do this would become more dynamic. This could manifest as increasing numbers of storms, or increasing storm intensity, or elements of both.
Edit: It is true though that variation in the incidence and intensity of storms as a result of climate change is a trickier prediction to make, especially at a local level. Unlike, say, sea level rise which is pretty much a certainty.
The poles are warming faster mainly due to the sea-ice feedback. Less sea ice, less sunlight reflected, more warming of the darker ocean.
This reduces the temperature gradient between tropics and poles, and so would be expected to reduce the strength of the jet stream (potentially making it more wavy and kissing to more blocking high breakdowns) and lower storm activity.
However, the warmer sea temperatures make more energy available for each individual storm.
Tentatively I would suggest that's what we're seeing. Fewer, but more intense, storms. More rain over the year, but falling in fewer events. That would tend to lead to more flooding, and it's not great for agriculture.
Arctic amplification has a number of causes; these include both the ice albedo effect you mention and other processes, including increased transport of water vapour (and hence heat) from the equatorial regions.
The poles would still be warming more rapidly even in the absence of ice, given that the more you insulate an unevenly heated body, the more even its temperature will become and the more heat will need to be transported across it.
The last part is wrong.
More insulation, more evenly heated - yes. More evenly heated, more heat transfer - absolutely not.
But yes! It's helpful again to consider Venus as an extreme example. Like the other planets, it receives far more heat in the form of solar radiation at its equator than it does at its poles. Yet, because it is so well insulated, the poles are only very slightly cooler than the equator. This means that both the equator and the poles must be radiating about the same amount of heat. This can only happen if heat is transported from the equator to the poles.
In summary, the more you insulate an unevenly heated body, the more even (and of course hotter) its temperature becomes. The more even its temperature becomes, the more evenly it radiates heat. The more evenly it radiates heat, the more heat has to be transported from the more strongly heated areas to the more weakly heated areas.
I don't know much about the climate of Venus but if, for example, not much heat is entering the system, and not much heat is leaving the system, then you don't need to transport much heat to even out the temperature. And the albedo of Venus is pretty high.
Venus certainly does have a high albedo, but it's also closer to the sun, which means it probably absorbs a similar amount of solar radiation as the Earth does. That's not really relevant though. The point is that equator receives more radiation than the poles, yet they both emit radaition at similar rates (being similar temperatures). The only way that can happen is because heat is being transported from the equator to the poles.
As Flatlander points out, though, rate of heat transfer is generally proportional to ΔT: P = kΔT. so if ΔT is getting smaller, the "constant" of proportionality k must be getting bigger. Other effects on which k depends, such as weather, must change to compensate for the reduced ΔT.
It's relevant because it determines how much heat needs to be transported.
Because of the tilt of the Earth we know that a stronger pole to equator temperature gradient creates more storm activity, because we see this with the difference between the strength of storm activity in summer and winter.
So you must have the causality the wrong way round.
In a moment of idle curiosity before going off and doing something else, I looked on google maps and there are three of them. Aldborough, Norwich and Royston. No idea why the cluster.
Imagine having to change your address for that man ...
Edit: moral is, never name a public park or street after a living person, or anyone who hasn't been dead for say 6 years. Just in case.
The people of Savile Row were completely stitched up.
In case TSE is wondering, "I am an f*cking idiot" in Dutch is:
Ik ben een verdomde idioot.
Is that Single Dutch or Double Dutch? As an inveterate lawyer TSE must surely be conversant with the latter.
I'm currently roaming around the USA. Everything seems perfectly normal here, apart from occasional performative ICE raids that ratchet up fear among a very small % of the population. Back in the day chancellor Dennis Healy recalled earnest student debates in the 1930s about 'who will do the dirty work under socialism?' 'Later in life,' he quipped, 'I discovered it was me.'
In the 2030s who would do the dirty work under Fascism? In reality there's no-one available on the scale they aspire do. ICE is two orders of magnitude too small to make any real difference to American lives. There's light at the end of the tunnel, comrades.
So I reckon Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was the last Duke of York because no future monarch will bestow that title again given what the title is associated with.
So what title will the second child/son of a monarch be awarded in the future.
I’d go for the Duke of Stoke/Earl of Glasgow.
Duke of York is the historic title going back to the fourteeenth century for the second eldest son of the monarch, hence why so many of them became Kings, James II, George VI. George V was never Duke of York though.
Fifteenth century. First second son of a king to hold the title was Richard of Shrewsbury in 1473. Henry VII then used it for his second son as a pointed rebuke to Yorkist plotters, James VI and I used it for his second son Charles to show he could and from thereon it became a tradition.
Before that, Edmund of Langley was the fifth son and the traditional title for the heir's next brother was Duke of Clarence. Given that the Duke of Clarence was accused of witchcraft and committed multiple acts of treason before being drowned in a vat of sweet wine, you can see why that title became a touch less fashionable...
In a moment of idle curiosity before going off and doing something else, I looked on google maps and there are three of them. Aldborough, Norwich and Royston. No idea why the cluster.
Imagine having to change your address for that man ...
Edit: moral is, never name a public park or street after a living person, or anyone who hasn't been dead for say 6 years. Just in case.
The people of Savile Row were completely stitched up.
The UK had a £26bn tourism deficit in the first half of the year:
Overseas residents made an estimated 7.2 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £4.7 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.
Overseas residents made an estimated 9.3 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £7.9 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 18.7 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £16.5 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 26.0 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £22.1 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.
Which is approximately how much money the government borrowed from foreign sources.
Just think if we could only create a giant sun and get rid of the excrement from the South Coast beaches we could have our own Cote d'Azur and all Rachel's problems would be over
That might happen, as tourists notice the traditional Mediterranean resorts are becoming unpleasantly hot, and look for alternatives.
I'll be investing heavily in a chain of paella shops across Margate, Blackpool and Yarmouth come 2035.
Back in the late 1980s, Jonathon Porrit of the Greens came on Radio 4 to tell us of the dangers of Global Warming.
He finished by saying that if nothing was done, “they will be growing palm trees on the beach at Bournemouth”.
I was very young but I remember thinking that that argument was a terrible way to convince people there was a problem.
In the UK and much of the world the initial problems are more the increase in extreme weather rather than the temperature rise. Not sure if they knew that was also coming back in the 80s or not.
They didn't. The assumption seemed to be, IIRC, that temperatures would increase all round, fairly evenly. In retrospect, the addition of energy into weather systems causing more extreme events should have been obvious.
I don't think it is immediately obvious that there will be more extreme events.
Every thermodynamic process has a heat source and a heat sink. If the sink warms as well as the source, then potentially there's no extra energy available.
There are various non-linearities (such as the saturation point of air) which make it more complicated than that, but the idea that all the extra energy is available is not true.
Butd surely extreme events by their definition are statistical extremes, and this brings into play the shifting of normal curves along the x-axis and all that.
The complication is that the shape of the normal distribution can change, as well as its centre point.
But people were aware of the risk of changes in extremes, though they didn't have any way to quantify that risk.
From physical first principles I think you'd expect more weather extremes from an increasing greenhouse effect.
As the greenhouse effect strengthens and heat is less readily rediated into space, it will increasing tend to move horizonally from the warmer to the cooler parts of the Earth. This is apparent from the fact that the poles are warming faster than the tropics. If more heat has to be transferred from place to place, then you'd imagine that the weather needed to do this would become more dynamic. This could manifest as increasing numbers of storms, or increasing storm intensity, or elements of both.
Edit: It is true though that variation in the incidence and intensity of storms as a result of climate change is a trickier prediction to make, especially at a local level. Unlike, say, sea level rise which is pretty much a certainty.
The poles are warming faster mainly due to the sea-ice feedback. Less sea ice, less sunlight reflected, more warming of the darker ocean.
This reduces the temperature gradient between tropics and poles, and so would be expected to reduce the strength of the jet stream (potentially making it more wavy and kissing to more blocking high breakdowns) and lower storm activity.
However, the warmer sea temperatures make more energy available for each individual storm.
Tentatively I would suggest that's what we're seeing. Fewer, but more intense, storms. More rain over the year, but falling in fewer events. That would tend to lead to more flooding, and it's not great for agriculture.
Arctic amplification has a number of causes; these include both the ice albedo effect you mention and other processes, including increased transport of water vapour (and hence heat) from the equatorial regions.
The poles would still be warming more rapidly even in the absence of ice, given that the more you insulate an unevenly heated body, the more even its temperature will become and the more heat will need to be transported across it.
The last part is wrong.
More insulation, more evenly heated - yes. More evenly heated, more heat transfer - absolutely not.
But yes! It's helpful again to consider Venus as an extreme example. Like the other planets, it receives far more heat in the form of solar radiation at its equator than it does at its poles. Yet, because it is so well insulated, the poles are only very slightly cooler than the equator. This means that both the equator and the poles must be radiating about the same amount of heat. This can only happen if heat is transported from the equator to the poles.
In summary, the more you insulate an unevenly heated body, the more even (and of course hotter) its temperature becomes. The more even its temperature becomes, the more evenly it radiates heat. The more evenly it radiates heat, the more heat has to be transported from the more strongly heated areas to the more weakly heated areas.
What's the mechanism for transferring heat faster with a smaller temperature difference? All heat transfer is driven by ΔT.
There's a bad assumption here.
Remember that your insulation also rejects heating.
Heat transfer is probably one of the most complex parts of Physics, difficult to teach and difficult to understand. But when you get an appocalyptic analysis thrown in by those who profit from projecting doom them any rationality leaves the room. To suggest Anthroprogenic Global Warming is not how a once teenager who skived more science lessons in school than she attended is to invite vilification. The earth is always in change and only for a short part of its 4.6B years have there been global icecaps. We are coming out of an ice age and earth would have been doing that whether we humans existed or not. Yes we will be affecting the speed, maybe, but not the final outcome. Eventually the sun will expand to the orbit of Jupiter and for earth the prospect is sub-optimal. Let us live in the World as it is ruled by the scientific laws as they are, not as a particularly ugly late adolescent might in her fantasies want them to be.
To be fair, it isn't just a young woman who has this idea. She was preceded by a man who said the same things, which carries much greater authority. Wasn't it Al Gore, or does memory deceive?
In a moment of idle curiosity before going off and doing something else, I looked on google maps and there are three of them. Aldborough, Norwich and Royston. No idea why the cluster.
Imagine having to change your address for that man ...
Edit: moral is, never name a public park or street after a living person, or anyone who hasn't been dead for say 6 years. Just in case.
Could be worse. Imagine living in Prince Andrew's Conduit.
The UK had a £26bn tourism deficit in the first half of the year:
Overseas residents made an estimated 7.2 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £4.7 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.
Overseas residents made an estimated 9.3 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £7.9 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 18.7 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £16.5 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 26.0 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £22.1 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.
Which is approximately how much money the government borrowed from foreign sources.
Just think if we could only create a giant sun and get rid of the excrement from the South Coast beaches we could have our own Cote d'Azur and all Rachel's problems would be over
That might happen, as tourists notice the traditional Mediterranean resorts are becoming unpleasantly hot, and look for alternatives.
I'll be investing heavily in a chain of paella shops across Margate, Blackpool and Yarmouth come 2035.
Back in the late 1980s, Jonathon Porrit of the Greens came on Radio 4 to tell us of the dangers of Global Warming.
He finished by saying that if nothing was done, “they will be growing palm trees on the beach at Bournemouth”.
I was very young but I remember thinking that that argument was a terrible way to convince people there was a problem.
In the UK and much of the world the initial problems are more the increase in extreme weather rather than the temperature rise. Not sure if they knew that was also coming back in the 80s or not.
They didn't. The assumption seemed to be, IIRC, that temperatures would increase all round, fairly evenly. In retrospect, the addition of energy into weather systems causing more extreme events should have been obvious.
I don't think it is immediately obvious that there will be more extreme events.
Every thermodynamic process has a heat source and a heat sink. If the sink warms as well as the source, then potentially there's no extra energy available.
There are various non-linearities (such as the saturation point of air) which make it more complicated than that, but the idea that all the extra energy is available is not true.
Butd surely extreme events by their definition are statistical extremes, and this brings into play the shifting of normal curves along the x-axis and all that.
The complication is that the shape of the normal distribution can change, as well as its centre point.
But people were aware of the risk of changes in extremes, though they didn't have any way to quantify that risk.
From physical first principles I think you'd expect more weather extremes from an increasing greenhouse effect.
As the greenhouse effect strengthens and heat is less readily rediated into space, it will increasing tend to move horizonally from the warmer to the cooler parts of the Earth. This is apparent from the fact that the poles are warming faster than the tropics. If more heat has to be transferred from place to place, then you'd imagine that the weather needed to do this would become more dynamic. This could manifest as increasing numbers of storms, or increasing storm intensity, or elements of both.
Edit: It is true though that variation in the incidence and intensity of storms as a result of climate change is a trickier prediction to make, especially at a local level. Unlike, say, sea level rise which is pretty much a certainty.
The poles are warming faster mainly due to the sea-ice feedback. Less sea ice, less sunlight reflected, more warming of the darker ocean.
This reduces the temperature gradient between tropics and poles, and so would be expected to reduce the strength of the jet stream (potentially making it more wavy and kissing to more blocking high breakdowns) and lower storm activity.
However, the warmer sea temperatures make more energy available for each individual storm.
Tentatively I would suggest that's what we're seeing. Fewer, but more intense, storms. More rain over the year, but falling in fewer events. That would tend to lead to more flooding, and it's not great for agriculture.
Arctic amplification has a number of causes; these include both the ice albedo effect you mention and other processes, including increased transport of water vapour (and hence heat) from the equatorial regions.
The poles would still be warming more rapidly even in the absence of ice, given that the more you insulate an unevenly heated body, the more even its temperature will become and the more heat will need to be transported across it.
The last part is wrong.
More insulation, more evenly heated - yes. More evenly heated, more heat transfer - absolutely not.
But yes! It's helpful again to consider Venus as an extreme example. Like the other planets, it receives far more heat in the form of solar radiation at its equator than it does at its poles. Yet, because it is so well insulated, the poles are only very slightly cooler than the equator. This means that both the equator and the poles must be radiating about the same amount of heat. This can only happen if heat is transported from the equator to the poles.
In summary, the more you insulate an unevenly heated body, the more even (and of course hotter) its temperature becomes. The more even its temperature becomes, the more evenly it radiates heat. The more evenly it radiates heat, the more heat has to be transported from the more strongly heated areas to the more weakly heated areas.
What's the mechanism for transferring heat faster with a smaller temperature difference? All heat transfer is driven by ΔT.
There's a bad assumption here.
Remember that your insulation also rejects heating.
Heat transfer is probably one of the most complex parts of Physics, difficult to teach and difficult to understand. But when you get an appocalyptic analysis thrown in by those who profit from projecting doom them any rationality leaves the room. To suggest Anthroprogenic Global Warming is not how a once teenager who skived more science lessons in school than she attended is to invite vilification. The earth is always in change and only for a short part of its 4.6B years have there been global icecaps. We are coming out of an ice age and earth would have been doing that whether we humans existed or not. Yes we will be affecting the speed, maybe, but not the final outcome. Eventually the sun will expand to the orbit of Jupiter and for earth the prospect is sub-optimal. Let us live in the World as it is ruled by the scientific laws as they are, not as a particularly ugly late adolescent might in her fantasies want them to be.
To be fair, it isn't just a young woman who has this idea. She was preceded by a man who said the same things, which carries much greater authority. Wasn't it Al Gore, or does memory deceive?
Lots and lots of people. Thatcher was receiving a briefing on global warming from British scientists while Al Gore was still busy creating the internet.
In case TSE is wondering, "I am an f*cking idiot" in Dutch is:
Ik ben een verdomde idioot.
Is that Single Dutch or Double Dutch? As an inveterate lawyer TSE must surely be conversant with the latter.
I'm currently roaming around the USA. Everything seems perfectly normal here, apart from occasional performative ICE raids that ratchet up fear among a very small % of the population. Back in the day chancellor Dennis Healy recalled earnest student debates in the 1930s about 'who will do the dirty work under socialism?' 'Later in life,' he quipped, 'I discovered it was me.'
In the 2030s who would do the dirty work under Fascism? In reality there's no-one available on the scale they aspire do. ICE is two orders of magnitude too small to make any real difference to American lives. There's light at the end of the tunnel, comrades.
In all police states, the police is tiny relative to the population.
Fear does most of the work.
The KGB* peaked at about 200k actual spies (bigger numbers include border guards and volunteer spies) - for a population of 286 million
RSHA (Germany) was 50k for 280 million (peak population conquered)
The OVRA (Italy) was 50k for 70 million (peak population conquered in WWII)
For comparison, ICE is 20k, expanding up to 30k under Trumps plans.
According to the Telegraph, Labour insisting that Mandy shouldn't lose his title over links to Epstein
Is this true? If so, a good move for Labour?
Maybe we should just abolish the peerage*.
Perhaps inadvertently, KCIII has now set a precedent that you can get your titles taken off you if you’ve been sufficiently naughty.
If he can take the titles off his brother why shouldn’t some Lord or Baroness who is caught doing something questionable get theirs removed too?
It is going to be a bit of a minefield. At the very least it may be the government has to set up some kind of independent forfeiture committee to avoid the monarch being dragged into the politics of scandal - every time there is one now, there will be a louder call for titles to be stripped.
*I would probably make an initial exception for some of the hereditaries, who at least have some history behind them holding a title.
I I was his recalcitrant grandson in California, I’d be more than a little worried this morning.
The precident has now been set.
Grandson? Has wee Archie been a naughty boy?
Archie will retain his titles and having a mixed race child in the line of succession has some advantages for the royals keeping Andrew with his titles now does not
Besides, Andrew has brought proper shame on the Family. Quite how bad that shame is, we will probably never find out, because the Family will make sure of it.
Harry just didn't want to play the game any more. And annoying as that is, he's the wrong nut to use the same sledgehammer on.
Harry still does play the game, he kept use of his titles and place in line of succession, he just couldn't be bothered with more royal duties unless he was King
Without his title he’s have much reduced ability to grift
In case TSE is wondering, "I am an f*cking idiot" in Dutch is:
Ik ben een verdomde idioot.
Is that Single Dutch or Double Dutch? As an inveterate lawyer TSE must surely be conversant with the latter.
I'm currently roaming around the USA. Everything seems perfectly normal here, apart from occasional performative ICE raids that ratchet up fear among a very small % of the population. Back in the day chancellor Dennis Healy recalled earnest student debates in the 1930s about 'who will do the dirty work under socialism?' 'Later in life,' he quipped, 'I discovered it was me.'
In the 2030s who would do the dirty work under Fascism? In reality there's no-one available on the scale they aspire do. ICE is two orders of magnitude too small to make any real difference to American lives. There's light at the end of the tunnel, comrades.
In all police states, the police is tiny relative to the population.
Fear does most of the work.
The KGB* peaked at about 200k actual spies (bigger numbers include border guards and volunteer spies) - for a population of 286 million
RSHA (Germany) was 50k for 280 million (peak population conquered)
The OVRA (Italy) was 50k for 70 million (peak population conquered in WWII)
*under a multiplicity of names
Fine KGB joke:
Two men are in a train carriage. One leans forward and says to the other, 'Do you want to hear some jokes about the KGB?'
'Before you go on,' said the other, 'I think you should know I'm a very senior officer in the KGB, holding the rank of colonel.'
'That's not a problem,' said the first man. 'I'll tell them very slowly and I'll even explain them to you.'
In case TSE is wondering, "I am an f*cking idiot" in Dutch is:
Ik ben een verdomde idioot.
Is that Single Dutch or Double Dutch? As an inveterate lawyer TSE must surely be conversant with the latter.
I'm currently roaming around the USA. Everything seems perfectly normal here, apart from occasional performative ICE raids that ratchet up fear among a very small % of the population. Back in the day chancellor Dennis Healy recalled earnest student debates in the 1930s about 'who will do the dirty work under socialism?' 'Later in life,' he quipped, 'I discovered it was me.'
In the 2030s who would do the dirty work under Fascism? In reality there's no-one available on the scale they aspire do. ICE is two orders of magnitude too small to make any real difference to American lives. There's light at the end of the tunnel, comrades.
In all police states, the police is tiny relative to the population.
Fear does most of the work.
The KGB* peaked at about 200k actual spies (bigger numbers include border guards and volunteer spies) - for a population of 286 million
RSHA (Germany) was 50k for 280 million (peak population conquered)
The OVRA (Italy) was 50k for 70 million (peak population conquered in WWII)
*under a multiplicity of names
Fine KGB joke:
Two men are in a train carriage. One leans forward and says to the other, 'Do you want to hear some jokes about the KGB?'
'Before you go on,' said the other, 'I think you should know I'm a very senior officer in the KGB, holding the rank of colonel.'
'That's not a problem,' said the first man. 'I'll tell them very slowly and I'll even explain them to you.'
KGB dog units consist of two officers and a dog. The two officers are required to keep an eye on the dangerous intellectual.
‘The money machine is misfiring’: City blames Brexit for UK’s £20bn productivity headache https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/oct/31/city-brexit-uk-productivity-eu-rachel-reeves-budget ..For Rob Rooney, the impact of Brexit for the City of London is clear. “Frankfurt, Madrid, Milan and Paris are all doing better than they were. It has been at London’s expense. There is no question about that.”
In his time as Morgan Stanley’s top executive in London, Rooney led the US investment bank’s relocation of hundreds of bankers and billions of pounds of assets to Frankfurt to sidestep Britain’s shock EU departure. More than 440 other City companies followed suit, moving almost £1tn between them – roughly 10% of the entire UK banking system – to financial hubs across the EU.
“I have friends and family who moved to Barcelona, Madrid and Paris. And these cities are all booming.”..
A lot of them are moving back.
Madrid is doing well based on people who fled Bolsanaro’a Brazil.
Milan recently doing very well because they have offered a sweet deal to non-doms from the UK
According to the Telegraph, Labour insisting that Mandy shouldn't lose his title over links to Epstein
Is this true? If so, a good move for Labour?
Maybe we should just abolish the peerage*.
Perhaps inadvertently, KCIII has now set a precedent that you can get your titles taken off you if you’ve been sufficiently naughty.
If he can take the titles off his brother why shouldn’t some Lord or Baroness who is caught doing something questionable get theirs removed too?
It is going to be a bit of a minefield. At the very least it may be the government has to set up some kind of independent forfeiture committee to avoid the monarch being dragged into the politics of scandal - every time there is one now, there will be a louder call for titles to be stripped.
*I would probably make an initial exception for some of the hereditaries, who at least have some history behind them holding a title.
Many, many titles were removed in the past, usually by separating the head from the body. It's probably best not to get Government/Parliament involved, tbh.
Er, the titles weren't removed. Just the heads. The titles remained in the family, AFAIK.
Typically they were suspended for years, sometimes generations, until the king was feeling sated
The UK had a £26bn tourism deficit in the first half of the year:
Overseas residents made an estimated 7.2 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £4.7 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.
Overseas residents made an estimated 9.3 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £7.9 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 18.7 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £16.5 billion in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2025.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 26.0 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £22.1 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025.
Which is approximately how much money the government borrowed from foreign sources.
Just think if we could only create a giant sun and get rid of the excrement from the South Coast beaches we could have our own Cote d'Azur and all Rachel's problems would be over
That might happen, as tourists notice the traditional Mediterranean resorts are becoming unpleasantly hot, and look for alternatives.
I'll be investing heavily in a chain of paella shops across Margate, Blackpool and Yarmouth come 2035.
Back in the late 1980s, Jonathon Porrit of the Greens came on Radio 4 to tell us of the dangers of Global Warming.
He finished by saying that if nothing was done, “they will be growing palm trees on the beach at Bournemouth”.
I was very young but I remember thinking that that argument was a terrible way to convince people there was a problem.
In the UK and much of the world the initial problems are more the increase in extreme weather rather than the temperature rise. Not sure if they knew that was also coming back in the 80s or not.
They didn't. The assumption seemed to be, IIRC, that temperatures would increase all round, fairly evenly. In retrospect, the addition of energy into weather systems causing more extreme events should have been obvious.
I don't think it is immediately obvious that there will be more extreme events.
Every thermodynamic process has a heat source and a heat sink. If the sink warms as well as the source, then potentially there's no extra energy available.
There are various non-linearities (such as the saturation point of air) which make it more complicated than that, but the idea that all the extra energy is available is not true.
Butd surely extreme events by their definition are statistical extremes, and this brings into play the shifting of normal curves along the x-axis and all that.
The complication is that the shape of the normal distribution can change, as well as its centre point.
But people were aware of the risk of changes in extremes, though they didn't have any way to quantify that risk.
From physical first principles I think you'd expect more weather extremes from an increasing greenhouse effect.
As the greenhouse effect strengthens and heat is less readily rediated into space, it will increasing tend to move horizonally from the warmer to the cooler parts of the Earth. This is apparent from the fact that the poles are warming faster than the tropics. If more heat has to be transferred from place to place, then you'd imagine that the weather needed to do this would become more dynamic. This could manifest as increasing numbers of storms, or increasing storm intensity, or elements of both.
Edit: It is true though that variation in the incidence and intensity of storms as a result of climate change is a trickier prediction to make, especially at a local level. Unlike, say, sea level rise which is pretty much a certainty.
The poles are warming faster mainly due to the sea-ice feedback. Less sea ice, less sunlight reflected, more warming of the darker ocean.
This reduces the temperature gradient between tropics and poles, and so would be expected to reduce the strength of the jet stream (potentially making it more wavy and kissing to more blocking high breakdowns) and lower storm activity.
However, the warmer sea temperatures make more energy available for each individual storm.
Tentatively I would suggest that's what we're seeing. Fewer, but more intense, storms. More rain over the year, but falling in fewer events. That would tend to lead to more flooding, and it's not great for agriculture.
Arctic amplification has a number of causes; these include both the ice albedo effect you mention and other processes, including increased transport of water vapour (and hence heat) from the equatorial regions.
The poles would still be warming more rapidly even in the absence of ice, given that the more you insulate an unevenly heated body, the more even its temperature will become and the more heat will need to be transported across it.
The last part is wrong.
More insulation, more evenly heated - yes. More evenly heated, more heat transfer - absolutely not.
But yes! It's helpful again to consider Venus as an extreme example. Like the other planets, it receives far more heat in the form of solar radiation at its equator than it does at its poles. Yet, because it is so well insulated, the poles are only very slightly cooler than the equator. This means that both the equator and the poles must be radiating about the same amount of heat. This can only happen if heat is transported from the equator to the poles.
In summary, the more you insulate an unevenly heated body, the more even (and of course hotter) its temperature becomes. The more even its temperature becomes, the more evenly it radiates heat. The more evenly it radiates heat, the more heat has to be transported from the more strongly heated areas to the more weakly heated areas.
What's the mechanism for transferring heat faster with a smaller temperature difference? All heat transfer is driven by ΔT.
There's a bad assumption here.
Remember that your insulation also rejects heating.
Heat transfer is probably one of the most complex parts of Physics, difficult to teach and difficult to understand. But when you get an appocalyptic analysis thrown in by those who profit from projecting doom them any rationality leaves the room. To suggest Anthroprogenic Global Warming is not how a once teenager who skived more science lessons in school than she attended is to invite vilification. The earth is always in change and only for a short part of its 4.6B years have there been global icecaps. We are coming out of an ice age and earth would have been doing that whether we humans existed or not. Yes we will be affecting the speed, maybe, but not the final outcome. Eventually the sun will expand to the orbit of Jupiter and for earth the prospect is sub-optimal. Let us live in the World as it is ruled by the scientific laws as they are, not as a particularly ugly late adolescent might in her fantasies want them to be.
To be fair, it isn't just a young woman who has this idea. She was preceded by a man who said the same things, which carries much greater authority. Wasn't it Al Gore, or does memory deceive?
I find it interesting that Greta (for I believe it is she who is being referred to) invites so much vituperation from I guess largely males of a certain age. It somewhat refutes their own claims of being vilified for putting forward rational views; it all seems very personal for those auld lads. Anyway I thought the auld lads had moved onto moaning about Greta speaking up for the Gazans rather than the planet.
According to the Telegraph, Labour insisting that Mandy shouldn't lose his title over links to Epstein
Is this true? If so, a good move for Labour?
Maybe we should just abolish the peerage*.
Perhaps inadvertently, KCIII has now set a precedent that you can get your titles taken off you if you’ve been sufficiently naughty.
If he can take the titles off his brother why shouldn’t some Lord or Baroness who is caught doing something questionable get theirs removed too?
It is going to be a bit of a minefield. At the very least it may be the government has to set up some kind of independent forfeiture committee to avoid the monarch being dragged into the politics of scandal - every time there is one now, there will be a louder call for titles to be stripped.
*I would probably make an initial exception for some of the hereditaries, who at least have some history behind them holding a title.
Many, many titles were removed in the past, usually by separating the head from the body. It's probably best not to get Government/Parliament involved, tbh.
Er, the titles weren't removed. Just the heads. The titles remained in the family, AFAIK.
Typically they were suspended for years, sometimes generations, until the king was feeling sated
Duke of Norfolk being suspended more often than a child with a compulsion for carrying knives.
This is such a heart warming story about love and multiculturalism working, fuck anyone who spins this as anti Muslim story.
A prison officer had sex with an inmate in a prison prayer room, a court heard.
Two inmates acted as lookouts as Isabelle Dale, 23, had sex with Shahid Sharif, a convicted robber, at HMP Coldingley in Surrey, it is claimed.
Sharif, who was three years into a twelve-year sentence, was transferred after the alleged encounter to HMP Swaleside, on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent.
However, he then conspired with Dale to help him smuggle envelopes “laced with spice” into his new prison, jurors heard.
Dale allegedly operated Sharif’s drug-dealing Snapchat account, and drug-smuggling paraphernalia was later found in the boot of the prison officer’s car, along with an engagement ring said by Dale to have been bought for her by Sharif.
UK RAF E-7 Wedgetail: the most expensive aircraft ever bought by the UK! Originally just over £2bn for 5, now £2.28bn for 3, making each cost £760m! And not a single useable aircraft has yet been delivered, with no prospect of such. IOC end of 2025? https://x.com/FTusa284/status/1984253324489826393
Comments
Ik ben een verdomde idioot.
This reduces the temperature gradient between tropics and poles, and so would be expected to reduce the strength of the jet stream (potentially making it more wavy and kissing to more blocking high breakdowns) and lower storm activity.
However, the warmer sea temperatures make more energy available for each individual storm.
Tentatively I would suggest that's what we're seeing. Fewer, but more intense, storms. More rain over the year, but falling in fewer events. That would tend to lead to more flooding, and it's not great for agriculture.
I remember speaking to one of Prince Andrew's protection team in 1989 when I was an RAF Police corporal at Northolt in 1989
The ex-Prince's flight was delayed and he was a bit "baity"
I asked the prot officer what Andrew was like
His reply was telling.
"He's a c**t."
The F-35B in UK Service – A Story of Compromise and Challenge
Views my own, corrections and comments welcomed. I have written on F-35B before - I am agnostic to it, I am more interested in outcome than platform. My view, we have the wrong aircraft to deliver the required outcome (2010 decision supports this), it’s a great (if expensive) aircraft for the USMC and the balance sheet of RR and BAES but not in a finance constrained UK where the SDR tells us NATO first and looks to the NE Atlantic and not the dreams and aspirations of global expeditionary warfare in 1998...
https://x.com/MtarfaL/status/1984226813766156658
Notable is the role of this character, who appear to have failed all the way up to Chief of the Defence Staff...
A recurring figure in this narrative is Air Chief Marshal Sir Rich Knighton, who has held roles as Senior Responsible Owner (SRO) for CEPP, Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff, Finance and Military Capability (FinMilCap), RAF Chief of the Air Staff (CAS), and now Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS) since September 2025. His career progression despite oversights raises questions about responsibility and accountability within the senior levels of the MoD (I have written about the MoD CIO and data leaks in detail, but he’s still in post).
https://x.com/MtarfaL/status/1984226960663273828
This year they've made a special effort, and included a hessian sack over the head.
Truly heartwarming.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-why-does-the-arctic-warm-faster-than-the-rest-of-the-planet/#:~:text=One of the key reasons,with so much rising air
Arctic amplification has a number of causes; these include both the ice albedo effect you mention and other processes, including increased transport of water vapour (and hence heat) from the equatorial regions.
The poles would still be warming more rapidly even in the absence of ice, given that the more you insulate an unevenly heated body, the more even its temperature will become and the more heat will need to be transported across it.
More insulation, more evenly heated - yes.
More evenly heated, more heat transfer - absolutely not.
Not to be tolerated.
By Mary Harrington" (£)
https://unherd.com/newsroom/andrew-is-modern-britains-scapegoat
In summary, the more you insulate an unevenly heated body, the more even (and of course hotter) its temperature becomes. The more even its temperature becomes, the more evenly it radiates heat. The more evenly it radiates heat, the more heat has to be transported from the more strongly heated areas to the more weakly heated areas.
‘The money machine is misfiring’: City blames Brexit for UK’s £20bn productivity headache
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/oct/31/city-brexit-uk-productivity-eu-rachel-reeves-budget
..For Rob Rooney, the impact of Brexit for the City of London is clear. “Frankfurt, Madrid, Milan and Paris are all doing better than they were. It has been at London’s expense. There is no question about that.”
In his time as Morgan Stanley’s top executive in London, Rooney led the US investment bank’s relocation of hundreds of bankers and billions of pounds of assets to Frankfurt to sidestep Britain’s shock EU departure. More than 440 other City companies followed suit, moving almost £1tn between them – roughly 10% of the entire UK banking system – to financial hubs across the EU.
“I have friends and family who moved to Barcelona, Madrid and Paris. And these cities are all booming.”..
If Polanski became PM, still admittedly very unlikely, would anyone not left of centre stay in the UK rather than emigrate?
Must be the best time of the year to dispose of inconvenient carcasses.
For towns like Wigan (not coincidentally Ms Nandy's constituency, but it's a nice idea). Apparently towns are smaller than cities. But let's not get into that debate again ...
Not sure Wigan has been written out. It's got a major literary classic by a great writer about its Pier.
Imagine having to change your address for that man ...
Edit: moral is, never name a public park or street after a living person, or anyone who hasn't been dead for say 6 years. Just in case.
https://www.wigan.gov.uk/Council/Our-Future-Borough/Wigan-Pier.aspx
Experts say analysis shows the local authority had reserves of nearly £1bn when it made the declaration in 2023
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/10/31/birmingham-council-probably-never-bankrupt-analysis-experts/
Oops.
There's a bad assumption here.
Remember that your insulation also rejects heating.
("...one more day to Halloween, Silver Shamrock...")
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tRXG8DFy5k
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_III:_Season_of_the_Witch
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Green_Religion
So what title will the second child/son of a monarch be awarded in the future.
I’d go for the Duke of Stoke/Earl of Glasgow.
15 Prince Andrew's Close
(No - not that one)...
They already had to create a new one for Harry because the previous generation was hanging around, so they won't be shy about creating new ones.
Reform UK leader is a danger and shares features with fascist leaders, says Left-wing party founder
Dominic Penna
Senior Political Correspondent"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/10/31/zarah-sultana-nigel-farage-danger
EXCLUSIVE: After Trump took over the Kennedy Center in Feb, he vowed to make it "hot" again. So, how's it doing?
@jeremybmerrill.com and I used data from the center's ticketing website to find out. Ticket sales are lowest they've been since the pandemic.
https://bsky.app/profile/travismandrews.bsky.social/post/3m4ik6eimuc2b
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/prediction_main.html
So Farage PM with DUP and TUV confidence and supply
So you won't have a single title for the spare.
PrinceAndrew Mountbatten Windsor for a starring role? A new spin on Its A (Royal) Knockout?As Flatlander points out, though, rate of heat transfer is generally proportional to ΔT: P = kΔT. so if ΔT is getting smaller, the "constant" of proportionality k must be getting bigger. Other effects on which k depends, such as weather, must change to compensate for the reduced ΔT.
That of course doesn't make my argument correct, and I'm happy to concede the point to a coherently framed counter argument.
Beautifully, under the circs, it’s also in Norfolk.
Because of the tilt of the Earth we know that a stronger pole to equator temperature gradient creates more storm activity, because we see this with the difference between the strength of storm activity in summer and winter.
So you must have the causality the wrong way round.
I'm currently roaming around the USA. Everything seems perfectly normal here, apart from occasional performative ICE raids that ratchet up fear among a very small % of the population. Back in the day chancellor Dennis Healy recalled earnest student debates in the 1930s about 'who will do the dirty work under socialism?' 'Later in life,' he quipped, 'I discovered it was me.'
In the 2030s who would do the dirty work under Fascism? In reality there's no-one available on the scale they aspire do. ICE is two orders of magnitude too small to make any real difference to American lives. There's light at the end of the tunnel, comrades.
Before that, Edmund of Langley was the fifth son and the traditional title for the heir's next brother was Duke of Clarence. Given that the Duke of Clarence was accused of witchcraft and committed multiple acts of treason before being drowned in a vat of sweet wine, you can see why that title became a touch less fashionable...
Imagine living in Prince Andrew's Conduit.
Fear does most of the work.
The KGB* peaked at about 200k actual spies (bigger numbers include border guards and volunteer spies) - for a population of 286 million
RSHA (Germany) was 50k for 280 million (peak population conquered)
The OVRA (Italy) was 50k for 70 million (peak population conquered in WWII)
For comparison, ICE is 20k, expanding up to 30k under Trumps plans.
*under a multiplicity of names
Two men are in a train carriage. One leans forward and says to the other, 'Do you want to hear some jokes about the KGB?'
'Before you go on,' said the other, 'I think you should know I'm a very senior officer in the KGB, holding the rank of colonel.'
'That's not a problem,' said the first man. 'I'll tell them very slowly and I'll even explain them to you.'
Madrid is doing well based on people who fled Bolsanaro’a Brazil.
Milan recently doing very well because they have offered a sweet deal to non-doms from the UK
Anyway I thought the auld lads had moved onto moaning about Greta speaking up for the Gazans rather than the planet.
A prison officer had sex with an inmate in a prison prayer room, a court heard.
Two inmates acted as lookouts as Isabelle Dale, 23, had sex with Shahid Sharif, a convicted robber, at HMP Coldingley in Surrey, it is claimed.
Sharif, who was three years into a twelve-year sentence, was transferred after the alleged encounter to HMP Swaleside, on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent.
However, he then conspired with Dale to help him smuggle envelopes “laced with spice” into his new prison, jurors heard.
Dale allegedly operated Sharif’s drug-dealing Snapchat account, and drug-smuggling paraphernalia was later found in the boot of the prison officer’s car, along with an engagement ring said by Dale to have been bought for her by Sharif.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/10/27/prison-officer-sex-inmate-prayer-room-hmp-coldingley-court/
UK RAF E-7 Wedgetail: the most expensive aircraft ever bought by the UK! Originally just over £2bn for 5, now £2.28bn for 3, making each cost £760m! And not a single useable aircraft has yet been delivered, with no prospect of such. IOC end of 2025?
https://x.com/FTusa284/status/1984253324489826393
Andrew had '40 prostitutes brought to five-star Thailand hotel room' during four-day taxpayer funded trip, author claims
https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/andrew-prostitutes-thailand-trip-5HjdGCQ_2/