Whitey Grandad

I've been in Denmark and Canada when snow fell and everything ground to a halt.

The same could be said about Brown...

My pleasure. Sunspots are only an indication of what's happening internally in the sun and the mechanism is not really understood, if at all. It is unusually quiet at the moment and should be building up towards 2011. I have always promised my wife I'd take her to see the Northern Lights so I have been waiting for the activity to increase but I may have to wait a little longer. http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/01apr_deepsolarminimum.htm http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/05/090504-sun-global-cooling.html http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_climatechange14.htm http://www.sott.net/articles/show/181839-Solar-Activity-Lowest-in-Almost-100-Years-Implications-for-Climate-Potentially-Significant All good reading but we shall have to wait a couple of years to see if the spots come back.

This one is the more more likely culprit, but volcanic activity also plays a big part: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_Minimum

No. Might be worth a punt at half the price but I think it's a big step-up for him.

Silly boy. It smacks of desperation.

There's a lot of rain coming up from the southwest which is turning to snow over the higher ground around Salisbury - Andover - Basingstoke. Southampton's fine at the moment http://www.raintoday.co.uk/

I think that's Christmas Eve. You'd better check with Trousers to see what date that is this year

Oops! That should be 09:10 Sunday. It's even worse than I thought.

Too tight for me! Miss that one and the next is 07:10 Saturday. I have caught the 17:10 once but it nearly killed me.

A31 closed both ways in Alton. A272 blocked both ways near B2070 Ramshill, Petersfield

www.theaa.com shows M3 northbound 0mph and 5mph around Micheldever to West startton www.trafficengland.com is so slow that the page won't update. These sites are fine until everybody needs to use them.

I think I spotted the downside there. I ate my chicken tikka sandwich sitting in the car looking across to Fawley with just one crow and a soggy rat for company.

Then all of us innocents will pay for the damage. Get him to charge Eastleigh Borough Council and then... Oh bugger.

Absolutely. It appears that Eurotunnel has responsibility for dragging dud trains out. I can't see what the problem is, they must have forseen these kinds of problems. And what about alternatives? Surely a standard train to Calais, bus to the boat and then train from Dover to London?

Yes, I suppose all you have in the way of assets is the Premier League status It's not like you have a modern stadium or state-of-the-art training facilities so if there are any other billionaires out there who fancy a punt they would probably look elsewhere. It's a problem for all the clubs like yours. Spend the money on infrastucture or spend on players. Do the former and you're likely to get relegated (like us) or do the latter and you still might get relegated. Enjoy what little victories come your way and try to have a good Christmas.

And there we can agree. I bid you all good night.

The finances are obviously your problem PES. I would guess that you need around £100m to see you through the next season. Admit it, wouldn't you feel a lot more comfortable and secure in the CCC, or maybe even League 1?

I suspect that commercial reasons are the culprits. Isn't there an approved ball that must be used?

They're called Milankovitch cycles which have long been thought to cause the ice ages but the position of the continents is also important. To get a big ice age you need a land mass located at one of the poles so that the snow that falls there stays there.

There are all sorts of wobbles. Precession of the axis, nutation, variations in eccentricity. It's only the presence of the moon that keeps it relativley stable. Without a big satellite like the moon and a giant planet to hoover up the asteroids, life on earth would never have evolved because we would have been frozen, fried or squashed long before now.

Charlize Theron in the Dior ad when she is walking away from camera. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix-DAUMiyzo or maybe this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oq9_4USpBU4&feature=related

For we sunworshippers this is an interesting site: http://www.spaceweather.com/ There is an unusual solar transit further down which caught me out. Scroll down and click on 'the movie'.

It is remarkably quiet at the moment. We should be building up for lots of sunspots in 2010 and 2011 but they are late arriving. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/15/sunspot-lapse-exceeds-95-of-normal/ Not quite unusual yet but it is at the extreme of expectations.

Possibly related to the Maunder Minimum, a period of relatively quiet solar activity. We are coming to the end of an interglacial period which has lasted for about 10,000 years and they tend to last about that long so we may need the CO2 to delay the next ice age. Interesting bit from the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/features/understanding/iceage_01.shtml 'in the context of the history of the planet, this is not a normal period... ...more average conditions would be significantly warmer' 'Throughout the history of the Earth it has been unusual to have one polar ice-cap; it is unique for us now to have two of them.' My sympathies are with Bjorn Lomborg. Whatever the possibilities or causes of global warming, we should be spending the money on dealing with it rather than trying to fight it.