Whitey Grandad

Indeed. Parents have a lot to answer for...

My dad was a Londoner born in 1918 and being the youngest of his family they all called him 'nipper'.

Nipper comes from the Navy, so I'm told. In the days of sail, when raising an anchor they used two capstans linked by an endless loop of rope. The anchor cable (big rope) was tied or 'nipped' to the endless loop with smaller pieces of cord. Small boys would run alongside the cable as it was hauled in repeatedly tying and untying the cords. They were called nippers.

Anything about snow?

I knew that. This is an interesting proposition: http://osmoticpower.com/ Perhaps we could use the frozen fresh water to generate energy? It would be even more efficient because the temperature difference could also be exploited.

Anything about snow?

The trouble is that we older members of society know what this country used to be like. Very little has changed for the better in the last 50 years.

Yep, just read it. It's all about Child abuse, not Health and Safety. There's absolutely nothing in there about snow in the playgrounds.

But they were thinking on small scale. If your'e gonna do it, do it big!

Pah! That's not real snow. It hardly comes over the top of your shoes.

As some of us have said, the country is going downhill fast.

Good idea! Make them all sign a disclaimer at the beginning or their kids don't get taught.

Just a thought... There is expected to be a world shortage of fresh water and the concern about the change in the Gulf Stream is thought to be due to melting glaciers affecting the North Atlantic, so.... load up all the ice before it hits the sea and transport it to the dry areas!

From what I have read before a change is 'very unlikely', whatever that means...

This has always been the case since I was at school. We never had any school closures in the fifties and sixties so what has changed?

If you find one, please let me know.

Yet another article. They all seem to say 'we just don't know'. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2004/jul/18/20040718-115714-6334r/

The question is 'how significant'? Increased temperatures lead to more water vapour which means more clouds which reflect more sunlight into space. Earlier climate models took no account of this effect. The reason for this was 'we did not know what effect clouds had so we left it out of our model'. This is also why solar activity is possibly more important than previously thought. An increase in high energy solar radiation has been proposed as causing more cloud formation. There is plenty of food for discussion here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation It's Wikipedia so the usual caveats apply.

No, water vapour and methane are many times more significant that CO2.

This is a good site for satellite images: http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/data/

It might be the reason now but it certainly wasn't in all the previous occasions so we ought to be sure what's happening and why. More about the Gulf Stream: http://articles.latimes.com/2007/jul/08/news/adfg-gulf8

Ther'es a bit here saying that we have no idea whether it will stop or not. We always have to remember who is publishing this stuff, there are a lot of people scrabbling about for limited research money. http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=12455&tid=282&cid=9986

Oh no, what have I done? Now I've got to go and dive through all those reports I've read over the last few years. Oh well, let's see what we find... (We don't actually get the Gulf Stream, just the North Atlantic Drift, but it's effect is similar)

The 'western' side is reducing but the 'east' is increasing. (I'm not sure how there can be an East and West in Antarctica but what do I know?) http://www.news.com.au/antarctic-ice-is-growing-not-melting-away/story-0-1225700043191

The latest orthodoxy is that the Gulf Stream has not, and will not change.