SaintBobby

The match vs Udinese is many things. But it is not "a massive game".

I wouldn't want to be Trevor Birch. He now has to explain why to hand the club over to Chanrai. Many LOLs.

TBH off to Hapoel Tel Aviv? http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2185649/Tal-Ben-Haim-close-reaching-deal-Portsmouth-nears-loan-spell-Hapoel-Tel-Aviv.html

It's all very quiet out there.....too quiet....

Hmmmm....which peer reviewed scientific paper is actually predicting a 60m rise in sea levels?

Surely, Chanrai takes them over and the only issue is how much of the PP is split between him, TBH and the football creditors?

Again, this highlights the problem with media reports. I'd hazard a guess that 60m is on the very high end of predictions - hence the use of the word "could". I'm not saying a rise in sea levels on that scale in the next couple of years would be a doddle to deal with- but is there any thought as to what engineering solutions might be possible and over what time frame? To give a very extreme (and very simplistic) example, if we have 1,000 years to build a 200 foot flood wall right round Britain, would it be impossible to do so? Another, rather less extreme, example put to me by some engineers is that we could create enormous trenches in certain uninhabited parts of the world (such as the Sahara) which would become (potentially salinated) reservoirs as sea levels rose. I can't remember the details, don't have the engineering knowledge to really know about feasibility and wouldn't have a clue on costs and benefits of such a project. But my point is we mustn't believe that we will have water lapping round our ankles in Southampton in the next few months and will suddenly be surprised a few weeks later that the whole city is under water. Our adaptability is so much better than that.

On the conventional side of the scientific argument http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/publications_ipcc_fourth_assessment_report_synthesis_report.htm On the sceptical side, Nigel Lawson's book - A Cool Look at Global Warming (if I remember the title correctly) On the outright denier side, anything by Fred Singer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Singer

Are you suggesting that China was a better place in 1978?

These would be very, very rough guesses by me, I'm not a scientist let alone a climatologist. 1. Is climate change happening? I'd say 85% YES. 2. Are man-made emissions a significant part of this? I'd say 70% YES 3. Are the consequences of climate change a net bad? I'd say 75% YES So, I'm a pretty clear YES to these questions. But the chance I'm right on ALL of them is .85 x .7 x .75 = 44.6%. So, overall, I suppose that means that the chance that these three things are not all true is higher than 50%. I don't accept that my questions 4 and 5 are "subsets" of point 3. 4, 5 & 6 are all about what we should do if 1,2 and 3 are all true.

I've found the more I've read about it, the more it's obvious that there are very big disagreements amongst the experts - and an acceptance by the experts that there are enormous uncertainties and a universal acceptance that climatology is a science in its infancy. To continue with the shark analogy.... Even if the shark is out there (which is not universally accepted by any means), there is a huge area of disagreement about whether the shark is a 30 foot beast or a 6 inch tiddler. And even if it is a 30 foot beast, it isn't obviously a carnivore - it may be a coward which flees from mankind. And even if it is a carnivore, it might be fairly straightforward to set up nets or barriers that keep it away from from the area of water close to the beach which we want to swim in. And even if we can't erect such barriers, we might just be willing to accept that every time we go swimming there's a one in a million chance that we will be eaten by a shark. There are a lot of steps between confidently asserting "there is a shark out there" and concluding "we need to move to a world in which no human being ever enters the water again"

I'm not persuaded the highlighted belief is arrogant (I don't believe the planet was created for us btw...just that we are an accident of nature). I believe - morally - that human lives are almost infinitely more valuable than the lives of chickens, termites, mosquitos, jellyfish etc. And that humanity is, indeed, infinitely more important than non-sentient life - cucumbers, bracken, mushrooms etc. It is acceptable for someone to take a different moral stance. For example, that God entrusted the Earth to us and we will anger Him terribly if we pluck too many apples from the forbidden tree or that our management of the planet's resources should be arranged in such a way as to primarily benefit goldfish. I wouldn't consider either of these alternative positions "arrogant", just wrong. The case that we are "harvest[ing] whatever resources we care to without any fear of consequence" is a straw man argument. I can think of no human exploitation of the planet - mining, drilling for oil, making furniture out of trees which has been done without fear of consequences. That doesn't mean that mistakes aren't made or that visceral greed is never present. But our (often very brave) exploitation of the planet has been precisely what has driven civilisation forward. In any event, if Earth was an apple, mankind has yet to drill through the skin. And who knows what useful stuff we might eventually find in the wider universe, within which our own planet is not even a speck. The "we would need 3.5 as many resources" to all live like Westerners line, falls foul of a very common green misnomer. Namely, that scientific advancement has reached its zenith. In fact, we can be supremely confident that we will get better and better at the smart use of natural resources. I don't know if nuclear power will go on to provide the entire world with clean, cheap energy for everyone. Or if nanotechnology will lead to the almost total elimination of disease. Or if GM food will make human malnutrition a thing of the past. Or if someone will invent a supersonic helicopter that runs off tangerine juice. But I am supremely confident that human ingenuity will prevail. I think today is the best time to be alive for mankind on virtually any sensible criteria you care to pick. Average income and wealth per person. Access to running water. Life expectancy. Infant mortality rates. Amount of leisure time per person. Propensity to recover from illness, disease or injury. Access to electricity. Access to telecommunications. Ability to travel substantial distances both cheaply and quickly. Reduced prospect of being forcibly drafted to go to war. Greater equality for women and ethnic minorities. Longevity and health in retirement. The list just goes on and on. It is not true that this graph is a simple straight line of permanent human improvement (I think things were worse for New Yorkers during and immediately after 9/11 than just before it; the UK economy has not yet recovered to its 2008 levels; Zimbabwe is probably a worse place today even than it was under white supremacist rule etc), but the overall, basic trend is overwhelmingly positive. I think there are interesting and difficult moral questions about inter-generational equity. But if we in the West are even a tad concerned, just a mite worried about the environment we will leave to our kids and grandkids, we should be absolutely apoplectic about the financial debt we are leaving them.

That's 2 minutes of my life I'm never going to get back.

Deforestation may well constitute a human rights abuse of the indigenous population. It's their HUMAN rights which concern me, not deforestation per se. I don't agree with your implication that mankind has brought itself to be the very brink of disaster. 2012 is, pretty much, the best year to be alive in the history of humanity and 2052 will be even better. 3012 will be almost inconceivably better.

Species extinction concerns me very slightly. There may be biodiversity issues - with a knock-on impact, but in and of itself, it's not a disaster that the dodo is extinct, for example. I wouldn't say that one particular human group is more important than any others (for example, if banning X saves 100 lives in group A but causes 200 deaths in group B, then don't ban X)

I'm pretty decisively pro-human on these matters. The environment and the planet are ours to exploit, alter, drill and adapt to our own needs and desires. Putting aside a small, residual concern for other sentient life forms, I would only measure ecological damage in terms of how it impacts on us. Pollution, deforestation, leaded petrol etc don't trouble me per se - they trouble me only in so far as they impact on humanity (which can be a considerable, negative impact, obviously).

In fairness, disposable income today is about the same as it was in 2005. (we are still some way from getting back to pre-crash 2008 levels). So, I'd say this amounts to pretty impressive sales. Also, being in the top flight for 20+ years generates more year-on-year publicity (and presumably sales) than having climbed out of 3rd division after a 7 year absence.

What's the price difference (taking account of inflation?) I'd have thought the club should set the prices to try and sell about 23,000 season tickets given current capacity, and they seem to have done that pretty well.

Am surprised club hasn't made more of the fact if we've sold 22K+ season tickets.

My (pretty limited) understanding of the scientific debate is that there has been a pretty substantial backtracking/revision of the more catastrophic predictions. For example, the IPCC have quietly ditched the "hockey stick" graph (which forecasts accelerating, apocalyptic results). Similarly, the scientific papers are usually much more qualified/conditional/moderate than the accompanying headlines which render the science too simple, too apocalyptic and too eye-catching. For example, I doubt there are many leading scientists who would still endorse Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" without a very long list of qualifications (they might consider it useful in PR terms to draw public attention to the purported problem, but computer generated images of e.g. Manhattan 20 feet under water are shock tactics not science). A fair number of posters on this thread seem to embrace the precautionary principle (i.e. "even if there's only a 30% chance of this being true and a 10% chance of it being really catastrophic, we'd be wise to take some pretty dramatic steps to try and prevent it happening. If these steps turn out to be have been unnecessary, well that's just part of the uncertainty of life"). I'm not persuaded of this approach. It at least needs to build in the potential unintended consequences of making carbon-based energy much more expensive. This is too often caricatured as simply involving rich Westerners insulating their lofts or installing catalytic convertors in their cars. The impact on those in the poorer parts of the world are much less trivial and could often literally be a matter of life and death. A horrific example of the precautionary principle being applied was the ban on DDT use following the publication of "Silent Spring", which argued DDT was potentially damaging to wildlife. The consequence of this well-intentioned, but ill-considered, policy has been the entirely avoidable deaths of thousands upon thousands of people from malaria. My scepticism is further underscored by the fact that climate change follows in a long line of apocalyptic scare stories which have turned out to be utter nonsense despite overwhelming scientific evidence being claimed for these theories at the time. This doesn't mean climate change isn't a problem. But it does mean that we should at least raise an eyebrow before taking some of the claims on board. For more on this, I recommend http://www.iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files/upldbook440pdf.pdf This addresses your point about ignoring scientists being like the mayor of Amity Island refusing to close the beach.... I'm not sure we should just take scientists' pronouncements hook, line and sinker about risk and simply roll them out as public policy. Jaws would have been a very different (and enormously less exciting) movie if the mayor had been right. There was no shark, or not much chance of the shark posing much of an ongoing danger, but the beach is closed as a precaution, large numbers of local businesses go under, lifeguards lose their jobs, a high proportion of the local population sink into economic and mental depression, some even become suicidal. The purpose of Jaws was to frighten its audience with a wholly unrealistic narrative about the behaviour of a great white shark. Not to provide a sensible, mature overview of balancing safety and leisure in high density tourist areas with potentially lethal indigenous wildlife. I often feel like a lot of stories emanating from the "green lobby" are too much like the former (Jaws) and not enough like the latter (a calm, collected, more boring view of what we should actually do).

I suppose there's a 6th specifically UK-question as well. Given that the UK accounts for 1% of the world's population and, I think, about 2% of greenhouse emissions, to what extent are we confident that it is wise to lead by example? Even if we were able to reduce our carbon emissions to zero, the impact will be derisory if the powerhouses of China, India and Brazil are hugely increasing their emissions. This might, I suppose, make apocalypse inevitable - but the UK's policy wouldn't seem to have much rationale other than perhaps giving British taxpayers a better argument to deploy when we finally get to the pearly gates.

Are they really keen on signing a player whose name is pronounced "Must have a dumb buyer"?

Furthermore, if global warming is happening AND net beneficial, we should subsidise carbon emissions, not tax them. But that aside, if solar panels, wind turbines, nuclear power, tangerine juice or humans running around inside our own enormous hamster wheels become cheaper than carbon-based energy production, well fine. But that has nothing to do with climate change. Just technological advancement. If insulating your loft saves a fortune on domestic fuel bills (and thus also adds to the value of the property), this will be provided by the market.

This is highly, highly contested. See, for example, Matt Sinclair's "Let Them Eat Carbon"

I think - simply for PR reasons - if I was Kanu's agent or TBH's agent, I'd say "We are aware that the club will close if we demand payment now. However, a further £11m of parachute payments are available if the club survives. It is unclear why this money should be used as a windfall bonus for any potential new owners. In consequence, we are willing to defer any claims under the football creditors rule until these payments arrive and are happy to do so at an interest rate of 0%".