Verbal

I'm probably alone in this, but I find your posts utterly obnoxious.

Quite. Hague is by the far the Tories' most skilled debater - and used to wipe the floor with Blair.

Well that's the end of it then. Case closed.

Stop it. Stop it now.

Yep, I was going to avoid using the word 'efficient', for the usual reasons, but actually, it just came naturally to them to fix the problem.

Just got back from what was supposed to be a business trip to Cologne. All German airports seemed to shut down with an horrendous snow storm, and we landed at Paderborn, which is god knows where up in the hills. The tiny airport was crowded with jets that were supposed to have landed at Frankfurt, Dusseldorf and Cologne. And I thought that was it: I'm going to spend a week in a half-lit airport lounge living off Turkish coffee and apple pies. There were no taxis leaving the town, and the buses weren't taking the risk. The hotels were full. Things got worse when the roads into town were blocked by accidents. But within two hours, Paderborn airport reopened - the slowploughs running up and down the runway continuously. We took off into a blizzard and landed in one - after an aborted attempt. I missed my meeting but made it to Cologne - and I was only about four hours late getting into the city. The Germans just made it work. When I got to Cologne, the taxi driver told me it had snowed only twice in eleven years, so snowstorms are not something they're used to. Yet they made things work without any real fuss - just got on with the job of solving an inconvenient problem.

He's busy on the main board calling Kelvin 'fit'.

Go for Carey Mulligan - a pretty safe bet after her performance in 'An Education'.

Apologies, Frank. I now realise you're really one of us, minus a spell checker.

The breakdowns aren't really the issue. It's that it took up to 18 hours to pull the trains out of the tunnel. Seem a pretty basic failure of common-sense health and safety to me.

No, the ice cores collected at the poles really do tell us interesting things about happened in the tropics, and other parts of the globe - and over several hundred millennia. That's why scientists who study the cores are so interested in them. I was in Svalbard in 1989, I think. I wasn't there as a tourist.

Not true Grandad. And if TDD can spout about being there so can I. Only my presence was less than helpful. Back in the late eighties, I was at a research station that had been continuously recording ice temperatures for about 30 years. I had an electrician with me (from Portsmouth, as it happens), who plugged in a light and blew all the fuses. So there's this Norwegian research station in Svalbard with a continuous record of ice...except for half an hour twenty years ago. Still trust their results than the observations of the ice and stuff that TDD bumped into.

What did you measure the 'ice and stuff' with exactly? And over how many decades?

It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt. Mark Twain

They will, Nick. 31 Jan at the latest. Promise.

Did Daniel Azougy tell you that?

Dinenage Trench Foot?

Daren, I wasn't seeking to blame anyone and I understand where you're coming from. But you're quite mistaken to believe that you're isolated on this issue. I think most people (if not everyone) know full well that 19C was shockingly wrong, and should really have respectfully withdrawn the original comments. I just think - as your reply suggests - that reliving the incident so 'publicly' isn't helping anyone, not least of all you.

Lawson's 'scpeticism' amount to no more than the hopeful belief that 'I can't possibly see how puny little humankind could cause climate change.' It's about on a par with believing the earth HAS to be flat because he can't see how we would fall off otherwise. Quite pathetic really - and his lack of engagement with the scientific argument is, of course, to be expected.

The problem is, 19, BA higher-ups have a long track (and I think now criminal) record of harassment, false inducement, black propaganda, etc - not only against some of its employees and other airlines, but against a few of its complaining customers too. It is truly a sick company. So FF's suspicions are probably well founded, even if his line of argument about the strike isn't, imo.

Beckford is suffering a bit of wobble in form according to my gloomy Leeds supporting friend.

Not really. If you replace the names of those on the board at Watford with 'Wilde', 'Crouch' and 'Lowe', you'll get a sense of what's happening - just another tiresome example of ego rage.

And herein lies one huge problem. With a certain strike due at any time in the New Year, who on earth is going to buy a BA ticket in the near future. Even a diehard BA enthusiast - the few that are left - would hesitate. The strike was going to be bad enough - but the threat of a strike could be even worse for the company. Which is why Duncan, I don't buy the logic of this: 'However, there were vestiges of the defiant mood that saw thousands of cabin crew cheer the announcement of a strike vote. "This psychological warfare has been going on all year and more," wrote one BA employee. "If we have to wait a few more weeks – so be it." Writing on the website, Duncan Holley, secretary of Bassa, blamed Unite for "losing the PR initiative" amid a welter of negative publicity over the comparatively high earnings of BA crew. However, he urged members to vote again for a long strike when a reballot was held. "Let's not look back except to learn and let's not recriminate. This will still be the biggest battle and it is one that has to be won," he said. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/dec/17/ba-cabin-crew-union-strike Unless you and the dinosaurs in BA management can solve this very, very quickly, there will be no BA to fight.

Agreed. Coal is no easy solution. And carbon capture is still a way from being economically (or technically) viable on the sorts of scales we're talking about.