Mystery solved!

It turns out that the Bristol Bus story mentioned in my previous post was this:- A bus, that was made in Bristol about 30 years ago, was shipped to Dubai for the filming of an episode of Doctor Who and had a container dropped on it at the docks.

Stirring stuff, I'm sure you'll agree, and definitely a story of such importance that it is the main headline for a city of 500,000 people. My attention is not at all brought back to the fact that Mrs Red Squirrel's unpleasant incident didn't even make the local news in her NY borough.

Compare and contrast *rolls eyes*


Anyway, it snowed today. SNOW! Snooooooooooooooooooooooooowwwww! Snowsnowsnowsnowsnow! It doesn't snow here very often (as you can probably tell). Once every other year it'll snow enough to settle on the ground, and once every five years or so it'll settle overnight - so to have an entire centimetre of snow on the ground right now has reduced most of the city's residents to gibbering simpletons trying to build snowmen and throw a handful of slush at passing walkers.

My snowman rocked.

The reason it doesn't snow very much is because of the gulf stream. Water, freezing in the arctic becomes more salty (and therefore heavier) and sinks to the bottom of the ocean. This motion pulls warm water from the tropics (or specifically the Caribbean) and the resulting current of warm water heading north is called the gulf stream. I have helpfully illustrated this for you below, with the UK represented as a tramp with a begging bowl, the USA as a greedy Omnomnom sucking up the world's resources, the Arctic as a drowned polar bear and Jamaica as a palm tree smoking a spliff*




This is all well and good because as you can see from my highly detailed diagram, the UK should be as cold as the Labrador Coast (which presumably is where the dogs come from). Thanks to the gulf stream however, it's barely cold enough to snow down in the 'knee' bit where Bristol resides.

Unfortunately, as the Arctic ice melts due to global warming then the water doesn't get saltier anymore, and sinks slower or not at all - shutting off the warm water flowing north**

So consider your poor cousins across the Atlantic when the price of gas reaches three cents a cubic metre and you can't leave your Humvee running all night to make it quicker for your 200 yard drive to work the next morning. Consider poor us - because the only two places on the planet due to get colder thanks to global warming are the UK and Norway. Runaway soaring global temperatures and it actually gets *colder*. How unlucky can you get?

On the plus side, at least we'd come second in the Winter Olympics.....

*National stereotypes - lazy *and* fun!
**You may have seen the Atlantic Conveyor stop in a film called 'The Day After Tomorrow.' So, yeah, like that but over years and years and without the cold-enough-to-freeze-you-in-seconds weather. And without the tidal waves. And without the gross over-simplification of the plot. And without the stupid Hollywood sentimentality. Seriously - worse film since Armageddon. Don't *ever* get me started on Arma-twatfest-geddon....