In the news

One firefighter died in Norway whilst fighting forest fires, and a group of Swedish firefighters had to be rescued by helicopter after they got entirely surrounded by fire.

(Can't find any good sources, soz)

On a loosely related note, I spent a week climbing in the Austrian Alps in June. I was nearly brought to tears to see a glacier that I have known for 15 years had reduced by 30m in length since the last time I crossed it two years ago.

15m per year is desperately sad. It'll be gone in our lifetimes.

And that is after one of the longest and snowiest winters in living memory.

Yeah it's really bad. We've already fucked the planet.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/04/melting-glaciers-swiss-alps-could-reveal-hundreds-mummified-corpses

Switzerland’s glaciers have been melting at an unprecedented rate, losing almost one cubic km in ice volume or about 900 bn litres of water over the past year.

900 bn litres of water.
the past year.
ffs

For people struggling with the concept of 900bn, that's enough water to fill 3.2m double-decker buses.

I think what you're all saying is that in 5-10 years time Scotland will be inhabitable?

or flood 1.25m football pitches to a depth of 10cm

Can you please use Wales as the standard unit of measure here.

Ta.

I found an unopened can of coke from the 1992 Olympics in a glacier in June. Beats a corpse in my opinion.

1 Attachment

It probably tastes better too

1972!

Thats what I thought at first but it was a 1992 can made for the Barcelona olympics, commemorating the 1972 olympics. See bottom left logo...

Before anybody asks....yes it was still cold. No, I didn't drink it. Even though it was unopened it seemed to be only half full and god knows how much aluminium would have been in it.

I know you're joking but it really isn't a big difference between (e.g.) Edinburgh and London

• 1° colder mean temperature (8.5° - 9.6°)
  
• 12% less precipitation in Edinburgh (668 - 754mm)
  
• 30 more days with precipitation per year in Edinburgh (191 - 164 days)
  
  

Biggest difference is that you lose ~20% of hours of sunlight, 1286 to 1573 h.

I prefer long days in summer that you get up here and being near actual mountains with snow caps and so on.

Couldn't pay me to move back to England.

Shhhh.....

It's shit up here, wink wink, nudge nudge!

I do legitimately have vitamin D deficiency so yeah, stay away everyone

How many blue whales?

Excellent, back on message.

My wife got Lymes disease once as well (true story, all good now, caught early and massive dose of antibiotics)

The tragedy of the UK is that there are very beautiful places where it's great to live, and there's where you can earn a living, and these places are not the same place.

Unless you can work from home, of course, although even that is problematic WRT airport access.

So true, and so depressing.

I feel that it is a common situation in many places, though (not to say there aren't exceptions)

If i lived in a rural area I would be murdered by my postman within a year with the amount of shit i buy online.

Living in a rural area you would be buying more onlin as the 45 minute drive to the closest town would get tiresome quickly, especially when you can't find what you want! On another note, my neighbour is into drones, RC cars and RC boats so is getting random shit delivered all the time, to the bewilderment of his wife, the posty loves him, you may be ok!

Our DPD driver expects to visit us once a day! Postman is so good if we leave stamped envelopes in our letterbox he will post them for us.

Yay for rural life

Our Amazon guy is inventive to the point of being a little creepy - he’s left parcels inside the garage door (only accessible by walking all the way round the house and usually locked) and on a kitchen stool by shoving his arm through the cat flap.

Did you fly there? Sadly we're all complicit.

With tickets bought using Bitcoin