BBC: Drought declared in south-east England
… [Environment Secretary] Ms Spelman said she wanted water companies to look at the possibility of connecting pipe networks so they could transfer water from wetter parts of the country.
For the record, the South of England isn't the only place with low water levels at the moment.
This is a situation that has been discussed for 20 years or so - a national grid of water. How surprising then that the greedy water companies haven't initiated a scheme off their own bat. They're waiting for the government to pay for it then cream off the profits.
Cynical....moi?
Yorkshire Water shipped a whole pile of water down south during the last drought, making a tidy profit. Then Yorkshire began to run alarmingly low on water, and their customers were not at all impressed.
Personally, I don't want that nasty, soft, chalky, southern water coming anywhere near my supply, thank you very much.
Chalky water is "hard" rather than "soft".
Not too much danger of Southern water coming North any time soon. We'll just pipe all the Yorkshire water down here, filter out the whippets, and use it to under-cut the roads by pumping it all out of massive holes in the pipes somewhere beneath the metropolis.
I know perfectly well that chalky water is hard, and it's our water which is soft, but for some reason I keep getting them the wrong way round.
If you live in a hard water area, try Yorkshire Tea's special hard water blend: it actually works. No nasty scum on top!
There is one word that stops the Spanish form having a hose pipe ban....desalination!
Rather an expensive way to supply water in one of the wettest countries in Europe... We would need to build more nuclear power stations to make it work.
We could always nuke Spain & nick their water!
You haven't really thought this through: Spain is downhill from Britain; pumping all their water up here would be a huge headache.
But, contrary to popular belief, the rain in Spain stays almost invariably in the hills - gravity is our friend here!
But the earth is flat & only 4000 years old, according to my colleague Tim.
Would you trust a doctor, if his name were Tim? Well, then!
The best way to deal with creationists is either to ignore them completely (my preferred approach these days, what with life's being too short to waste time arguing with arseholes*), or (my former approach, which can be great fun) pretend to be totally taken in by what they are saying, then start asking polite, naive-sounding questions about the apparent flaws in their point of view.
[* Remember, Jesus died to save arseholes.]
Incidentally, if Tim really says the world is only 4,000 years old, he is not in line with creationist dogma: the world was created the night preceding Sunday, 23rd October 4004 BC. That would make the world over 6,000 years old by now.