If you look at all of the solutions to Global Warming and Climate Change, they all tend to be somewhere in the neighborhood of richer countries, mainly US, redistributing wealth and the ability to exploit natural resources, to poorer countries. Follow the money, always follow the money.
As for the U in colour, flavour, honour, armour, rumour, and where it went, as an amateur wordsmith (killer oxymoron, no?), etymology and philology are interests of mine. Up until the early part of the 18th centruty the English language had no standardized (or standardised) spelling. It wasn't until the publishing of a few influential dictionaries that people began to notice the differences in spellings.
British English spelling generally follows Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755, whereas American English follows Noah Webster's An American Dictionary of the English Language, which was published in 1828.
Noah Webster was a strong proponent of spelling reform, as was many others of the time. These dictionaries were published during a period known as The Golden Age of Philology, where philology is to consider both form and meaning in linguistic expression, combining both linguistics and literary studies. As a consequence, to properly study literature, its meaning, a history of language must also be taken into consideration so as to be able to understand literature in context. To easy the understanding of history, as well as current and future language communications, spelling reform was needed.
Spelling reforms are often officially sanctioned or mandated changes for various reason, like making it easier for kids and immigrants to become literate, making the language more useful for international communications, even for political or cosmetically aesthetic reasons. The danger of spelling reform, of course, is that too much of a good thing can leave historical literature unreadable and unintelligible. Fortunately, old habits die hard, as in the case of the officially mandated spelling change from aeroplane to airplane, as adopted by the British Air Corps in 1928, and by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in the US in 1916, they still use the old form within the British forces at a rate of about 7:1. Aeroplane is actually French. Go figure.
Spelling reform in Britain offered many choices, most were met with resistance, and the Norman, Anglo-French spellings were generally retained. In Johnson's dictionary, he wasn't particularly into spelling reform, but he used the spellings that were, in his opinion, best derived from all of the versions within his sources, and he simply preferred the French versions to the Latin and Greek versions, by and large.
In the US, the more simplified spellings of Websters initial dictionary took hold, where he dropped seemingly extraneous letters from many words, partly for aesthetics, and partly to set it apart from England.
Since then, any subsequent difference in spelling between the US and Britain are largely cultural.
In early drafts of the Declaration of Independence, the word "honor" is spelled "honour", so it would appear that the official final draft has a typo. Although, up until Johnson's and Websters dictionaries, honor and honour were used with the same frequency in England, and the British surname of Honor is how it is still spelled.
There are many variations other than -or and -our, of course. Center and centre, shop and shoppe, standardize and standardise, catalogue and catalog. Some are of varying origins, like Latin and Greek, but most of the non-American variations still stem from the French, which is why Canada tends to use the more French spellings for most of these, even though they have as many American English spellings as they do British English.
Both oe and ae words are used more often in England, and the extra letter is dropped here. English spellings of aenemia, diarrhoea, paediatric, encyclopaedia and midiaeval have the extra letter that anemia, diarrhea, pediatric, encyclopedia, and medieval have in the US.
The British prefer ageing, while American like aging. The UK likes sizeable, America likes sizable. Both, however, prefer lovable, datable, usable.
Oddly, though, the American spelling of aesthetics and archaeology are esthetics and archeology in England. It's a wacky world. Though, archeology is becoming more frequent here in American.
Now that we know where the U went, the more important quesiton is, when snow melts, where does the white go?
