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The nearest weather station to me is 8 miles away. It is consistently different to any readings I usually have from out door thermometers.

Although much of the UK has been experiencing an easing of the cold since the weekend with a thaw of lying snow taking place and showers that were falling just as snow now falling as a wintry mix, the cold spell has at least one more trick up it's sleeve..

It's arriving from the southwest and is at the moment a run of the mill Atlantic weather system with rain and strong winds associated with it. As it bumps into the cold air across the British Isles though, that rain will readily turn to snow bringing some quite substantial falls with as much as 30cm likely over the higher ground of southern England, Wales, the Midlands and Ireland, with 10-20cm possible to lower ground as well.

Those strong, gale force (severe gales in Ireland and up western coastal regions for a time today) coupled with the snow will obviously make for some very difficult conditions with blizzards during the heavier bursts of snow.

The rain is already moving across Ireland, turning to snow as it pushes north, it'll reach southwest England and Wales during late morning and early afternoon, pushing steadily northeast through the evening and overnight. It's likely to be mainly rain and sleet close to the coasts, and through much of Cornwall but elsewhere it will mainly be snow - making for a difficult journey to work for many parts of the southern half of the UK tomorrow morning.

Through tomorrow the band edges north into Northern England and Scotland, generally turning back to rain and sleet through southern counties as it does so, but continuing to fall as snow from the Midlands northward in particular.

Watch too for an increase in the intensity and wintriness of wintry showers pushing into eastern parts of the northern half of the country ahead of the main band of rain, sleet and snow during the next 24 hours as those southeasterly winds pull the deeper cold back in for a short time.

Looking ahead to the remainder of the week, the rain sleet and snow clears away later in the day tomorrow, leaving the majority of any rain, sleet and snow showers to fall across Scotland during the latter part of the day and into Thursday. As the week draws to a close the cold slowly filters away allowing the thaw to gather pace with Atlantic systems arriving from the west.

Don't be surprised though if this is only a brief respite with a number of signals pointing toward a return of the cold relatively soon..

But we've always had it.

Just been on phone to IG and another pal who also watches History documentaries as keenly as we do

From this .. I learned that there was a famine in the Middle Ages . caused by relentlessly hot summers and bitterly harsh winters.

Errr? A cycle then which occurs each milennia's first centenary years? Sadly.. we do not have sufficient data to measure as our ancestors only reported by anecdote and not the "internet backed by computerised models!"

The British Broadcasting Corporation has put its weather forecasting contract out to tender – the first time since its radio broadcasts began in 1923 – after taking heat from the public for a string of embarrassingly inaccurate long-range weather forecasts. The UK Met Office, the government-owned meteorological department that has had the BBC contract for almost 90 years, is a partner with the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University of Climategate fame. CRU and the UK Met Office jointly provide the climate change data that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change relies on.

The BBC’s decision comes amid one of the fiercest winters in decades that has left the country unprepared for the snow-related chaos it has seen. In August, the Met Office had forecast a mild winter. Last summer, the BBC had again been embarrassed: Thanks to the forecasts it had received from the UK Met, the BBC had warned its audience of an "odds-on barbecue summer" that instead was cool and rainy. In both cases, the BBC has faced outrage from a public that had been misled by the information the BBBC had provided it.

Many blame the UK Met Office’s abysmal forecasts record on a climate change bias. The BBC’s own climate correspondent, Paul Hudson, who for a decade had been a UK Met forecaster, believes the UK Met’s problem could stem from flawed computer models at its Hadley Centre, which provides data to the IPCC.

“Could it be that the Hadley supercomputer had developed a warm bias?” he wrote for the BBC yesterday, elaborating on a troubling possibility that has implications for the climate change debate. Last week, on the same subject, he wrote: “Experts I have spoken to tell me that this certainly is possible with such computer models. And if this is the case, what are the implications for the Hadley centre's predictions for future global temperatures? Could they be affected by such a warm bias? If global temperatures were to fall in years to come would the computer model be capable of forecasting this?”

The UK Met has also lost contracts to private sector firms in the UK that depend on accurate long-range forecasts, among them Marks & Spencer and Tesco.

In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC's 2007 report. It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was "speculation" and was not supported by any formal research. If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen in climate research. The IPCC was set up precisely to ensure that world leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change.

HERE'S the question to put to all those who confidently(link1) declare(link2) that the recent severe winter conditions prove that global warming is nonsense

The IPCC report, rather than taking the evidence and forming a conclusion, formed a conclusion then searched the literature to find any evidence, no matter how flimsy, to substantiate their conclusion.

"Anyone who doesn't take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either." - Albert Einstein

Biodiversity nears 'point of no return'

The decline in the world's biodiversity is approaching a point of no return, warns Hilary Benn. In this week's Green Room, the UK's environment secretary urges the international community to seize the chance to act before it is too late.

In 2002, the world's governments made a commitment to significantly reduce the rate of biodiversity loss by 2010.

Although it is hard to measure how much biodiversity we have, we do know these targets have not been met. [ ]

…

Mechanisms now exist for research, monitoring and scientific assessment of biodiversity, although we now need an Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services to oversee progress …

Climate change and biodiversity are inextricably linked.

Syed Hasnain, the scientist at the centre of the growing controversy over melting Himalayan glaciers (not), is now working for Dr R K Pachauri's TERI as head of the institute glaciology team, funded by a generous grant from a US charity, researching the effects of the retreat.
Highlighted in The Sunday Times yesterday, Dr Hasnain was the scientist responsible for claiming that the world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035. This was picked up by the New Scientist and then by a 2005 WWF report, and subsequently published as a definitive claim in the IPCC's 2007 fourth assessment report, masterminded by Dr R K Pachauri.
But, while Dr Hasnain, who was then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, has admitted that the New Scientist report was based on "speculation" and was not supported by any formal research, he is now a direct beneficiary of that speculation.

Atmospheric CO2 does not just sustain our systems, it is vital for them.
No CO2 = very few green plants.
If the idiots of the IPCC succeed in lowering the CO2 levels (not a chance.....only 5% is due to man) below about 50ppm then most plants would die.