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You should always be prepared with a flask of hot tea, mars bars, thick coat and shovel in the boot in the winter if you are expecting to using high routes or back roads in particular. however don't see much likleyhood for a leeds to suffolk round trip returning Thurs eve. Looks as there may be a couple of hours of wet snow (at best) followed by quite a bit or rain, i doubt you'll encounter any difficulties. You may not even see any snow.

I'm predicting warmth throughout the year and a CET of 12 deg C

Its very interesting that we have had (sure someone that will correct me if i'm wrong) quite a period now showing temps of several degrees above average. If the whole year now is 2 or 3 degrees above average and you have a run starting Jun 06 - Dec 07 with maybe just the odd month average, then people will start to be concerned. Weeks of 30 deg+ temps this summer again would make people notice. What are the chances of having a repeat of the 1995, 2003 and 2006 seasons with anomolously high temps persisting over long periods of the year ? A statistician would say the chances of a hot summer like last year are pretty low i'd guess, these events happen rarely, looking at the CET record. if i was a betting man, i'd wager against it and say we're due a cool rainy summer and autumn in 2007 . Maybe this year is the one where we notice a step upwards to higher temperatures more permanently? It will be pretty freaky if we stay 2 or 3 degrees above average throughout this year - this isn't supposed to happen til the year 2070!

i see that Jan's average to date is 7.20 deg C or something ridiculous, despite last week's wintery temps to knock it a bit. looking mild again as we go into feb, at the moment but loads of uncertainty and i get the feeling it will be more mixed next month, rather than SW zonal tropical stuff all the time, i think that little one has blown its puff out for now. however, i think we will see our share of mild, maybe a few half hearted northerly "blasts" but nothing too much . i think it could be cooler at night than we've been used to so far this winter ( but would be freaky if we continued with the weeks of 10deg + minimas) so overall i think still a mild 6.1 deg C

the scary thing is now that much of the world, not just the UK, has been experiencing temps this winter of 4+ deg C above normal. this is very very unusual. if this continues into summer we will see serious problems. this could be the year when the temperature throughout the world flips to a new climate perhaps?

well i did attend an agricultural college years ago so no doubt that's where i got my crackpot ideas from. i don't understand you point though .no one's saying kill half the world's population ; just that it's far too high and needs to be reduced. this could be done in any number of ways. so where would you draw the line? 8 billion, 10 billion, 20 billion people, before you said we had to do something? that's going to be a seriously compromised, wretched, unhappy quality of life for 95 % of people, simple matter of scarce resources, its so basic it hardly needs pointing out. how many years before we see crowded shanty towns growing up on the edge of all the cities in europe? not as many years away as you might expect my friend.

well, even if GW wasn't true, nearly every measure postulated to counter its effects would leave us with a cleaner, greener environment and be good for business in the long term. here at my work ( yes i have been busy this afternoon ) we have got a new environmental policy which will frame all our business decisions so we are as green as we can be. this has to be good, it is social responsibility whatever way you look at it. What do you suggest, we just keep going as we are, just on the offchance that its all a hoax, like the Millenium Bug? The end result of that would still be a more polluted world ,GW or not.

i'm sorry , this just isn't right, because by the time we get to that break point, the worlds environment will have been so degraded as to not to be able to support any kind of civilistaion. in 1980 the world had 4.4 bn people in it. in 2000 it reached 6 bn by 2015 it will be 7bn . this is the major challenge of our times. 10 cities the size of London each year being added to the world population - all wanting food , clothing, housing, coka cola. but, because of scarce resources, getting decreasing amounts of food, cast off western clothes to wear, slum dwellings, and the only access to fresh water to be paid for by the bottle and the only cooking fuel wood and charcol from the forests. it is totally irresponsible of us to allow this to continue or it will eventually destroy us all. yet talk of population control gets you castigated as some sort of weird new Hitler. very sad we cant debate this properly. true

i don't think it is a horrible article and it comes from a mainstream website about peak oil and environmental degredation. we're going to have to do something as the world just cannot support all these people. we already give our precious food away through the WFP but that surplus will be needed to feed ourselves very soon as crops yields are starting to become more unpredictable and shortages become more likley throughout the world, not just in the third wordl. there are already over a BILLION people now living in sorry, infected slums, throughout the world with no work. i wonder how many of you have seen these places and the lives of the people live in them? The population has increased by about the same number in the last 15 years. Is this all our futures? What kind of world is this? its completely unaccpetable. i accept this is all thought provoking stuff and we have strayed far beyond the original topic , yes this winter has scared me as i think if the summer is 4 -5 degrees above normal we'll be in for a roasting - but on the broader point of what we do about climate change i think wholesale population control is the only way if people globally are to hope to maintain or increase their standard of living ( which is pretty poor for many already). Im sure i'm not alone in thinking this.

i know you're being devils advocate. but i wasn't absolving myself of any blame in any of the points i made or trying to be high and mighty or setting myself up to be perfect. that wasnt my point. and i wasn't saying that we shouldn't fly , just stating what we are all doing and what i observed! when you see it first hand it makes you realise what's happening. i agree about flying its difficult , jet engines should be converted to run on biodiesel, this should happen in time with technological developments in that area. but at least i think this and suggest it should be done. if the world was left to you no doubt we'd still be flying in polluting vehicles forever. seriously though, no serious scientist refutes that warming is due to human co 2 emissions, its a fact, it 's just the consequences of the warming we're arguing over now. i used to be a sceptic but having read a lot of scientific papers i am convinced this is real. its not a mass delusion.

this is a good article. http://dieoff.org/page119.htm

i'm not a nut , but i think its a subject that dare not speak its name, yet is the root of our problems. if we only had a quarter of the people , the problems would be much less. why is ever increasing population not complained about . a global one child per family programme would be so , so sensible. what's the point of african people having 8 kids each when there's no food to feed them, for example? no wonder people are already escaping these envoriromentally dire places to new lives and risking their lives to do so . its not just an economic thing, its a survival thing increasingly. similarly , the worlds growing population needs ever more buildings and infrastructure to house these people. our natural resources are raped for this. look at the emerging mega cities all over the world. once new york a tokyo were the only cities with a "manhatten" style skyline. now there are countless cities, ones you wouldnt even recognise the names of, each with 5 million or more people, all looking like this, a 22nd century forest of skyscaper cities is emerging globally now which have all been produced from scare materials and natural resources and devastating the surrounding natural environments - and what for? you should go to haiti if you want to see a dark vision of the future of the world, a place where rampant population growth outside the scope of the natural envorironment to deal with it, combined with the unbridled, selfish use of natural resources has created truly hell on earth for virtually all its people. this could be the future for everywhere else too, unless we do something about it. curbing population growth and even reducing population seems a good place to start, to me.

1) volcanic eruptions dont spew out "billions of cubic kilometres of rock, gas, chemicals" . Krakatoa spewed out 25sq km . 2) I'd like to see you try to feed everyone in the world using 1sqm of land per person (and provide all their other material requirements). The planet is totally overpopulated to the tune of about 4bn, but no one will talk about it. We could and should reduce the world population by 4/5ths within 50 years - quite achievable if world governments put their minds to it . 3) pinatubo did cool the earth by 1 degree, for about a year as a result of a week long eruption. It soon revovered. We have been putting WARMING onions in the atmos for hundreds of years and continue to squirt it out from every smokestack, car exhaust and factory in the world at increasing rates at ground level, every single day and from aeroplanes at high level. This has to have an inpact on the atmosphere. We are small and the world is big but you only have to fly at high level around Asia in the summer and autumn to know that haze you encounter at 35,000 feet stretching from Bombay to Thailand Indonesia and the Philipines is NOT natural and CANT be doing the atmosphere or us , any good whatsoever. These are large feature things you can see with your own eye and which are down to us to do something about. We are changing the atmosphere, for the worse, and are fouling our own nest. If we don't as a species attempt to do anything about it , we and the planet's ecology will be destroyed. 4) I flew over the Amazon in the autumn , in the dark, on a plane back from Chile. The skies were clear, a little hazy, but all over these little semicircles of orange light from down below shone back at me, all over the place, for an hour or two as we flew. At first i thought how unusual the towns shapes were, then it dawned on me, these were forest fires, lit by people, burning out of control all over the jungle. the haze was from the burinng forests , all those particulates in the atmosphere. and it brought home the reality of what we're doing to the world and it is profoundly depressing. We are having a BIG impact, we are changing the world faster than you know and its not for the better. How long it may take to change back after we stop having this impact is unknown but at the current time do you see us changing anything for the better anytime soon? If not, id suggest that , just as the pinatubo event was a week long eruption who's effect on the climate lasted a year, our hundreds of years of continous "effort" at spewing out this stuff will keep continually changing our climate until we stop.

what about sudden climatic shifts which can happen over a decade? and change to a new climate for the next thousands of years, are these real ? are we in one of these now?

Woke to the tiniest of tiny sprinklings of snow this morning after a cold night. Interestingly i observed urban heat island effect last night in a cab back from central london where the temp on car monitor dropped from +1.5 deg C in the West End, back in Dulwich 4.5 miles out of the centre, it was -0.8 deg, lowest so far this winter.

4.5 deg

Very happy! First snowfall of the winter and first day with snow lying in London at 9am since 2005 and also first frost of winter 2006/7 (-.6 deg C). Only the one frost though. Nice to see the white stuff can still penetrate the heart of the Metropolis even in the GW era. Yeti, there was no snowfall in London in Feb March 06, in Dec 05 we had less than an inch , Jan 04 we had maybe an inch and a half one evening but was melted by the next lunchtime. snow is rare in London . The last time there was 8 inches or more was in 1991, before that, 1963.

broken clock still tells the right time twice a day

overheard conversation on bus " we were supposed to be having blizzards this week" "yeah, they always get it wrong" oh dear.

today the metro had 2 stories , one a photo strap about mild weather bringing the daffs out in Cornwall, the second one on the next page about "the big cool down" this winter bringing the threat of bird flu from Russia. ever feel like you're living in a parallel universe?

i know this will get removed but the more i think about it the more i am inclined to believe it is just plain mendacious headline / publicity grabbing, as it is not backed up by anything . having said that (!) i once knew a guy who sold insurance for public outdoor events and they did use his forecasts as a part of the assessment of risk, though this was over 5 years ago and i guess the market's a bit more crowded today. pc seems to have changed his tune recently , didn't he used to do these "this summer will be hotter than usual" type forecasts?, but now he seems to have moved onto the much more dodgy "there will be a gale on 18 December" "blizzards next week" specific date forecasts which can be pulled to bits much more easily. Signs of desperation perhaps???

hovered around 8.5deg overnight, the high night time minimia are a feature at the moment. i

the "public" has the memory span of a knat, as far as the media is concerned.

well in the travel section of today's london lite on an article about dubai it talks of stepping out into "100 deg C heat". nice!

i think it's outrageous that media organisations still lap it up when they should be able to see the accuracy is really dodgy - for example the "3 sets of 100 MPHDecember storms" - forecast for the only period this winter when the weather actually went quiet - but which PC will probably say transmogrified into the New Year's Eve "event". this sort of hyperbole just denigrates proper professional forecasters,.