Bob Earll   ‘The warning reports have been published. We have great difficulty in assessing ‘events’ in the context of a changing baseline. This is aided by our amnesia over past events. Remember the floods of 2007 and the Pitt report. This winter’s floods have shown that we – in particular George Osborne – needs to understand a different kind of normality and the implications for flood risk management and many other aspects of society.

Met Office December wettest on record 5 January 2016   The latest provisional statistics from the Met Office confirm December has broken records both for rain’fall and temperature. The month was not only the wettest December on record, but also the wettest calendar month overall since records* began in 1910, while 2015 is the sixth wettest year on record (dating back to 1910).

The UK mean temperature for 2015 is 9.2 °C, notably warm but not exceptional. The warmest year on record was set in 2014 at 9.9 °C.  The UK mean temperature for December is record breaking at 7.9 °C, which is 4.1 °C above the long-term average. The previous record was 6.9 °C in 1934.

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2016/december-records

The Met Office expects the global mean temperature for 2016 to be between 0.72 °C and 0.96 °C above the long-term (1961-1990) average of 14.0 °C, with a central estimate of 0.84 °C. It would mean that 2015 and 2016 are likely to be the two warmest years on record. Meanwhile, new research from the US suggests that the Arctic is warming significantly faster than other parts of the world, with record warming over the last year.