South West England is already very damp. Following a number of flood alerts earlier in the month, the Environment Agency issued several amber flood alerts in Devon yesterday,  followed by a red flood warning this morning for the River Char near the Dorset Coast:

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As recent summers go, we've had a cracker. All that's changing now though. I went for a bike ride earlier this evening, and things were reminiscent of this time last year. The roads were covered in soil and stones washed from the fields. The road along the ridge above here had but a narrow piece of tarmac visible above the brown ponds on either side. Here's a picture I took at the top of the hill:

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After all the hullabaloo in the "popular press" recently, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC for short) have now started issuing information following the meeting in Stockholm this week discussing the contribution of their Working Group I to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5 for short). According to the initial press release:

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Following up a line of research suggested to me by The Telegraph earlier today I followed a link to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center. This is the sight that greeted me:

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After a very long wait it looks as though the first Atlantic hurricane of the 2013 season will be announced later today. Currently Humberto is a mere tropical storm, but according to the latest National Hurricane Centre public advisory bulletin:

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This weekend The Mail Online published a story purporting to explain how "How [the Arctic] Ice Sheet Grew 920,000 Square Miles In A Year". The story was written by David Rose, so of course it did nothing of the sort!  We've come across Mr. Rose before, when he regurgitated one of his "Great Green Con" stories earlier this year, so now let's take a closer look at his most recent "Great White Con". I quote David's opening words of "wisdom":

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Although their "Trip Tracker" doesn't reflect this as yet, the Mainstream Last First expedition have just reported on their Facebook page that the Arctic Joule is currently:

Beached at Dew Line Station under the Arctic eagle's watch

at Cape Parry. They've also posted a picture of themselves rowing in the Arctic twilight:

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After commenting on the "quiet start" to the 2013 Atlantic Hurricane season only a few days ago, I can now report that things are warming up off the west coast of North Africa. The first two tropical storms of the Atlantic season were born over in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. The third started in the central Atlantic. The fourth is called Dorian, and earlier this morning the National Hurricane Centre announced that the:

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We've been following the approaching cyclone in the Arctic for a few days, and this morning the predictions are starting to come true. Out of all the various forecasting models we've looked at so far only ECMWF offers a "nowcast". That's the model's idea of what's happening in real time in the real world, and here's how it looked over the Arctic first thing this morning, as visualised by the Danish Meteorological Institute:

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Here at econnexus.org.uk we're used to tracking hurricanes, but so far there's been a fairly quiet start to the 2013 Atlantic hurricane season. The strongest tropical storm so far has been Andrea, whose winds reached a maximum speed of 65 mph (100 km/h) around a minimum central pressure of 992 mbar. The National Hurricane Centre currently reports "No tropical cyclones at this time" for both the Eastern Pacific and the North Atlantic. Despite that an "extra-tropical" cyclone looks like it's on its way next week, far to the north of both those oceans.

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