It was a nice sunny day today in South Devon, for the first time in a very long time. Here's some proof:

Blue skies and still waters at The Turf Locks on April 6th 2013

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Today is April 1st, Easter Monday 2013. However this tale is no joke. Before we get on to more serious matters would you care to join me in some festive fun? Let's play "spot the difference"! To get some images free from clouds I've gone back in time a couple of days into March. Having done that here's a bird's eye view of the Disko Bay area of western Greenland, taken on March 28th 2013:

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You may recall that a couple of weeks ago we showed you some satellite images revealing that the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska had become covered with a vast spider's web of cracks. Then last weekend gaping fissures tens of miles across opened up in the ice cap north of Greenland. Today we take you back to the Beaufort Sea once more, where this is what the latest satellite images reveal:

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As I've recently been reporting over on the Arctic Sea Ice Forum, I inadvertently found myself having lunch with the Chinese delegation to the Economist's Arctic Summit in Norway last week. Amongst other things I learned about the voyage of the Chinese research vessel Xue Long (Snow Dragon in English) right across the Arctic Basin last summer:

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Roland Emmerich's "The Day After Tomorrow" is a BAFTA award winning action/adventure movie in which, according to the Internet Movie Database:

A sudden international storm plunges the planet into a new Ice Age.

A large team of scientists have spent the last four years investigating how close to the truth the movie is, under the auspices of the European Union's "Thermohaline Overturning – at Risk?" project (or THOR for short). The project web site states that their objectives are to:

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Earlier this month Professor Kevin Anderson, Chair in Energy and Climate Change at the University of Manchester, gave a presentation at the Cabot Institute at the University of  Bristol. He expressed his basic thesis as follows:

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It's been raining hard all day here in the Haldon Hills. If you're wondering why that's happening yet again please peruse my recent articles on how climate change causes Arctic sea-ice to disappear, which causes frequent floods here in South West England,  which causes unpleasant bugs to go swimming around our beaches. Putting all that together at the present moment, here's how the information available online looks as we speak.

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In the good old days I used to pore over atmospheric pressure charts kindly provided online by the likes of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF for short) before making a decision on exactly where and when to go surfing.  Here's what they are revealing to me today:

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At the end of last month the "Summer Olympics Special" edition of Time magazine carried a picture of Jessica Ennis on the cover. Just inside, however, was a double page photograph of "A bulldozed field in Geff, Illinois", together with the information that "A drought devastating stretches of the U.S. has forced many farmers to destroy their failed crops".  That was accompanied on the Time web site by a series of photographs and an article entitled "The Great Drying Strikes Again". Time pointed out that:

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The COP17 climate change conference in Durban finally finished on Sunday a day and a half late. According to the final press release it:

Delivered a breakthrough on the future of the international community's response to climate change, whilst recognizing the urgent need to raise their collective level of ambition to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to keep the average global temperature rise below two degrees Celsius.

The press release itemises the "breakthrough" decisions as follows:

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