This March is set to be the coldest since 1962 in the UK in the national record dating back to 1910, according to provisional Met Office statistics.
Between March 1 and March 26, the UK mean temperature was 2.5 °C, which is three degrees below the long term average. This also makes it joint fourth coldest on record in the UK.
Looking at individual countries, March 2013 is likely to be the fourth coldest on record for England, joint third coldest for Wales, joint eighth coldest for Scotland and sixth coldest for Northern Ireland.
March has been extremely cold and snowy and joins 2006, 2001, 1995, 1987, 1979, 1970 and 1962 as years when March saw some significant snowfall. Once all the figures are in, it’s possible that the December to March period for 2012/13 will be comparable with 2010/11, 2009/10 or winters in the mid-1980s.
All this cold weather must be something to do with "Global Warming", remember when solemn faced scientists were telling us that our children would not know what snow was like? This was gleefully reported by the press and equally gleefully seized upon by the politicians to inflict more tax upon us and promote nuclear fission power stations.
All that was about 12 years ago and I was dubious about these claims then as the data set appeared to be very small and carefully selected to fit the theory. A few years down the line and the predictions made then are scarcely mentioned anymore. Global warming has become “Climate change” and we are all enjoined to pay more taxes in order to reverse it.
Britain is now abandoning its coal fired power stations even as China and India build more to provide cheap, safe energy. At the same time Britain has accumulated the largest civilian stockpile of plutonium in the world. We need to re-think our energy policy in terms of what we have as resources on these islands. A good start would be to use the tidal flow of the Severn river and keep British coal fired stations running until solutions are found to provide all our needs from renewable sources.