February, having been billed as the hottest month on record, was followed by a cooler March as the el nino effect subsides.  If temperatures have been rising since the eighteenth/early nineteenth century’s Little Ice Age, the data for the lower troposphere, uncontaminated by urban heat islands and the surface temperature casts doubt on the extent of the trend over recent years.

UK government is suddenly beginning to realise that wind is costly and unreliable and is now focussing on gas, which by replacing coal says Minister Amber Rudd is "One of the greatest and most cost-effective contributions we can make to emission reductions in electricity”.  But the government is also reviewing its coal plants’ reliability and will doubtless see a role for them once the Parisian carbon maelstrom passes.  In any event carbon capture and storage plans in the UK have been abandoned in recognition that this is a very expensive way to sacrifice carbon to the greenhouse gods.