18th June - Today's News: Scotland & Ireland Enjoy Heat Wave

A mild night here in Evesham with a min of just 14.9c - warmest of the year - and, though largely unreported in the national (ie London) press, the Scots bask in sun as heatwave makes country hotter than holiday hotspot Ibiza whilst Ireland's heatwave rivals Rio and surpasses the Mediterranean - if confirmed, Newport, Co Mayo's 27c would be the highest temp recorded in the British Isles so far this year.

Not quite as hot as India though, where heat wave continues in Rajasthan, Ganganagar sizzles at 45.2 deg celsius whilst across the country the recent (and in places on-going) Indian heat wave claims hundreds of lives

In contrast, coldest June night in 50 years brings summertime snow to northern Finland

Tornado rips off roofs, tosses trees, in southern Ontario

Apparent pause in global warming blamed on 'lousy data' by ESA - as I have pointed out a few times, in my opinion there has been no pause, as shown by the steady increase in global temp for each successive La Nina year over the past decade.  And many now say that even with a major El Nino, 2014 is well on track to be the warmest year ever recorded.  UAH had May as the 3rd warmest and the lastest GISS figures produced by NASA, and date from the JMA, both say that May 2014 was the warmest May on record - NOAA's data should be out later this week.

And according to a guess article on WUWT the Sun is still slumping along - with allusions that solar activity matches that of the Dalton Minimum (and remember, most of Wattsy's gang are adamant that even if there isn't actually any global cooling (yet) there definitely hasn't been any warming since at least 1998...)  So if it is the warmest year on record, we can't blame the Sun!