England hasn’t had such a cold April for almost a hundred years, and I think Scotland was chillier last month than at any time “since records began”. The Met Office serves up sunshine and precipitation figures with UK temperatures here.

Durham Tees weather station posted a month mean a couple of degrees centigrade above the UK April average – mainly because it didn’t share Scotland’s experience. It was 2.7°C colder than the 2009 to 2020 average minimum and so accords with the Met Office’s anomaly map for the four nations. But 2021 wasn’t the coldest April of the thirteen years for which I have data. 2012 was 0.68 degrees cooler. All that sunshine last month had an impact after the frosty early mornings.

April, though, is the fifth month of the meteorological year and the running mean from the first of December, in the guise of Temperature Above Pre-Industrial, reveals Durham Tees is quite a bit warmer in 2021 than the IPCC Paris Accord projection. There has been a 0.2°C fall in the month but at 1.42°C above Pre-Industrial on the 30th, Durham Tees is 0.34 degrees warmer than it should be if the 2040 Paris limit is not to be breached. Those trendlines in the graph above are misleading.

Below is a graph indicating April’s mean temperatures above/below Pre-Industrial from 2009 to 2021. Most years are “grayed out” to avoid confusion. Only the warmest and coolest years at the end of April are highlighted, with 2021 emphasized. The average Temperature above Pre-Industrial for the 13 years (2009 to 2021) is 1.17°C. This is about 0.1 degrees above the IPCC projection indicating a warming rate four times greater than expected. 2021 is currently running about sixteen times warmer than the IPCC’s projection (offered in 2017). Not to worry. The Grand Solar Minimum/Little Ice Age is on the way.

Insect 30 · Sea Slater