Philobiblon

Santa’s home is melting: children and parents flying to Lapland this year are finding not the usual heavy snowdrifts and -20C temperatures, but messy slush.

A spokesman for First Choice holidays, the British tour operator that takes thousands of Britons to Lapland, said yesterday that the conditions were “incredibly unusual”. However, they have occurred in the week that US scientists warned that the Arctic region is now warming so fast that all the ice in the Arctic ocean, which covers the North Pole, could melt away in as little as 35 years – meaning extinction for polar bears, which depend on the floating ice to hunt.

Now I wonder how all of those Briton tourists got there? Yes, that was a rhetorical question – of course they flew, adding to the greenhouse gases that are destroying the very thing they went to see.

At home, it is going to be the warmest year in Britain on record.

The record year has astounded scientists. “What’s phenomenal about this year is that some of these months have broken records by incredible amounts. This year it was 0.8C warmer in autumn and 0.5C warmer between April and October than the previous warmest years. Normally these records are broken by around one tenth of a degree or so,” said Prof Jones.

But it is no surprise to the geranium on my (rather windy and east-facing) balcony – it is still actively flowering now – when it should be dead from cold.