The Australian Climate Commission have just released two reports on climate change and the measures being taken around the world to address it. The first is entitled "The Critical Decade: Extreme Weather". Our headline covers the sort of extreme weather we're most familiar here in South West England, but the Climate Commission present a long list of other examples of recent extreme weather in Australia:

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Why should we care about abrupt climate change in the Arctic? Because climate change in the Arctic leads to climate change outside the Arctic, and in particular here in South West England!

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The set of cracks in the Arctic sea ice across the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas that we showed three days ago have now refrozen, and some new ones have opened up nearer the north coast of Alaska. However whilst that has been going on another set of "cracks" over on the Russian side of the Arctic have been growing ever wider. Here's how the Laptev Sea looks from space this morning:

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The ice covering the Beaufort Sea has already found itself split by fractures many hundreds of miles long more than once this year. Now it is cracking at the seams once again, as this picture taken by the Terra satellite yesterday reveals:

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NASA have recently been flying low over the sea ice in the Arctic on their latest IceBridge mission, measuring its thickness and recording a variety of images too, amongst other things.  In our All Fools' Day quiz here on econnexus.org we took a close look at the sea ice around the Disko Bay area of Western Greenland. One reason for doing that was because, as Julia Slingo who is chief scientist at the UK's Met Office pointed out only yesterday:

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According to ITV News this evening:

The Met Office is calling a meeting of top scientists to look at the "urgent" question of whether the warming of the Arctic is affecting UK weather.

In an interview with ITV Professor Julia Slingo OBE, chief scientist at the United Kingdom's Met Office has been commenting on the evident changes in the Great British Climate over the last few years. Julia told ITV (amongst other things) that:

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It was a nice sunny day today in South Devon, for the first time in a very long time. Here's some proof:

Blue skies and still waters at The Turf Locks on April 6th 2013

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Today is April 1st, Easter Monday 2013. However this tale is no joke. Before we get on to more serious matters would you care to join me in some festive fun? Let's play "spot the difference"! To get some images free from clouds I've gone back in time a couple of days into March. Having done that here's a bird's eye view of the Disko Bay area of western Greenland, taken on March 28th 2013:

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You may recall that a couple of weeks ago we showed you some satellite images revealing that the Beaufort Sea north of Alaska had become covered with a vast spider's web of cracks. Then last weekend gaping fissures tens of miles across opened up in the ice cap north of Greenland. Today we take you back to the Beaufort Sea once more, where this is what the latest satellite images reveal:

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As I've recently been reporting over on the Arctic Sea Ice Forum, I inadvertently found myself having lunch with the Chinese delegation to the Economist's Arctic Summit in Norway last week. Amongst other things I learned about the voyage of the Chinese research vessel Xue Long (Snow Dragon in English) right across the Arctic Basin last summer:

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