"One of the warmest winters in history"

A peek into how meteorologists at the British National Meteorology Agency determine how warm a winter it is (after two straight weeks of record cold and snow):

In fact, the Met still asserts we are in the midst of an unusually warm winter — as one of its staffers sniffily protested in an internet posting to a newspaper last week: “This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded. For your information, we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average. As November was a very seasonally warm month, then all the data will come from those readings.”