The most significant meteorological event for some time has been the publication last month of the third report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is a standing committee of several hundred international scientific experts on almost every aspect of climatology and the environment.
The IPCC has no political or economic axe to grind, and operates under the joint auspices of the World Meteorological Organisation and the United Nations Environment Programme. Its purpose is to be an informed institutional framework through which an authoritative and independent "best guess" can be arrived at on the thorny questions of global warming and the enhanced greenhouse effect.
And the gurus have become more pessimistic. Their last report, published in 1995, estimated that average global temperatures might rise by up to 3.5 degrees by the end of the century - a quite alarming proposition. But now they have revised the figures upwards. The very least we can expect, they say, is an increase of 1.5 degrees before 2100; in the worst scenario, with no corrective action taken to prevent it, the rise in average global temperature could be a catastrophic six degrees, with corresponding rises in ocean levels. The experts describe it soberly, but pull no punches: "The projected rate of warming is much larger than the observed changes during the 20th century, and is very likely to be without precedent during at least the last 10,000 years, based on paleoclimatic data."
The latest report, however, is also interesting for what it does not say. It does not pronounce ex cathedra on the issue of whether many of the unusually severe weather events of recent years - the apparent increase in the frequency and ferocity of hurricanes, the seemingly unusual droughts and floods in many parts of the world, and the unusually strong El Nino not so long ago - may be a consequence of the observed increase in global temperature.
And it remains cautious, too, on making predictions that such extreme events may become more common in the future. Our present knowledge of the workings of the atmosphere, they say, is just not sufficient to predict such longterm local effects with any confidence.
And neither do the authors pronounce on some of the more horrific scenarios proposed from time to time - such as the suggestion that global warming might result in a diversion or blocking of the Gulf Stream, thereby bringing a regime of unpleasantly extreme weather conditions to north-western Europe. Again, the answer they give is that, as yet, we simply do not know.
But that which we do know now, is more than cause enough for worry.