Lapland can only dream of white Christmas

It should be a winter wonderland; instead, it's just piles of slush. British holidaymakers travelling to Lapland for a pre-Christmas holiday got a shock when they arrived in Santa's traditional home this week: no snow.

Rovaniemi, a town on the Arctic Circle in northern Finland which is the Lapp capital, is normally covered in deep drifts at this time of the year, with accompanying temperatures going down to -20C.

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But this week it has been completely snow-free and temperatures have been up to three degrees above freezing. As a result, disappointed families hoping to go on husky and reindeer sleigh rides, as part of increasingly-popular Father Christmas package tours, have found excursions cancelled, and they have had to make do with slush at best.

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.

In a further major sign of rapid climatic warming yesterday, UK scientists announced that 2006 is on target to be the warmest year ever recorded in Britain. With just two weeks of the year remaining, it is "very likely" to prove the warmest in the whole Central England Temperature Record (CET), which goes back to 1659, according to researchers from the UK Met Office and the University of East Anglia. It will beat the record by a considerable margin, with a likely average temperature over the whole year of 10.84C, compared to the previous record of 10.63C set jointly in 1999 and 1990.

The year has been "remarkable", setting new temperature records, the researchers said. These have included:

* the warmest month on record in Britain, set this July, with a mean temperature of 19.7C

* the warmest-ever September on record (16.8C)

* the warmest-ever April to October, with a mean temperature of 14.6C

* the warmest-ever British autumn, with a mean temperature of 12.6C.

Worldwide, 2006 is on course to be the sixth warmest year, in a record that stretches back to 1850, with the top 10 warmest years occurring since 1994. It would have been warmer still but for a cool start due to "La Niña", the sea-surface temperature anomaly in the Pacific ocean.

In Lapland this week, the warming has been all too obvious, according to British holidaymakers who were leaving Rovaniemi yesterday. "We're extremely disappointed," said Michelle Gower, of Enfield, North London, who travelled to see Santa's home with a friend and three children, two aged seven, and one aged six.

"There's no snow - it's just slush and it looks ugly. There are no picture postcards here. We couldn't book up for a lot of rides as you can't do them without snow - the husky ride was cancelled. And it's warm, actually. We crossed the Arctic Circle yesterday without even a coat on, it was that warm.

"Rovaniemi just looks like a normal town - there's no snow at all," said Mark Foreman, 46, a lawyer, who travelled to Lapland with his seven-year-old son Max, from Leigh-on-Sea, Essex. "Max had expectations of coming out of the hotel and building a snowman but there's nothing to build one with. He is disappointed. There is so much less for him to be able to do. I've had a little talk with him about global warming."

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