The two winters before that weren't exactly mild either, especially 2009-10.

Did any body see the Horizon docuementary Global Weirding on BBC 4, very interesting 

A good point and I will have a bias having grown up during the crappy winters of the 90's and mid 2000's

An interesting point is that cold spells nowadays seem to come from high pressure over Greenland rather than over Scandi, so the NAO data (pressure difference between Gibraltar and Iceland) for winter is varying more unlike temperature....

Scandi highs were much more common before the 20th century and at times very common in the winter months, now they are rare, recent examples of pronounced Scandi highs are Feb 2009 and 2012, but they seem to be becoming more elusive.

Maybe they will make another comeback if we have a pronounced solar minimum at the end of this decade.... who knows?

Although we've had no snow here, I can't say it's been a bad winter or that it's reached a tipping point. It's easy for me to say that as we haven't had flooding and I know the met office say it's been the wettest on record, but it hasn't been the wettest here.  For some people it has been the worst as they've had flooding, but other parts of the country have had flooding in previous years, as did we a few years ago, but not this year.

We all like to sensationalise about the weather to some degree and some people have short memories as it's not so long ago that we were getting excited about the worst drought conditions and hosepipe bans, so it was almost inevitable we'd get a period of floods.  We've had record low temperatures, record snowfall, record high temps, ong periods of grey summer days, etc... 

We've only been making accurate recordings of weather stats for a very short time in the grand scheme of things, so we may be breaking recorded stats, but we have very little to go on with regard to weather extremes further back in history.