THE weather has been awful.

Even from the steamed-up windows of the member's restaurant, MSPs cannot help but to have noticed the storms lashing against the concrete panels, wooden poles and oddly shaped decorative panels that constitute Holyrood's protective outer casing.

We have been warned about these wetter and wilder winters as a consequence of global warming.

But it wasn't a gloomy realisation that the parliament has been battered by the elements for days on end that prompted Kezia Dugdale to raise the issue of climate change during First Minister's Questions.

Oh no. It was the fact the First Minister is off to Paris on Monday to hob nob with world leaders at the UN climate summit.

The Herald:

The FM will take part in debates, attend a business event and conduct "high level bi-laterals" as her spokesman put it with a bit of a flourish.

If that sounds like a meeting to you, it sounds ominously like grandstanding to Ms Dugdale and her Scottish Labour colleagues who would dearly love to be over there grandstanding themselves. Nicola is going green in Paris and Labour is green with envy.

So Ms Dugdale went for the climate jugular, the awkward fact that while the Scottish Government has some of the toughest targets in the world to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it hasn't actually met them. Ever.

The Herald:

"Will she remember to tell the world?" prodded the Scottish Labour leader.

Unwisely, Ms Sturgeon responded with honesty and hard facts, explaining patiently to MSPs how the targets had been missed because they had been made even tougher as a result of new scientific evidence.

But the more she burbled earnestly about "10,000 mega-tonnes of carbon" the more the Labour backbenchers groaned.

"This is actually factual information," she pleaded, but to no avail.

"There is more spin in that answer than the average wind turbine," chuckled Ms Dugdale.

But, as usual, it was the First Minister who had the last laugh.

She revealed she would be travelling to Paris by train, not the polluting plane of Ms Dugdale's imagination, and her backbenchers fell about. In gales of laughter.