  We show that the causal set approach to creating an ever-present cosmological
'constant' in the expanding universe is strongly constrained by the isotropy of
the microwave background. Fluctuations generated by stochastic lambda
generation which are consistent with COBE and WMAP observations are far too
small to dominate the expansion dynamics at z<1000 and so cannot explain the
observed late-time acceleration of the universe. We also discuss other
observational constraints from the power spectrum of galaxy clustering and show
that the theoretical possibility of ever-present lambda arises only in 3+1
dimensional space-times.
