  Adiabatic vacua are known to be Hadamard states. We show, however that the
energy-momentum tensor of a linear Klein-Gordon field on Robertson-Walker
spaces developes a generic singularity on the initial hypersurface if the
adiabatic vacuum is of order less than four. Therefore, adiabatic vacua are
physically reasonable only if their order is at least four.
  A certain non-local large momentum expansion of the mode functions has
recently been suggested to yield the subtraction terms needed to remove the
ultraviolet divergences in the energy-momentum tensor. We find that this scheme
fails to reproduce the trace anomaly and therefore is not equivalent to
adiabatic regularisation.
