Get used to floods - the worst is yet to come (Independent UK)

[marmar]

Geoffrey Lean: Get used to floods - the worst is yet to come
It is salutary that Gordon Brown has been faced with a climate-driven crisis so early in his premiership

Published: 24 July 2007

If there is one thing we Britons should surely be able to cope with, it's the rain. We may be wearily resigned to the apparent inability of the nation that invented the steam engine to run a railroad. We may, perhaps, be persuaded by successive governments that our public services are continually in need of "reform". We may even believe that we can excuse being caught unawares, as last year, by drought. But this damp island, slap in the path of the wet westerlies, is awfully used to getting a drenching.

Yet here we are, after a few days of heavy downpours, bang in the middle of a national crisis. The rains brought transport to a standstill. A whole town is cut off by water from the rest of the world. Hundreds of thousands of people have lost or may lose their water supplies. Hundreds of thousands more face losing electric power. And we are told that the worst is yet to come.

Things have changed - and we have been caught out because we were not prepared ... We have, of course, had severe floods before; the worst killed 2,000 people when the Severn burst its banks in 1606, while an area the size of Kent was inundated across the country in the spring of 1947. But they have become more frequent - more than doubling over the past century.

This is mainly down to the weather. We are used to miserable summers - but this month is expected to be the wettest-ever July, following the wettest-ever June. We have also experienced torrential rains before - in July 1955 an unmatched 10 inches fell in Martinstown, Dorset, in just 24 hours. But these, too, are becoming more common.

Research at Newcastle University last year concluded that downpours have become twice as intense over the past 40 years, and that the worst come four times more often. And the Environment Agency predicts that heavy rainfall will become three or four times more common in coming decades, increasing flooding tenfold.

This is only to be expected as the world heats up, injecting more energy in the climatic system and evaporating more water from the sea. As The Independent reported yesterday, a new scientific paper will tomorrow firmly make the link between heavier rainfall and global warming. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article2795649.ece

[soothsayer]

1. bring on the gondolas