A 21st century catastrophe

The British Environmental Agency have said that the floods caused by last Friday's downpour was actually worse than the great floods of 1947.

"We have not seen flooding of this magnitude before," said the agency yesterday. "The benchmark was 1947, and this has already exceeded it." And the 1947 floods were said to have been the worst for 200 years.

What's simply astonishing - and this is why I keep saying that it is very hard to explain to anyone who wasn't in the UK that day what actually took place - is that the flooding that has surpassed the great flood of 1947 was as a result of rainfall which fell for a little over an hour, but did so with an intensity that I have honestly never seen before in my life. As a result of that hour and a bit of rainfall, entire British towns have been cut off, thousands have had to be evacuated and thousands more have been cut off from access to water.

It is obvious that the Government and the civil powers, from Gordon Brown down to the emergency services, are struggling to cope, not only with the sheer physical scale of the disaster itself, but with the very concept of it. It is entirely unfamiliar. It is new. Yet it is exactly what has been forecast for the past decade and more.

It is nearly 10 years since the scientists of the UK Climate Impacts Programme first gave their detailed forecast of what global warming had in store for Britain in the 21st century - and high up on the list was rainfall, increasing both in frequency and intensity.

This was thought most likely to happen in winter, with summers predicted to be hotter and dryer. But yesterday Peter Stott of the Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, an author of a new scientific paper linking increases in rainfall to climate change, commented: "It is possible under climate change that there could be an increase of extreme rainfall even under general drying."

The paper by Dr Stott and other authors, reported in The Independent yesterday, detects for the first time a "human fingerprint" in rainfall increases in recent decades in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere - that is, it finds they were partly caused by global warming, itself caused by emissions of greenhouse gases.

I was stunned today to read that what scientists are referring to as 'the catastrophic "extreme rainfall events" of the summer of 2007, on 24 June and 20 July' have now officially been deemed worse that the great flood of 1947.

As I say, and it all occurred in just over an hour. I think my original description of the events as "biblical" has been proven apt.

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Tags: UK, rainfall, extreme rainfall events, flooding, global warming