The question everyone is asking lately is just what is going on with all these floods in the UK recently?
The Met Office put it down to torrential rain already falling on sodden ground creating flash floods and the large amount of water running off into rivers which rapidly expand and burst their banks.
The Environment Agency website states that 'as future assessments are completed it is expected that we will see a trend in the level of flood risk. These assessments are expected to show that flood risk is increasing'.
That answers the first half of the question but it doesn't explain the torrential rains that leads to the flooding. which only happened once or twice a decade previously. So what has changed that we now get two or three major floods in Britain a year?
This year bought flood chaos in early summer to Northern Ireland, Wales and the South West, again in the North of England in September and now the South West has been badly hit again this past week. .
Historically, the UK has always suffered from winter floods but these occur after a slow, but relentless, build up of rain over months and by melting snow but modern day floods are happening out of 'flood season' and rapidly after sudden, torrential downpours.
The Flood Hazard Research Centre, said: 'We appear to be shifting to a situation where you get a lot of rain and you get surface water flooding — sudden rainfall is driving the flooding’.
A study at Newcastle University concluded storms have become twice as heavy since the Sixties — and the most torrential occur four times as often.
The last Government increased spending on flood defences but one of the first things the Coalition did after coming into power was slash the flood defence budget by 30 per cent so the required level of defence is missing combined with housing being built on flood plains so with nowhere for water to go, it enters our streets, gardens and homes.
Another reason offered is the amount of grass areas, a natural soak for rain, which have been paved over so more rain runs off the concreted areas into storm drains and into the already swollen rivers.
Why are we getting more rain? The experts who study the climate and the extreme weather events point towards our old foe global warming.
The Earth System Science Centre at the Penn State Department of Meteorology: 'There is no question in my mind that the "signal" of climate change has now emerged in our day-to-day weather. We are seeing the loading of the random weather dice toward more "sixes". We are seeing and feeling climate change'
Dr Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution, at the Met Office Centre: 'The globally warmer atmosphere now carries 4% more moisture over the oceans than in the 1970s and in many places this extra moisture would be expected to lead to increased rainfall when storms form over land'.
Dr Clare Goodess, senior researcher at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit: 'An anthropogenic influence has recently been detected over Northern Hemisphere land areas in the largest daily rainfall events experienced each year.
Michael Oppenheimer, professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School and Department of Geosciences: 'The link between extreme events which have occurred recently and the build-up of the greenhouse gases is best represented by the "loading the dice" analogy – as the world warms, the likelihood of occurrence (frequency), intensity, and/or geographic extent of many
types of extreme events is increasing. According to computer simulations of climate, the likelihood that such an event would occur was about doubled by the buildup of the greenhouse gases.
Harold Brooks, head of the mesoscale applications group at Noaa's National Severe Storms Laboratory: 'We understand that warming the planet will likely lead to a more intense water cycle, with heavier rain when it rains'.
Michael F. Wehner, staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: 'This risk of extreme weather has already changed significantly due to human induced global warming. While these events could have occurred without the human changes to the climate, it is important to know that the amount of climate change that we have experienced so far is very small to what is projected to occur by the middle and end of this century. By 2100, today's most extreme weather events will seem relatively normal.
NASA: 'All individual weather events observed could have happened prior to the human intervention in the climate system, however unlikely that may have been. However, if the question were posed as 'would these events have occurred if atmospheric carbon dioxide had remained at its pre-industrial level of 280 ppm?”, an appropriate answer in that case is 'almost certainly not'.
Worrying, the the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre report Long-term trend in global CO2 emissions show that the amount of CO2 emissions we pump into the atmosphere is still going up.
Sorry to the flooded parts of Britain but it seems that due to a warming atmosphere and a cut in the flood defence budget, you will be paddling in your living rooms for quite a while yet.
