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The UK's Record Floods Are a Climate Change Wake-Up Call

Even if the floods aren't directly "caused" by climate change, they're likely a taste of extreme weather to come.
Image: RobW/Flickr

Britain has a well-deserved reputation for being rainy, but by all accounts the recent weather is exceptional. Floods are devastating areas of the country, with rainfall in southern and central England this January greater than any year since records began in 1767. And it’s still pouring down.

“Hurricane-force” winds with speeds of 100-miles per hour were recorded in a storm last night—pretty remarkable for a country that doesn’t get hurricanes—and further severe flooding is forecast, with no clear end in sight. The Guardian reported that around 5.2 million, or one in six, properties in England are now at risk of flooding, and accountancy firm PwC estimated clean-up costs of up to £1 billion ($1.6 billion).

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One of the worst-hit areas is the south-west region of Somerset, where farming is a huge industry, but recently towns and villages along the River Thames have also seen severe flooding, and thousands of homes along the river have been evacuated (thankfully central London, where I am right now, is fine so far). Storms last night left 80,000 properties without power this morning, transport is in chaos and another storm is forecast this weekend.

The military has been called in to help flooded residents (when they remember their kit), the government is holding Cobra emergency response meetings, and things look set to get worse before they get better. The earth is now so saturated with water that the British Geological Survey has said there’s a risk of groundwater flooding—where water literally seeps up through the ground.

David Cameron visits flooded citizens in his wellies. Image: The Prime Minister's Office/Flickr

Everyone’s agreed it’s a natural crisis. But while politicians, being politicians, are busy playing the blame game, what’s the real cause? With such an extreme weather event, there’s one thing on everyone’s minds: climate change.

In the UK, climate change has generally been accepted as a thing that exists, and that human activity contributes to. And so I was unpleasantly surprised this morning to turn on my radio and hear former Chancellor Lord Lawson flatly deny any link between climate change and the current extreme weather, and instead suggest that the floods were a reason to stop investing in renewable energy (no, I didn’t follow, either). Just as we’re seeing extremely unusual and devastating weather, climate change denial seems to be gaining a voice in the UK for pretty much the first time.

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Environment secretary Owen Paterson refused to link the flooding to climate change and drastically cut funding in this area, and now other climate change “sceptics” are emerging. Energy secretary Ed Davey is giving a speech today in which he will point the finger at some members of the Conservative Party who are trying to undermine the government’s position on climate change. He’ll apparently accuse them of “wilfully ignorant, head in the sand, nimby-ist conservatism.”

That sounds about right. Because the fact is, even if these particular floods aren’t “caused” by climate change (though there is lots of evidence to suggest it does play a role in the severity of the disaster), they can be taken as a wake-up call to the kind of extreme weather events climate change is well understood as set to increase. If you won’t accept this as the real deal, consider it a dress rehearsal. One we’re clearly underprepared for.

What was a car park, now underwater in Wallingford, a town near the River Thames. Image: CEH Science News/Flickr

It’s difficult to draw a definitive link between a specific weather event and climate change, particularly in the UK where climate is usually volatile. But Julia Slingo, chief scientist of the UK’s Met Office, has said that “all the evidence suggests there is a link to climate change,” and that, "There is no evidence to counter the basic premise that a warmer world will lead to more intense daily and hourly rain events.”

She spoke ahead of a report released by the Met this week, which explained the weather was part of “major perturbations to the Pacific and North Atlantic jet streams”—which also led to the polar vortex on the other side of the Atlantic. Those, in turn, were driven by increased rainfall in Indonesia and the tropical West Pacific. The question then is, was that brought on by human-caused climate change?

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For now it’s impossible to tell for sure, but according to the report we will soon have a better way of measuring that. “The attribution of these changes to anthropogenic global warming requires climate models of sufficient resolution to capture storms and their associated rainfall,” it explained. “Such models are now becoming available and should be deployed as soon as possible to provide a solid evidence base for future investments in flood and coastal defences.”

While we can’t prove a definitive link between the current floods and climate change, it seems likely. We know that, as the planet warms, rainy places will get rainier. In the Telegraph, climate researcher Corinne Le Quéré explained, “It is simple physics: the planet warms, water evaporates more, more moisture is available in the atmosphere for individual storms, therefore more heavy precipitation.” So if an individual storm is just caused by “weather,” its severity is likely affected by global warming.

This map shows rainfall in December and January as a percentage of tha average over 1981-2010. You can see the south of England is the worst affected. Image: Met Office 

Then there’s the matter of rising sea levels. Britain, being an island country, is obviously quite affected by this. According to the Met report, levels along the English Channel have risen 12 centimetres over the 19th century and that’s expected to rise by another 11-16 centimetres by 2030. While sea level rise might not directly cause flooding (yet), it obviously risks lowering the country’s resilience to more rain.

It’s not as easy as saying climate change causes floods, but it’s even less productive to stick your head in the ground and pretend climate change isn’t happening. Whether the current flooding is a direct result of man-made global warming, or has just been exacerbated by it, is almost beside the point when it comes to preparing for the future.

Dredging rivers and investing in flood defences—things the UK government has been accused of leaving too late in this instance—might be important in mitigating the devastating effects of floods, but they won’t help prevent extreme weather events in the first place. If we don’t act in response to the current situation, we can consider it a taste of things to come.