UK summer floods a freak event, nothing to do with climate change

A new report has suggested that the UK’s floods last summer were not a direct result of climate change.

The report, called ‘The summer 2007 floods in England and Wales - a hydrological appraisal’, was put together by researchers from the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. It states that the UK floods in June and July were a “very singular event”, completely out of sync with historical patterns of weather.

This has resulted in a number of articles in the mainstream media suggesting that the report denies a link between the summer floods and climate change.

However, the report’s authors deny this, saying that climate change does cause extreme weather events, but also confirming that the summer floods in the UK were not part of this trend.

The report itself clearly points out that climate change will result in wetter winters and warmer and drier summers in the UK. As such, climate change makes flooding more likely in the winter.

However, other research has postulated that climate change should reduce flooding, because hotter summers will dry out the soil, allowing it to be more absorbant for the wetter winters.

The report concludes by saying that although UK floods are rare, the risk of home-owners being flooded out has increased significantly due to housing developments being built on floodplains.