Can London’s floods be explained by climate change?

It’s climate change again, innit. It didn’t take long for Sunday’s flooding in London to be put together with Canada’s recent heatwave and the floods in Germany and China to be used as ‘evidence’ of ever-accelerating climate change – giving us even less time to save the world than previously thought. ‘More rain as Londoners call out climate change,’ screamed a headline on City A.M., alongside pictures of water pouring through Stratford DLR station and cars stuck on the North Circular. Sunday’s flash floods have also brought an old favourite out of the closet: a map purporting to show large parts of London which will be underwater by 2030 – and which actually shows areas which would be threatened, even now, by extreme tidal flooding if London had no flood defences (which of course it does have).

But is it really climate change wot flooded your local bus stop? One of the latest wheezes of climate alarmists is to argue that warmer air contains more moisture, and to use that to try to link any flood event to global warming.