This sheltered isle

This rainy weather has occasionally softened my rock-hard cynicism about climate change. I have bicycled around London for 25 years — and I usually get drenched about half a dozen times a year. This week, I have been soaked six times in as many days. For a moment, I nearly fell for the theory, suggested by some scientists, that the jet stream had slipped south, pushed downwards by warming polar temperatures. 

But then the sun came out, and reason — and cynicism — returned. This summer’s weather is unusual, but it isn’t freakish. If anything, our extreme reaction to not-so-extreme rainfall shows how limited the capacities of the British climate are. In the places that have been recently flooded, rainfall may have been high, but only by British standards. The wettest recorded day in Britain was during the Cumbrian floods of November 2009, when 12.3 inches of rain fell on Seathwaite in 24 hours.