You’d better get used to the wet

Sales of sandals, swimwear and ice cream have fallen and we’re stuffing ourselves with comfort food to warm up after getting drenched. Sales of meatballs are up 20% and we are also buying more tinned soup and mince.

Fake tan is proving popular, so we can at least have the illusion of summer when we look in the mirror.

But the worst isn’t over. At the end of last week forecasters predicted rain for six days out of the next nine. Rain looks to be a familiar companion from now on, winter and summer. There are arguments about the cause of global warming — most climatologists believe it is a man-made disaster, born of flooding the atmosphere with carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels; some say it may be a natural phenomenon because the world has previously experienced ice ages and warmer periods — but its effect is not in doubt.

We think of global warming as making the world hotter but it will also make it wetter, because of melting ice caps and hotter air drawing up more moisture. 2004 is on course to be one of the hottest years on record. Although the weather seems dire now, July was average and the first six months of the year warmer than usual. But this August is the wettest since 1992 and there seems no end in sight to what meteorologists call “precipitation events”.

“Rainfall is definitely getting heavier,” says Dr David Viner, senior research scientist in the climate research unit at the University of East Anglia. “It is a time of huge change. We can expect to see more intense storms but also floods like those in London, which are not as dramatic as the Cornwall floods but equally damaging. Overall, we can expect dry seasons to get drier and wet seasons wetter.”

Some of the climate change we are experiencing is already visible and welcome. Winters are not so severe. Trees come into leaf and flowers bloom earlier. Birds arrive sooner. Our wildlife is expanding.

“If you look at a bird book that’s 20 or 30 years old it will tell you that the little egret — a small, white, heron — is a rare visitor to Britain. Yet now it is nesting and breeding on the coast of East Anglia,” says Viner. “So though we have definite climate change, it is not all doom and gloom.”

One of the areas Viner says will be most affected by climate change — not surprisingly — is tourism. At the moment, the summer migration from northern to southern Europe accounts for 70% of all international travel. Brits eat egg and chips in Torremolinos while Germans stick to bratwurst, so we can assume they go for the weather rather than the culture. But for how much longer? The heatwave in southern Europe last year — which claimed several hundred lives — was too much for many people. “The so-called ‘comfort index’ collapsed,” says Viner. “People were coming home to northern Europe and finding the weather was what they’d been seeking in the south. As time goes on, that may mean our south coast resorts regenerate and benefit.”

So rather than egg and chips in Torremolinos it will be paella in Margate . . . but not if devastating thunderstorms become a regular feature of the British summer.

And it looks as though they will, though their horrible effects are as much a result of our draining flood plains and mania for building as of global warming.

“Human beings cause flooding disasters. We’ve changed the way we structure our society and are using more and more of what we consider to be valuable land,” says Bjorn Lomborg, former head of Denmark’s environmental advice agency and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist.

“When you build on wetlands, spring floods, for example, will do more harm. We need to restore some of the wetlands and forests that keep water manageable.

“There is really something immoral about looking at instances such as Boscastle and saying, ‘This shows we need to do something about global warming. We should comply with the Kyoto treaty.’ Even if we did follow the Kyoto treaty, it would not mean we would get less flooding. It simply means we would get slightly less water over the next 100 years.

“Basically, people are saying, ‘This is horrible. Let’s do something that will make it not quite so horrible by 2100.

“The way to deal with this is by planting more forests and having wetlands we allow to be flooded once in a while and sometimes saying ‘no’ to new buildings.”

But, in any case, how far it is possible to predict our weather is a moot point.

“The Romans produced good wine in York. King Canute dug peat to keep his people warm through the little ice age. Samuel Pepys described revels on a frozen Thames and hurricane force winds tearing roofs off houses,” the environmentalist David Bellamy wrote recently.

“The summer of the battle of Britain was gorgeous. Up and down, up and down, went the temperature and there is no real proof that it is not still doing just that as part of a natural phenomenon.”

Bellamy believes man’s contribution to global warming may be minimal and that water vapour has a far more dramatic effect on the earth’s temperature. “I first became sceptical about the latest bout of so-called global warming being due to a rise in the levels of carbon dioxide when I took a look at the facts and figures of past climate change,” he says.

“The most recent bout of natural global warming started in earnest about 13,000 years ago when ancient Brits were helping to send mammoths to the wall of extinction. The glaciers started to melt in earnest.

“Since then, evidence from pollen and ice core records and from history tell us that Britain’s climate has been far from temperature stable over a range of some six degrees celsius. They show that a couple of millennia later, temperatures dropped like a stone. Both people and what mammoths were left moved back south.

“Then, with minor waggles of a few degrees, global warming continued, giving us our island status by filling up the English Channel with water.”

Dr Bill Burroughs, a retired meteorologist, points out that dramatic storms, though we tend to associate them with the hurricanes and tornadoes of “freak weather” television programmes, have always been a part of the British climate.

Just as our current woes are partly blamed on Hurricane Charley, which struck Florida last week, its namesake brought chaos and torrential rain to Britain in 1986. In 1979 the Fastnet yacht race ended in tragedy when a storm sank 77 yachts and 15 sailors died.

But knowing that freak weather is nothing new or that Britain is really getting warmer is scant comfort as we face another dreary August week. Ready the umbrellas. After a fine weekend, guess what? It’s going to rain.