We Must Face Up to the Flooding, Not Flee to the Sun

For once, it's OK to talk about the weather. That traditional subject for polite and humdrum conversation has become interesting. Coming just a month after parts of Yorkshire almost disappeared under the floodwaters, the spectacle of rescue boats and helicopters at work across the Midlands has been gripping, if scarcely believable. Is this really Britain? In July? Tens of thousands of motorists have been stranded, thousands evacuated from their homes, and the cost of the damage done so far stretches into millions of pounds.

So far Gordon Brown has been lucky. The teeming floods that have cut off towns, destroyed countless square miles of farming, and stopped everything from aircraft flights to performances by the Royal Shakespeare Company, don't seem to have dampened his political honeymoon very much. And that's despite his political enemies repeatedly pointing out that the sun has hardly been seen since Brown took over. The Tories' John Redwood even went so far as to declare: "The government's failure to prevent these floods is an outrage."

Redwood, to be fair, was talking about stockpiling of sandbags and ditch-clearance, and the stranding of people on the M5. Yes, mistakes have been made. The government has been slow to act, particularly last month in Sheffield. And even now, when weather forecasters have been predicting the torrents for days, there's not been clear enough direction. Local councils may have been offered help and will be compensated by the government, but a disaster on this scale surely merits a specially designated minister who can take charge and coordinate all the different agencies and government departments involved.

At least in future we are promised that temporary barriers will be stored nearer to where they are needed so that they don't get stuck on flooded roads. As hammering rain becomes more common, there is going to be a steadily greater focus on flood defenses. Britain is going to have to spend more on modernizing sewers and drains too. The debate about building new homes on flood plains will become more intense.

The row over the Environment Agency's budget for flood planning is important, and had we spent two or three times the current flood protection budget, no doubt we would have got by better. But, as the agency's head, Baroness Young, acknowledged yesterday, the scale of the rainfall was so dramatic that even much better planning would probably have failed.

Here is the brutal truth: however good our flood defenses, transport planning, emergency relief and so forth, it is all inadequate if we don't face up to the primary question: not "Why hasn't the government been better prepared?" but "Isn't our failure to respond to climate change by changing our economy and lifestyles simply idiotic?".

Not everyone thinks the floods are connected with climate change. The Bishop of Carlisle blames last month's deluge on our pro-gay and anti-marriage culture. Meteorologists say a southern shift in the jet stream is to blame - but why has it moved? It could be part of the change of events caused by La Niña, a natural phenomenon in the Pacific. Others point to the grim summers of 1954 and 1956 as evidence that this is, in the words of the BBC weatherman John Kettley, "just an old-style British summer".

It would be interesting to hear what climate change scientists make of that. Matt Huddleston, the Met Office's climate change consultant, refers instead to the warming of the Atlantic, one of the effects of climate change. That too is the Al Gore message, relayed directly a few weeks ago at a summit in London with Brown and David Miliband. The science seems clear and simple: as the oceans warm, so greater quantities of water evaporate, to be carried and dropped in greater deluges. The apparent contradiction between more droughts and more floods isn't a contradiction at all. Brown and Miliband, sitting with a raft of senior Whitehall people, were fulsome in their praise of Gore's analysis. They also know the implications of what Gore says.

At that same meeting Miliband, then environment secretary, responded by saying that climate change was no longer a matter simply for people like him, but for prime ministers and foreign secretaries. One mandarin laughed and whispered to me: "Well, now we know what job he wants, then." But Miliband is right. It's no longer enough for the issue of climate change to be parcelled off to a smallish department. Most of the scientific evidence suggests these summer rains are highly likely to be a consequence of global warming; at the very least, global warming science predicts more turbulent weather, including more heavy downpours - just what has happened. But if you are still unsure, then there is plenty of evidence elsewhere: almost every weather statistic, the breakup of the ice sheets, the increasing number and power of typhoons, the drastic impact on habitats ... what more do we need?

Above all, what we need is a new politics, ready and opportunistic enough to join the dots. We shouldn't have heard mainly about extra money for local authorities, or debates about new housing, relevant though they are. We should have heard Brown, Miliband and the rest coming straight out and saying plainly that this is a further example of what lies ahead for us, time and again, if we don't change our ways. They should have grabbed the opportunity to get us thinking afresh about the changes we need to make.

Why? Because it's going to be hard, and controversial, and the number of desperate naysayers is just going to rise. That is human nature. Was there a more eloquent example of our customary short-term reaction than reports that ever more of us are going to respond to the (climate-change-caused) bad summer by getting into (climate-change-causing) jets and flying to the Mediterranean - where, by the way, global warming is causing innumerable heatwave deaths?

For most of us are hypocrites. I hold my hand up too. Our long-planned week's holiday to a Greek resort will go ahead if the airports are open. I'm sitting looking up at a cloudy sky, feeling light-starved, desperate for sunshine. I need to be cajoled, led, provoked and taxed into changing my ways, as do we all. And - ah - right on cue, another drumming of rain on the skylight.