20110216_SK
Source: Sky News
URL: N/A
Date: 16/02/2011
Event: Sky News: Manmade Gases 'Partly To Blame' For UK Floods
People:
- Professor Myles Allen: Physicist and head of the Climate Dynamics group at the University of Oxford
- Chris Huhne: Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change in the UK
- Tom Parmenter: Sky News correspondent
Tom Parmenter: For much of the UK, the autumn of 2000 was the wettest on record. The rain was relentless. The flooding swept through town after town. Thousands had their homes and businesses ruined. It cost £1.3 billion to sort out. After seven years analysing what was going on, researchers at the University of Oxford say, for the first time, man-made greenhouse gases could have been a reason as to why.
Myles Allen: Those floods could have happened, even if we had not interfered with the climate. But rising greenhouse gas levels loaded the dice, if you like, in favour of those floods happening, and made them more likely by around a factor of two.
Tom Parmenter: The implications for science are potentially very big. Before, the link between flooding and greenhouse gases had been guesswork.
Chris Huhne: The vast consensus in the scientific community is that this is an urgent problem, and that the evidence is getting stronger that we have to move fast.
Tom Parmenter: As the waters were crashing through, statistical analysis was far from people's minds in Uckfield in East Sussex. A decade on, the picture has changed but instincts haven't.
Man in street: I personally don't think that it's greenhouse gases, but, you know, I can be convinced to the contrary with the right evidence, maybe, but I'd say people are more worried about what's going on in their local environment, and whether it affects them or not, in the true sense of the word. Have I got - am I flooded out?
Tom Parmenter: To that end, they've invested here to minimise the effects of any future flooding. Nothing though will hold back the debate about climate change, as scientists continue to probe just what people do to this planet. Tom Parmenter, Sky News, East Sussex.