The Guardian Floods, gales and blizzards alarm as well as harm us now because they seem to be incontrovertible proof of global warming. Even a small rise in the prevailing temperature of the world's atmosphere changes the geography and severity of weather events, increasing the risk of floods in such low-lying areas as the Ganges and Mekong deltas and some European coasts, while threatening to shift the flow of ocean currents which govern continental climates, triggering droughts elsewhere. It was only in places with unreliably changeable weather, like Britain, that the art of earnest and endless debate about it was fully developed. Now everywhere people squint at the sky and comment on the unusual quantity or dearth of rain, or the increased ferocity of winds and the rising height of tides.
Small changes have big effects.
Britain was once part of the European land mass, and the Thames was a tributary of the Rhine, whose mouth was the English Channel. Climate-induced changes in sea levels inundated the shallow plains once continuous between the fenlands of East Anglia and the Low Countries. For some time after the initial flooding there was a large island between Britain and continental Europe, where the Dogger Bank now lies under the North Sea's cold waters. That too sank, and historians say that the peoples of Britain, once they had been separated from their mainland brethren, lapsed two thousand years behind them in agricultural, technological and military development. There is a stern modern moral in that fact.