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Europe's deadly floods are glimpse of future climate

A new study shows that the record-breaking rainfall was made more likely and intense by climate change.

Storm Boris has ravaged countries including Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Austria and Italy, leading to at least 24 deaths and billions of pounds of damage. Scientists at WWA work out how much of a role climate change played in an extreme weather event by comparing it with a model of how bad that storm, drought or heatwave might have been in a world where humans hadn't been burning fossil fuels for nearly 200 years. The kind of rainfall unleashed by Boris is thankfully still rare – expected to occur about once every 100-300 years in today’s climate, which has warmed by about 1.3C due to greenhouse gas emissions.

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