Heavier rain and warmer weather will cause mouldier winters

Winters will be wetter, damper and mouldier, scientists have warned, as they say last year’s downpours were made 20 times heavier by climate change.

A rapid attribution study found that storms in the UK are becoming wetter, and global warming would make the intense ones seen this past winter ten times more likely.

Sarah Kew, researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, warned that the UK and Ireland “face a wetter, damper and mouldier future due to climate change”.

She said: “While the influence of climate change on strong storm winds is less clear, autumn and winter rainfall has become much heavier, bringing more damaging and sometimes deadly floods to urban and agricultural areas.”

The study looked at the role that global warming had played in the storms across the UK and Ireland between October and March, which left at least 13 dead.

There were 11 named storms, which caused widespread destruction, cutting off electricity to tens of thousands of homes and felling dozens of trees.

Human induced

The study found that human-induced climate change had led to the average rainfall on a stormy day becoming around 20 per cent heavier.

It looked at weather data and climate models to compare the storm severity and associated rain, as well as rainfall over the storm season, between today’s world with 1.2C of warming and the cooler climate before industrialisation.

They found that while rainfall during intense storms would have occurred about once every 50 years before human-caused climate change, the same level would now be expected to occur about once every five years.

The study found that climate change increased rainfall between October and March, the wettest six months on record, by 6 to 25 per cent.

The conditions seen in 2023/2024 would have occurred only every 80 years at most in the cooler, pre-industrial era, but are not considered likely once every 20 years.

Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in climate science at the Grantham Institute – Climate Change and the Environment, Imperial College London, said: “To put it bluntly, climate change is already making life s----ier.

“Wetter winters are flooding farms, cancelling football matches, and overflowing sewage systems.

“Groceries are becoming more expensive and Brits holidaying in Europe are having to shelter from record-breaking heat waves and wildfires.