Tomgram: Chip Ward, How Efficiency Maximizes Catastrophe

It's true that no single incident or development -- no matter how out of the ordinary or startling -- can straightforwardly be attributed to climate change. Nonetheless, it seems strange that the massive flooding in England, of a sort last seen more than 60 years ago, led the TV news and made front pages here with hardly a mention of global warming. You certainly won't see a headline like this one from the British Telegraph: "Floods show global warming is here."

And yet this has been "the wettest May to July period for England and Wales since records began in 1766." The recent "Great Flood of July" in southern England followed a somewhat similar June event in the north. As parts of the country are still submerged in the wake of torrential, tropical-style deluges (a month's worth of rain fell in a few hours), while record extremes of heat "roast" central and southern Europe, the subject of climate change is certainly on European minds -- and a group of scientists are evidently going to release a study in the journal Nature this week that claims "more intense rainstorms across parts of the northern hemisphere are being generated by man-made global warming.