Is climate change causing more flooding?

Large parts of the country were affected by flooding during Storm Bert

Storm Bert caused chaos across many parts of the country at the end of last month but are we seeing more storms and is flooding getting worse because of climate change?

The short answer is "yes" but there is other stuff going on we need to dive into.

The physics of climate change is, in many ways, fairly simple.

As humans, we keep doing stuff that produces gases like carbon dioxide and these cause the climate of our planet to warm up.

One effect of a hotter climate is that more water is evaporated and there is more energy in the atmosphere.

The end result in winter is more storms which can dump a lot more rain, very quickly, over smaller areas.

The flip side of this is hotter, drier summers.

All of this is directly linked to pretty much everything we do as people.

On an individual level, from flying off on holiday to driving to the shops - right up to the activities of massive fossil fuel companies at a global scale.

But can we say Storm Bert was made worse because of climate change?

Are we seeing more floods and damage than we used to?

Well we need to unpack the events of the last week to get a sense of what is happening.

The New Road cricket ground in Worcester, home of Worcestershire County Cricket Club, flooded again in November

The satellite image of Storm Bert showed a long finger of cloud extending across the country, ready to dump a lot of rain over quite a small area.

It's an "atmospheric river" which is exactly what it sounds like, a river of water in the sky, ready to drop.

Bert was a very slow-moving front that turned into a zone of really heavy rain which lasted for 36 hours in places.

This sort of intense, violent downpour is exactly what we will see more of because of climate change.

Usually as a reporter, I end up saying a particular storm like Bert certainly matches the trends we expect with a warming planet but it's hard to say one specific weather event is caused by climate change itself.

However, in the last few years, scientists have become much better at discerning how much of a storm or weather disaster is due to climate change.

Floods this month in Colombia were described by researchers as being "mostly exacerbated by human-driven climate change".

Events in Valencia in Spain are also said to have been "mostly strengthened by human-driven climate change".

Direct research into Bert has not yet been published but the signs are clear.

Climate change is driving this.

Businesses in Tenbury Wells, Worcestershire, were severely damaged by floodwater

However, there are a few other very human parts to this story.

The weather forecasting perhaps missed how intense the rain was going to be initially, with some rain and flood warnings upgraded later on.

While the failure of a flood wall in Tenbury Wells, in Worcestershire, left people and businesses underwater that are not normally affected by flooding.

All this also indicates some difficult truths about climate change and its impact.

Flood defences are not a cure all for flooding risk.

They need maintenance and can still fail. What was built as a sensible precaution in the 1990s may no longer be up to the job today.

Some areas may never be suitable for flood defences and sometimes these climate change-driven storms will dump water where we do not expect it.

But the starkest truth about the impact of Storm Bert is that, while this is exactly what we expect with climate change, most of us still continue to take our flights, drive our cars and carry on global business as normal.

Even as the global climate change conference COP29 wound down amid bitter divisions, doing what is needed to decisively tackle climate change remains apparently out of our reach.

Even as we begin to live with the consequences.