Floods!
I can imagine nothing worse than waking up to find flood water in your house.
When I was a child, I used to have a recurring dream about living in top-floor apartment, surrounded by water from a heavily-flooded River Thames… It was pretty disturbing, but not as disturbing as the real thing, I’m sure.
Those people who live in beautiful houses near rivers must be really devastated, because after years of valuing their unique and historic houses, they now find that their homes are uninsurable and may no longer be worth much - on top of having their domestic lives ruined.
To add insult to injury, these people don’t seem to be getting as much sympathy as one would expect:
“It’s just global warming - deal with it!” summarises some of the comments that I have heard. Shocking really.
If it really is Global Warming, then how come some of the same areas that we are flooded this year had their hottest ever summer last year? And even if it is Global Warming, then it’s kind of all our responsibility, not just those people that live in flood-plains.
Whatever the causes, it seems that we must be braced for increasingly unpredictable weather in the future, so what are we going to do about it?
Us Townies shrugging our shoulders and getting on with life while our Rural cousins suffer is probably not acceptable - we need to fundamentally change the way that we live if we’re going to be able to cope with what the future has in store for us.
