Climate known: There will be more floods and droughts

Warm air holds more moisture: about 5 per cent more for each 1°C temperature increase. This means more rain or snow overall, and more intense rain or snowfall on average.This trend is already evident, and is stronger than models predict.

More intense precipitation means more floods. While we can't say whether a particular flood is due to climate change, modelling indicates that climate change is making such events far more likely and more extreme. The many floods in the past year or two, from Pakistan to the US, might not have broken so many records had the world not been warming.