As Extreme Weather Turns Deadly in the UK, Climate Activists Are Forced to Cancel Meeting

The UK Student Climate Network had scheduled Sunday’s event to take place in Strattfordshire in the middle of England. However, police advised the group to cancel the event since travel to and from the event was unsafe, according to the Independent. The group said that heavy rain made the roads impassable.

“This kind of last-minute cancellation is particularly difficult for young people without the financial resources to travel across the country whenever we choose,” Conningham said, as the Independent reported. “We are now living in an age of climate storms – where the most extreme weather of the last century is becoming the norm in this one.”

“This is an emergency that’s now being felt across the world – from Staffordshire to Sri Lanka,” she added.

CBS News reported that the UK government’s Environment Agency had issued a record 634 flood warnings on Sunday alone. More than 200 flood warnings remain in place across the UK, including nine severe – or “danger to life” – warnings, as the BBC reported.

Storm Dennis slammed areas that were still recovering from last week’s storm, Ciara. Dennis hit with winds reaching 91 miles per hour. It doused England, Scotland and Wales with more than half a month’s rain in just one afternoon, as The New York Times reported.

The government released emergency funds to help people recover from the storms.

“We’ll never be able to protect every single household just because of the nature of climate change and the fact that these weather events are becoming more extreme,” British Environment Secretary George Eustice said, as CBS News reported. He added that authorities had “done everything that we can do with a significant sum of money, and there’s more to come.”

Michael Byrne, a climate scientist at the at the University of St. Andrews in Edinburgh told the Independent that increased precipitation is a predictable byproduct of a warming world.

“When you warm the planet, the atmosphere holds more water. In many parts of the world, including the UK, rising temperatures go hand in hand with more rain,” he said. “These storms are nothing new, going back 100 years, but, because we are now more than 1C warmer as a whole versus pre-industrial times, every degree means 7 percent more water in the atmosphere and more rain in these heavy rain events.”

“When they come, they bring more rain, 100 per cent for certain, because of climate change,” Byrnes added.

Byrnes’ statement backs the findings of a study published in Nature last summer which found that hurricanes were dropping more rain. The scientists also predicted that future warming could increase rainfall totals for the most extreme hurricanes and tropical cyclones by up to 30 percent.

As for the climate activists whose meeting was canceled because of extreme weather, the storm just provided more evidence of the urgent need for action.

“The longer we wait to take the action we need, the harder it will be, and the bigger the risk of it being too late,” Coningham said as CBS News reported.