"Researchers Can Now Blame Warming For Individual Disasters"

"As floodwaters from the swollen River Thames crept closer to the walls of Myles Allen's south Oxford home in the United Kingdom, he was thinking about climate change — and if scientists could figure out if it was affecting the climbing water outside.

It was January 2003, and as Allen — a climate expert at the University of Oxford — monitored the rising waters from the safety of his house, a voice on the radio was telling him that it couldn't be done. Sure, the flood was the type of event likely to be made more frequent by global warming, the representative of the United Kingdom's Met Office said on the show. But ascertaining anything more concrete was out of reach.

At the time, the Thames River Basin had seen some of its greatest rainfall in decades, and by early January, the flow in some parts of the river was the highest it had been since 1947."

Chelsea Harvey reports for ClimateWire January 2, 2018.