Climate change 'made record UK rainfall in December more likely'

Study finds global warming made Britain 50-75% more likely to receive catastrophic rainfall that caused floods, but natural variation also played a role

Climate change made the UK's record December rainfall, which caused the devastating floods, 50-75% more likely, a preliminary scientific investigation has found.

"Greenhouse gas emissions are loading the weather dice towards these warmer, wetter winters," said Friederike Otto, scientific coordinator of the climateprediction.net project, which harnessed the collective power of roughly 70,000 home computers to run thousands of climate models extremely quickly.