Environment: Hot air isn't blowing the floods away

Gordon Brown does not blame the building of housing estates on flood plains, nor the ravenous construction that has taken place along riverbanks during his party's 10 year rule but the somewhat more nebulous, and difficult to pin down, climate change for the floods that presently cover thousands of square miles of England.

"We had a month's worth of rain in an hour," he said, as rainwater that fell on mountains gushes down to join what were, the day before yesterday, rivers and are now lakes.

One such lake has a huge oil slick across it, as a submerged petrol station's tanks failed in the extreme conditions. More are quietly filling up with raw sewage as drains and treatment plants are overwhelmed by the increasingly filthy water.

Some places are under 30 feet (almost 10 metres) of water.

But it's not the lack of effective drainage, or the failure to de-silt rivers that is at fault, or so Mr Brown would have us believe. It's because some parts of the world have drought and some have floods.

In that, he's right. Australia and California are gasping for water. Southern Europe is a rash of forest fires as trees become tinder. If only the clouds knew where to go.

Back in the real world, Bangladesh is suffering its annual flood. As of this morning, 15 people have died. No one should be surprised - it happens every year.

But while it may be easy to laugh at Brown's gauche politicisation of the climate change issue, the fact is that he is right. In Kuala Lumpur, it has been the rainy season for a little over two years. At the end of last century which sounds a long time ago but isn't, the monsoon was predictable: it rained for an hour every afternoon at 4 pm for around two months of the year, and lighter rain for about another two months. Now, it rains harder, for longer, most days right around the year, and at unpredictable times. Just a month ago, a six hour storm left part of the city under four inches of mud - despite KL's very impressive drainage system: the amount of water that fell was, at its simplest, just too much to go down the drain holes as fast as it was falling.

The tropical storms that brought widespread flooding to Vietnam and The Philippines last year won't arrive for two months - but already some areas are seeing dramatically reduced time for the rain that does fall to seep or drain away.

Brown says we must learn to live with climate change. But as weather-watchers predict that taiphoons will hit the cost of North East Borneo within fifteen years (and judging by the speed they are coming down the Philippines' peninsula, that might be an over-estimate) living with the weather is rapidly ceasing to be an option for many, especially in poor countries.