George Osborne recently defended his welfare cuts by insisting that it was wrong to pass on our current national debt to future generations. He maintained that our children shouldn’t have to bear the consequences of our greedy lifestyles and general over consumption.

On the face of it, that’s not too unreasonable. However, it is, in the context of what else he said.

He is determined to champion shale gas fracking and so commit the UK to another generation of fossil-fuelled power stations, supported by tax breaks, weaker planning controls and very large community bribes. It seems that he is quite prepared to dump all the extra CO2 from the current population into the atmosphere breathed by our great grandchildren irrespective of the consequences. That problem can wait, apparently.

I hope they can all swim, as a significant consequence of a destabilised and warming climate is more flooding, as many have experienced in the last few years. This isn’t surprising as warmer air holds more water vapour, up to seven per cent more per extra degree, and the records for the last 30 years show that rainfall is becoming more intensive, and the run-off more destructive. One of the footprints of global warming is uncontrolled flooding.

The UK has had its fair share of this increased inundation recently with Tewkesbury, Boscastle, Sheffield, Hull, Cumberland and Hebden Bridge leading the way, but these have been almost insignificant events compared with other parts of the world. The scale and damage has been simply staggering and unprecedented, with the worst examples being the most recent.

In 2005, Mumbai received 25 inches of rain in 12 hours, and the pattern was continued in Queensland, Australia, in 2010. It’s still struggling to recover from records floods following four inches of rain a day, for three days, 40 deaths and three-quarters of the state designated a disaster zone.

The same year a fifth of Pakistan, three times the area of Great Britain, was under water following 11 inches of rain in 24 hours, 20 million people homeless and more than 2,000 dead.

This April, parts of Argentina had up to 16 inches of rainfall in two hours, 300 people died and the water was waist- deep in Buenos Aires. Then it was central Europe’s turn, with one of the wettest springs ever, while the Northern Indian monsoon came a month early, with four times the expected rainfall, and thousands dead.

Perhaps it’s only justice that in June, Alberta, the Canadian oil state, received eight inches of rainfall in 24 hours, and record flooding, though it’s unlikely to stop them developing the oil sands that will continue to pump CO2 into the atmosphere.