Over the last couple of years we have become accustomed to news pictures that show folk knee-deep in water in their kitchens. The roll call includes Tewkesbury, Toll Bar, York, Hull and Cumbria.

Part of the explanation is that the generally-warmer air temperatures with climate change mean that the atmosphere can hold more water vapour, and that has been very amply demonstrated in 2010 with the unprecedented flooding in Pakistan and Australia.

However, it’s the scale of these last two events that makes them shocking, and outside our experience. The fact that normal climate mechanisms, like the Indian monsoon, and the varying temperature of the Pacific Ocean are now more extreme, means that it’s even more urgent that we consider what to do about the way that our behaviour and appetites are contributing to the change.

The UN describes the Pakistan floods as the greatest humanitarian disaster in recent history, and the figures support this assessment. It was greater than the 2005 tsunami, the Kashmir earthquake and the recent Haiti disaster rolled into one. The Indus River basin received frequent downpours of more than 10in of rain in 24 hours, resulting in the flooding of almost 1,000 miles of land between the mountains and the sea.

A combination of the very warm seas to the south and the blocked jet stream over Russia led to more than 2,000 deaths, more than half a million houses destroyed, one-and-a-half million acres of inundated farmland with losses of food and cotton worth more than £3 billion. Twenty million people were, and still are, affected, and it will take years to repair the roads, dams, and power infrastructure.

Last March, at the tail end of summer, a tropical cyclone dumped ‘one-in-a-hundred-year’ floods on Queensland, and some nine months later it happened again, but this time much stronger, with another saturated air mass exaggerated by a warming western Pacific, due to the La Nina conditions. It flooded the river basins in an area the size of France and Germany – four times the area of the UK.

Fewer people died, but there was more than £3 billion-worth of damage to farming and the infrastructure with particular problems for the sugar industry and the flooded coal mines and exporting ports.

We might not have suffered the fear and the loss of these events on such a scale, but there is a knock-on effect on our own lives with the rising prices of sugar, wheat, cotton and energy, the latter because of the coal problems.

We’ll certainly feel the rise in insurance premiums as companies struggle to recoup their losses after record natural calamities costing £75 billion in 2010.