Flooding has been much in the news over the last year, and it’s probably the most obvious indication that the climate is changing. We can’t help but notice a foot of water in our living rooms.

Indeed this is the third time that I have written about flooding, and I suspect that it won’t be the last. The first was in June 2007, when widespread flooding in Boscastle, Helmsley, Malton and much of the Severn valley followed worldwide extremes, such as a metre of rainfall in 24 hours in Mumbai.

In January 2011, I was prompted again by the previous year’s flooding of half of Queensland and a third of Pakistan, particularly as, closer to home, Tewkesbury, Toll Bar, York, Hull and parts of Cumbria were partly under water.

And it has continued in 2012, with Hebden Bridge being submerged on and off throughout the year. Finally the problem became extensive, from Aberdeen to Devon and Cornwall, and the insurance industry is bracing itself for yet another year of record claims.

We have a love-hate relationship with water. It’s idyllic for swans to glide about on, and heated and added to a tea bag it has much to commend it, but overall it’s dangerous stuff. It ruins carpets, drowns us, and carves out our landscape, all the time as part of the normal hydrological cycle. We take it for granted as it evaporates from the sea, forms clouds, condenses into rain, becomes rivers, and runs back into the sea to start all over again.

Left alone it will all be in balance, with almost all its work completed in a few hours each year, and we shouldn’t forget how much energy is involved. A cubic metre of river water, washing machine size, weighs at least a tonne, and in flood it increases the work done 64 times whenever its speed doubles. That’s powerful.

Our daily experience, from turning on the heating to demist car windows, or hanging out the washing in summer, tells us that warmer air holds more water vapour. So because climate change gases, mainly CO2, have warmed the atmosphere, by almost a degree in the last 50 years, we are encouraging more water vapour into the air, by nearly ten per cent, and it then rains on the hills around Hebden Bridge.

With more rainfall, the ground quickly becomes saturated, so the next rain can’t soak in, and this isn’t helpful as we like to live near rivers, pave over our gardens, tarmac large supermarket car parks, and block the drains with plastic bags.

Rivers aren’t the problem – we are. The best flood defence is surely less CO2, less concrete and flood plains left for flooding.