These are weather events that affect your local areas at different times of year. They include flooding, heatwaves and drought.

But why are we experiencing these things because of a temperature rise? How are floods linked to a warming planet? Let’s take a look at how it all links together.

The Met Office have very helpfully put together this table to show changes, if any, in extreme weather events.

Let’s start by looking at flooding. Surely, if it’s getting warmer, we’d expect less water. Well, it turns out that a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapour. That means when it rains, we’re experiencing more rain. And that’s why we’re hearing things like “a month's worth of rain in one day” so often.

When we think about tropical areas, we know that they experience monsoon seasons, and a warmer climate explains why. However, they’re also often very green areas, like rainforests, etc. And so they have the greenery to allow for the runoff of rain. Cities, towns and built-up areas in the UK are not built for this type of weather, and so we experience flooding.

When it comes to storms, they need two main ingredients – warmth and moisture. Now we know about the water vapour, and we know that our climate is warming; we can see that these are the ideal ingredients for more storms. Basically, what would have been a wee baby storm out of the loch that likely wouldn’t have affected anyone, now has more warmth and moisture to build itself into a larger, more violent storm that has more energy to come further inland.

Droughts we’re seeing are simply due to higher temperatures, and with droughts, the lack of land moisture and increased temperatures is therefore allowing larger, more devastating wildfires.