The satellite image of Storm Bert showed a long finger of cloud extending across the country, ready to dump lots of rain on a fairly small area.

It’s an “atmospheric river”, which is exactly what it sounds like, a river of water in the sky, ready to flow.

Bert was a very slow moving front that developed into an area of ​​very heavy rain that lasted 36 hours in places.

These types of intense, heavy downpours are exactly what we will see more of as a result of climate change.

Usually, as a journalist, I end up saying that a particular storm like Bert certainly fits the trends we expect with a warming planet, but it’s hard to say that a specific weather event is caused by the change climate itself.

However, in recent years, scientists have become much better at discerning the extent to which a storm or weather disaster is due to climate change.

This month’s floods in Colombia have been described by researchers as “mainly exacerbated by human-caused climate change, external“.

The events in Valencia in Spain would also have been “mainly enhanced by human-caused climate change, external“.

Direct research into Bert has not yet been published, but the signs are clear.

Climate change is the cause of this situation.