Euan Mearns has been analysing the Met Office's report on the floods and has raised some important concerns:
Sea level along the English Channel has already risen by about 12cm in the last 100 years. With the warming we are already committed to over the next few decades, a further 11-16cm of sea level rise is likely by 2030. This equates to 23-27cm (9-101⁄2 inches) of total sea level rise since 1900.
12 cm in 100 years translates to 1.2 mm per year of sea level rise along the English channel over the past 100 years. The Met Office is now suggesting that this is going to accelerate to 13.5 cm (median) in the next 16 years giving a rate of 8.4 mm per year until 2030. This represents an acceleration in the rate of sea level rise of 700% that is forecast to start happening tomorrow! This must surely be total drivel (Figure 3).
There is also this worry about the report's coverage of tides:
In the main body of the report the authors do discuss the exceptional Spring tides of early and late January but in the summary instead choose to present drivel on sea levels. Clive Best has estimated that the additional tidal height caused by rare alignments of Earth, Moon and Sun may have added over a meter to the normal Spring tide events. If correct this will have added significantly to coastal flooding and is totally unconnected to manmade global warming.
As Euan explains, the report is not all bad, but some of the issues he raises, and the fact that some high, but not exceptional rainfall caused a report to be published in the first place, make it look as if there is a political subtext to its publication.