Goldberg, I looked up some literature and found something I want to quote:
The pattern of changes in extremes uncovered by the research matches the predictions made in a number of climate models. Dr Fowler, author of the study at Newcastle University, claims 'the changes in the 40 year period are consistent with the trend we would expect from global warming'.
But Philip Eden, one of the country's leading and most respected climatologists, argues that the claims could be misleading. The problem, he says, is down to the short period of rainfall statistics analysed.
He claims that by taking a much longer time period, for example the whole of the 20th century, the frequency of high intensity rainfall events that we have witnessed in the past 30 years is not unusual.
The eras of heaviest summer downpours have actually coincided with cooler summers, not warmer summers, in particular 1912-1931, and again from 1948-1969.
In autumn and winter, downpours are closely linked with the strength of westerlies, which were very low in the 1960s, the start point of the study, and reached a peak between 1988 and 2002, he continued.
That said there does seem to have been more incidences of flooding in the last couple of decades.
But could it be that this is more a function of urbanisation and flood plain development, than any significant increase in high intensity rainfall events?
And the media could have played their part in making us think that flooding is on the increase.
Source:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/2 ... lood.shtmlGiven that the world has stopped warming over the last 12 years or so, when we search data we need to make sure the time series includes recent years, otherwise it's skewed improperly. Also any scenarios using to predict flooding increases in the future need to be analyzed very carefully, because these scenarios tend to be goofy sometimes.
Finally, given the evident rise in urbanization in places such a Latin America, and the lack of attention paid to flood control in the region, it would be extremely unlikely to see a regional reduction in flood events.