UK Floods Linked to Warming

Central Britain is under water after record rains, and scientists are now saying that the heavy downfall is caused by man-made global warming. Britain's sodden summer, with swollen rivers, thousand homeless and water plants failing, has been caused by a southward shift of the jet stream. Not unprecedented, the Independent reports, but just what a new study predicts with warming.

"The 'human fingerprint' has been detected before in temperature rises, but never before in rainfall," says one source familiar with the study, "So this is very significant." The full study, which links increased rainfall in the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere to emissions of greenhouse gases, will be published in Nature on Wednesday.  (More United Kingdom stories.)