Two scientific studies of the 1898 Cumbrian flooding agreed that rainfall on the hills above Borrowdale could well have been as high as 13.8 inches (350 millimetres) — even more than that now being trumpeted by Dame Julia Slingo as ‘unprecedented’. 
And that was 117 years ago, decades before we ever heard of global warming.
As for the flooding of Carlisle at the weekend, the cause of this was not just the abnormal rainfall brought by what the Met Office absurdly called ‘Storm Desmond’. 
The problem was rivers already swollen by weeks of rain — itself not unusual for November. ‘Desmond’ just pushed it over the top.
Historical records show that Carlisle and Cockermouth have many times suffered flood events as serious as this one. Those listed on the Environment Agency website include no fewer than four such floods in the Thirties alone.
So where does this leave the excitable claims by the Met Office’s Dame Julia and Environment Secretary Liz Truss that this recent rainfall was yet further evidence of ‘climate change’, which is making such ‘extreme weather events’ more frequent and more intense?