THERE are numerous reasons why yesterday's weather caused so much havoc across the country.

It was, after all, a very severe storm - perhaps the worst in living memory in parts of the south.

So many homes were flooded because, in our overcrowded island, we are building too close to rivers.

We are laying down more and more concrete, and we have encouraged farmers to become more and more intensive. Rain just bounces off Britain - off town centres, off out-of-town retail parks, off large unwooded fields, off unculverted dales - and rushes into the rivers which overwhelm the houses which have been built too close to them.

We haven't properly maintained our Victorian drainage systems - around the North-East yesterday it was possible to see that much flooding was caused by blockages that occur whenever there is heavy rainfall.

So much disturbance was caused because of our changing lifestyles. A generation or two ago, our forefathers were more locally-orientated. Children walked to school rather than have their parents plough through floodwaters in 4x4s. Adults worked closer to home and so didn't need railways or roads to commute to the office.

They were all more self-sufficient compared to our modern "just-in-time" mentality. They would have had the essentials, or ways of making them, that were stripped off the shop shelves of Bognor Regis in a wave of panic-buying.

All of these factors contribute to the havoc experienced yesterday. But even together they cannot explain it.

The storm of 2000 will now be ranked with the storms of 1987, 1990 and 1995 as the most devastating in living memory. We can detect a pattern here.

Similarly, already in this year alone places like Skinningrove, South Church, Bishop Auckland, Howden-le-Wear and Hurworth Place have all suffered the worst flooding for decades. The pattern grows stronger.

"Freak" weather conditions are becoming so common they can no longer be described as "freak". All the evidence points to a warming of the planet which, for us, means that wetter weather becomes the norm.

It was therefore a sodden irony which also yesterday saw outrage greet the Government's plans to break a fuel blockade while the protestors gathered to work out how they could force cuts of up to 22p from the price of a litre of petrol.

The Government must address the protestors' concerns in a reasoned way. It must also do far more than it has so far to create a semi-decent rail system that takes people off the roads and freight off the lorries.

But it must not compromise the position of the world's fourth largest economy to preach and persuade other countries that they, like us, must do their bit to reduce the output of greenhouse gases.

Yesterday we experienced the future of our climate - and yet in all of our narrow-minded ways, we appear to want to make it worse