I’m writing this while staring at yet another weather warning on my phone. Severe weather. Moderate snow or ice. And honestly? It barely registers anymore.
That should concern us.
As I write this in mid-February 2026, parts of England have experienced over 40 consecutive days of rain. Not 40 days of drizzle. Forty days of persistent, ground-saturating, river-bursting, field-flooding rainfall that hasn’t let up since New Year’s Eve. Devon, Cornwall, and Worcestershire have been hit the hardest, with the Met Office confirming some stations have recorded rain every single day since 31 December 2025.
I drove to Leicester the other day, and the landscape told the story better than any news report could. Rivers had burst their banks. Fields were submerged. It looked like what the Germans call Land unter — land under water. The phrase is grimly appropriate.
From Bone-Dry to Completely Soaked
Here’s what makes this truly unsettling. Cast your mind back to last year. Spring 2025 was the sixth-driest on record in a series going back to 1836. By summer, five parts of England were officially in drought. Yorkshire Water’s reservoirs dropped to levels not seen since 1995. Hosepipe bans were rolled out. Farmers couldn’t irrigate their crops. Canals were closed because there simply wasn’t enough water to navigate them.
That was barely six months ago.
Now England has already received more than its entire average winter rainfall with half of February still to go. There are over 200 active flood alerts across England and Wales. The M62 had to be closed because the road surface literally fell apart from saturation. And the Met Office says there’s no end in sight because the jet stream has parked itself directly over us.
The Frog in the Pot
There’s an old story about a frog sitting in a pot of water that’s slowly being heated. The temperature rises so gradually that the frog doesn’t notice until it’s too late. It’s not a perfect analogy — real frogs would actually jump out — but it captures something important about how we respond to climate change.
Imagine a small group of those frogs armed with thermometers, charts, and decades of climate science, desperately trying to show the rest of the group that the water temperature is rising dangerously. The data is overwhelming. The evidence is there for anyone who cares to look. And yet the response from too many is a collective shrug: it’s just a bit of rain. It’s just a bit of heat. It’s just a bit of this, just a bit of that.
But “just a bit” is adding up to something much bigger. The extremes are getting more extreme, and the swings between them are getting more violent. We went from the driest spring in a century to 40 days of biblical rain in the space of a few months. That’s not normal weather variability. That’s a climate system under stress.
What Does This Mean for Our Food?
Here’s where it gets properly concerning. The UK only produces around 57% of the food it consumes, according to government figures. That means we’re already heavily dependent on imports for nearly half of what we eat. And a parliamentary report from late 2025 warned that without urgent action, domestic food production could fall by a third by 2050.
When fields are waterlogged for weeks on end, nothing grows. When drought scorches the soil in spring, crops fail. Farmers are caught between two extremes, and neither of them is good for growing food. Last year’s wheat harvest was the second-lowest yield since 2010. And that’s before you factor in the fact that prime agricultural land across the country is steadily being swallowed up by housing developments.
We’re building on the land that feeds us, while the land that’s left is increasingly at the mercy of weather that can’t seem to make up its mind.
The New Normal
I think the hardest thing to accept is that this isn’t a blip. This isn’t an unusually bad winter followed by an unusually dry spring followed by an unusually wet winter. This is the pattern now. The scientific term is “weather whiplash” — the tendency for a warming climate to produce more rapid and severe swings between extremes. Warmer air holds more moisture, which means when it rains, it rains harder and longer. When high pressure sets in, it bakes the landscape more intensely.
We’ve got mountains of data, satellite imagery, and climate models all pointing in the same direction. Carbon Brief reported this week on the links between the UK’s relentless rain and human-caused climate change. While formal attribution studies are still underway, the connection between a warmer atmosphere and more intense rainfall events is well established.
And yet here we are. Still debating whether it’s real. Still treating each extreme event as an isolated curiosity rather than part of a clear and accelerating trend.
So What Do We Do?
I don’t have all the answers. But I do know that pretending it’s fine isn’t one of them. At the very least, we need to start having honest conversations about what these changes mean for how we live, how we build, and how we feed ourselves. We need to stop treating farmland as a convenient plot for the next housing estate. We need flood defences that are designed for the climate we’re heading into, not the one we used to have. And we need to stop normalising the abnormal.
Because right now, we’re the frogs. And the water’s getting warmer.
KYAL <3
