A team of researchers have published a study that shows human greenhouse gas emissions significantly contributed to devestating floods in England and Wales in 2000. The floods damaged 10,000 properties and cost £1.3bn in insurance loses.

From the New Scientist:

Allen and his team found that human greenhouse gas emissions "significantly increased" the likelihood of the 2000 floods. They can say, with a 66 per cent confidence level, that emissions nearly doubled the risk of the 2000 floods.

Conversely, says Allen, there is only a 10 per cent chance that the increase in flood risk rose by just 20 per cent as a result of human contributions to climate.

Their methods seem very robust and combine a number of models to account for the difficulty of predicting rainfall and flooding events.

Their work also employed distributed citizen-science through Climateprediction.net, where idle computing time is donated by nearly 55,000 contributors and used run climate models. 

The authors have launched a new project, called Weatherathome, that will use distributed computing to model weather -- rather than climate -- events.