In the wake of the "more rain and more intense rain" story, Doug Keenan sends this graph of England & Wales rainfall records for 1766-2012 (click for larger; data here).
;)
Let's just say the trend towards more rainfall is not obvious. (As indeed is any trend towards less rainfall, which is said to be more likely by the UK Climate Impacts Programme).
[Updated to show England and Wales, rather than UK]
Bishop Hill
Doug writes:
The plot shows the total precipitation for England and Wales in 2012 as 1070 mm. That was the amount in the file for seasonal precipitation that the Met Office had on its web site when I downloaded the file on January 4th (at 20:31). The amount, however, is incorrect. The Met Office has since changed the file to specify the amount as 1245 mm. The other data points in the plot seem to be correct. An amended plot is included in the e-mail that I sent to Julia Slingo on January 7th. As shown and discussed there, the obvious problems remain.