This is important because the harder the rain falls, the more runs off the ground to cause floods. Global warming is also predicted to increase the number and force of storms and hurricanes and to raise sea levels, inundating coastal areas. Rainfall is predicted to increase for example over north-western Europe, including Britain in winter, and around the equator and in monsoon countries.And the rain is expected to be more intense. "As greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere," it warns, "we should expect an increase in rainfall and river flooding events." It adds it will be "difficult, if not impossible" to prevent them.Scientists expect more rain in many parts of the globe as the world heats up, partly because warmer air can hold more water.

A report from Amsterdam's University's Institute For Environmental Studies shows that rivers have been fuller, and flooding has increased, in Europe, the United States and Asia since the 1960s. The frequency of floods in Italy has almost doubled in the last quarter of a century; the Rhine at Karlsruhe in Germany has risen 23ft above flood level 10 times since 1977, compared with only three in the whole of the rest of the century and Bangladesh has been experiencing catastrophic inundations every three or four years since the early 1980s.HIGHER rainfall is partly to blame, says the Amsterdam report: all three countries have got wetter over the 20th century And global warming will make things worse. Earlier this year, mudslides buried two towns near Vesuvius in Italy's Campania, killing 160, while New Zealand suffered its worst inundation in a century and five central European countries were hit too. Patrick McCully, campaign director of the International Rivers Network in San Francisco says: "I can't ever remember a year with more extreme floods in more places."Earlier this autumn, a report from the US's National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, concluded that floods have indeed increased over the last quarter of a century. Britain has also suffered, if on a less disastrous scale, as rivers reached their highest levels in over a century both at Easter and last month, inundating thousands of homes and claiming lives.In all, according to the Brussels-based Centre For Research On The Epidemiology of Disasters, there have been 96 so far this year in 55 countries from Uzbekistan to Chad, the Yemen to Nepal, and Peru to French Polynesia. It means that Acts of God are, at the very least, aided and abetted by humanity.

Certainly there have been plenty of them so far this year: the Central America and Honduras tragedy, which looks like claiming the lives of over 20,000 people, and which has made a million homeless, is just one of a deluge of floods. In July, China's Yangtze River produced its worst inundation for nearly half a century, killing 2,000 and displacing 14 million people. The same month, floodwaters submerged two-thirds of Bangladesh and - unlike earlier, briefer disasters - continued to cover the country for months. Also in July three tidal waves engulfed Papua Guinea's north- west coast, killing another 2,000. In August, 100,000 people were made homeless in Nigeria when a dam burst And in September severe flooding hit Chaipas in Mexico. This alarming prospect - in the week that has seen Honduras counting the cost of Hurricane Mitch, officially described as the western hemisphere's worst-ever disaster - threatens to redefine the concept of a natural catastrophe. For as global warming takes hold, forests are felled and rivers are "tamed", they say that the waters will rise faster, further, and more frequently.