In 1860 an earnest meteorologist by the name of George Symons established the British Rainfall Organisation. He did so in response to public but mostly elite concerns that a series of droughts in the 1850s implied a permanent change in the national climate. His timing was not entirely fortuitous. That June was the wettest one recorded, comfortably damper than even last month. The next two months were also a washout. The experience was so traumatic that, 43 years later, this newspaper, reporting on severe flooding in London in June 1903 – when it rained for 58 hours continuously – referred back to the “ever memorable 1860” as if it had been yesterday.

That certain Victorians were disturbed by the drier weather of the 1850s is not surprising. The Earth had not long moved out of what is now termed the Little Ice Age when temperatures in this country were sharply down on a couple of centuries earlier. And Symons’s enthusiasm was not wasted. Through assiduous research he and his associates collected data on rainfall from 1677 and demonstrated emphatically that stretches of very hot summers and strings of exceptionally wet ones had occurred regularly in that period.

All of this is worth remembering during the present deluge. If the torrent of water was not bad enough, the surge of ignorant speculation as to its causes has added to the misery of the season. Numerous commentators and supposed “experts” have asserted that the flooding is proof of global warming. Much the same was contended by similar characters about the mild February (remember that?) enjoyed this year. That this flies totally in the face of the mainstream thesis about climate change – that Britain will endure wetter winters and drier summers – is plainly immaterial. If the weather moves away from the “norm” in any direction, then it must be global warming.

One camp that has not joined in this ludicrous orgy of false prophesy is the category that should know the most about the weather, the professional meteorologist. Our weather correspondent, Paul Simons, has pointed out that summer floods do occur in Britain rather often. There were, he outlines, dreadful runs of weather in the 1840s, 1910s and 1950s before the advent of low-cost airlines and quantifiable carbon emissions.

The claim that global warming is at work is no more plausible than more farfetched suppositions. These include the idea that years ending in 7 are cursed. The summer of 2007 has been miserable, 1997 was disappointing, 1987 and 1977 dull, 1967 brought flooding as did 1957, while June 1927 was so cloudy and foggy that the first total solar eclipse since 1724 passed by unseen. June 1917 resembled an outright monsoon. On this logic, AD777 must have been desperate; alas, being in the Dark Ages (The Times was not yet published), no details of that summer are available.

There is no doubt that the climate is changing and that the planet deserves the benefit of the doubt, but the members of our contemporary apocalyptic cult do not. This year will be warmer than 1860 was (but probably not as hot as 1560). How much of this is part of a natural cycle and how much due to man-made activities is not an exact science. Global warming has become an industry of its own, generating more heat than light (never mind the endless rain) as it wallows in breast-beating hyperbole. A leading article in this newspaper on August 29, 1912, bemoaned the chronic flooding of that year and blamed it on a “chain of barometric depressions” across northwest Europe. The same conclusion applies today.