The scientists and the green groups have been saying it for decades, but there’s nothing quite like seeing images of people canoeing down the streets to make the mess we’re in hit home.
Our selfish short-term needs have changed the climate and made our lowland environment increasingly vulnerable to heavy rainfall. Putting it simply, the planet can’t cope.
Greenhouse gases are slowly warming the globe, making polar ice caps melt. As more and more water enters the rain cycle, we cover flood plains in concrete, while the politicians sit at summit tables and pay lip service to cutting pollution.
Heavy rains would once have soaked away into the land, priming a sustainable water table.
Now our obsession with covering green fields with motorways and housing estates has sealed off natural drainage. In drier times, we abstract what remains from the land until the cracks turn fields to crazy paving.
Heavy rains run off into our rivers, straining flood defences to breaking point. Nature didn’t design our lowland rivers to cope with this two pronged onslaught of boom and bust.
Even our own tinkerings couldn’t equip them for the recent deluge. Before long the rivers themselves will have to be redesigned to protect those living in low-lying areas from the consequences of our own short-sightedness.
Perhaps the great trio of waterways which wind across East Anglia and empty into the Wash are the shape of things to come for rivers in flood-prone parts of the Midlands and Yorkshire. 
Today the lower reaches of the Welland, Nene and Ouse no more resemble their former selves than the peaty marshlands they flowed through 300 years ago.Over the centuries they’ve been diverted, dredged and straightened, in a bid to protect Fen farmlands from the ravages of flood and tide.
The lower Ouse itself isn’t even the original Ouse, but a man-made new cut dug to provide a short cut to the Wash.
Despite its tender years in the scheme of things, the Ouse is already at the hub of a complex system of man-made rivers which radiate out from Denver. As flows increase, millions of gallons of water are channelled into the tidal Hundred Foot, the Relief Channel or the Cut-Off, in a complex balancing act depending on weather, wind and tide.
Across Fenland, networks of ruler-straight man-made drains protect tens of thousands of acres from flooding, while great sluices keep the North Sea at bay.
The great Dutch drainers took centuries to drive the waters from the flat black lands, where food is grown on a bewildering scale. Now scientists believe rising sea levels could make parts of the Fens unworkable and uninhabitable within little more than a lifetime. Further east Broadland’s fragile freshwater habitats – particularly the River Thurne and its broads – could have even less time to live. Successive governments have diverted money from sea defences along the Norfolk coast.
Scientists agree it can only be a matter of time before the sea breaks through again, setting off an environmental time bomb.
With so much at stake it seems churlish to bemoan the consequences for our sport, or complain at blank hours watching a motionless tip or float. Yet anyone who fishes East Anglia’s rivers can already see the knock-on effects.Matchmen complain at erratic flows and see-sawing water levels. More alarming are the immense winter flows on bigger drains like the Relief Channel and Middle Level, which sweep generations of fry and silver fish out to sea each winter.
These waterways were only built as drainage channels in the first place, so we haven’t got a leg to stand on if it comes to a toss up between fish or flooding. It isn’t just those who fish these once great rivers who are seeing things change.
Species of fish once alien to our shores are being caught in our seas, while the cod which once formed the staple catch of the nation’s fishing fleets teeters on the verge of extinction.
Those who study eels wonder if they too are in danger in some areas, for some seem to have lost their urge to make their great migration back to the Sargasso Sea.
Global warming has already caused shifts in the Gulf Stream and the other great ocean currents.
Nearer home elver catches are plummeting and river netsmen bemoan falling catches, while those who target eels with rod and line are seeing bigger and bigger specimens.
What will replace these current generations of big old fish, which have elected to stay where they are instead of going home to their birthplace to breed, once they die out?
Look at the trend in other species. Twenty years ago, a five pound tench was a specimen to be proud of. These days doubles grow more and more commonplace, as mild springs and autumns prolong summer weed growth and natural food in pits and lakes.
Bigger barbel than ever before are being caught, along with carp and bream that would have been the stuff of fantasy in the days when Dick Walker and Fred J Taylor first set their minds to catching them.
There are those who argue global warming is a good thing, in small doses. They talk of the barbie culture, where we’ll all bask in hotter and hotter summers.
Doctors at the British Medical Association’s Festival of Medicine examined the other side of the coin last week.
Deaths from heart attacks and heat stroke are predicted to rocket within our lifetime, while storms, floods and diseases once associated with the tropics will all become killers worthy of a place in official statistics.
Perhaps the days when a five pound tench was a fish to be proud of weren’t so bad after all.
Spare a thought for the bread and butter roach, which is also undergoing a shift in population dynamics in some areas.
There are less of them about, so the survivors grow bigger. Pollution, abstraction and the cleaning up of sewage outfalls have all had a hand in changing the make-up of our rivers. As the ecosystem alters, vital food required by young fry of some species is becoming scarce.
Generations starve unseen, leaving abundant food for the few that survive to adulthood.
The netful of silver is fast becoming a thing of the past on many rivers.
Longer, dryer springs rob colour, flow and oxygen from our waters.
The Thames I loved more than 20 years ago is barely recognisable to those who trotted its brisk current in their schooldays.
As rivers become harder to fish, it’s no wonder so many have deserted them for the man-made commercial carp pools, where pole fished meat still buys a bite a chuck.
Many more have deserted angling altogether. In the late seventies, an estimated four million adults bought the old water authority rod licences. Latest figures show less than a million EA licences were sold this season.
When you look at the bigger picture, all the rows over livebaiting, record lists and all the other insignificant things which divide what few of us still fish pale into insignificance.
In a generation’s time, we might even look back on the last few decades of the 20th Century as the golden age of angling.
