Paper Monitor
10:33 UK time, Tuesday, 24 July 2007
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press, featuring, for today only, random acts of flood reporting.
"SIR – Had Bob Geldof or another celebrity announced that houses should be built on flood plains, no doubt the media and the Government would have taken notice" - Letter to the Daily Telegraph on the house-building on flood plains debate.
"The truth about monsoon Britain (and, no, it's not what you might think…) - the Daily Mail's science editor Michael Hanlon. (For those confused about what they should be thinking, "what you might think" refers to climate change.)
The war over Peter Stott:
"Yesterday, the Independent newspaper claimed that a research paper will be published in Nature this week linking this weekend's flooding with climate change," writes Michael Hanlon. "Met Office climatologist Peter Stott stressed that the paper was looking at global annual rainfall changes, NOT seasonal local events like this week's rains. 'This paper does not address the issue of whether summer rainfall is changing,' he told me."
Over to Michael McCarthy, environment editor of the Indie, writing in today's paper: "…yesterday Peter Stott…commented: "It is possible under climate change that there could be an increase of extreme rainfall even under extreme drying".
"WORSE IS YET TO COME.." - the Daily Mirror (cf yesterday's Daily Express headline).
"TEWKS OF HAZARDS" – the Mirror again.
"Oxford stoics set for a degree of discomfiture" – FT's attempt at a pun as flood threat hits the dreaming spires.
Cartoons of political leaders underwater:
- the Times depicts Brown as a white-haired Noah-like figure with the words "RAPID RESPONSE UNIT" on his chest, daintily hammering the first nail into the skeletal frame of an ark.
- the Independent portrays the prime minister swimming naked (it's ok, his modesty is preserved by a large tummy) in pursuit of a note on a fishing hook which reads "HOUSE BUILDING PROGRAMME" a la the cover of Nirvana's Nevermind.
- The Mail shows David Cameron waist-high in a deluge outside a Conservative Party office with the caption "not waving but drowning".
The 
