There’s a strong wind blowing and it’s pouring with rain as I write and it’s been that way for most of the month.

While national attention has rightly been focused on Cumbria, where there has been unprecedented rainfall and severe flooding, it’s been pretty damp in Sussex too.

By the time we end November, I reckon we will have seen the wettest month here since October 1987, which you may recall also included the Great Gale.

When the rain started, I wondered how long it would be before some weather expert attributed the floods to climate change.

I did not have to wait long.

A professor in Cardiff warned at the weekend that Britain would become more like tropical cities coping with frequent deluges. This missed a couple of points.

One is that places such as Cockermouth in Cumbria have already been badly flooded twice in the past decade.

The other is that Cockermouth is in the wettest part of Britain and the rain that falls there comes from Atlantic fronts rather than typically tropical thunderstorms.

To hear these experts speak, you would think there had never been exceptional weather events in the past.

A good example was the 2000 floods which badly affected Lewes.

Then I was told Lewes had never seen anything like it, only to open a book and see a picture from 1960 showing the railway station flooded to almost exactly the same depth.

The 1980s were a cold decade with lying snow in Sussex, even on the coast, every year from 1982 to 1987.

Yet that did not prevent a remarkable storm in July, which deposited six inches of rain in one night on Hove.

Everyone in Sussex remembers the Great Gale but few recall it was part of a wild month which had rainfall totals in most of Sussex exceeding ten inches.

There were several mudslides, including one in Rottingdean which has gone down in history as the biggest recorded.

Tempests

Exceptionally wet weather continued into the following month when the facades of two Regency houses in Percival Terrace, Brighton, collapsed into a hole caused by water. The 1960s were so cold experts predicted Britain would soon slip into a mini ice age.

They included the exceptional winter of 1963 when snow lay on the ground for two months.

Yet they also contained the enormous floods of September 1968, not a warm year, which inundated much of mid Sussex, closing roads for days on end.

In the 1950s, a miserable old decade, there were several notable floods, especially one on Exmoor in 1952 which caused damage and great loss of life.

You could argue, and some climatologists do, that all these events have occurred since the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century started global warming.

But that does not explain the amazing storm of 1703 which made the 1987 Great Gale seem like a gentle zephyr.

It happened at precisely this time of year and lasted a week.

Gusts of more than 120mph were recorded and millions of trees were destroyed.

Up to 15,000 lives were lost, compared with five in the Great Gale.

In his book The Storm, Daniel Defoe called it “the tempest that destroyed woods and forests all over England.”

Brighton was a picture of desolation, with houses and two windmills destroyed and countless fishermen’s lives lost at sea.

Less than two years later anther storm of almost equal ferocity destroyed the rest of the town and buried houses under the old cliff with pebbles 15ft deep.

It tore the roof off the church of St Nicholas.

These storms were caused by freak climatic conditions which have always been with us and always will be.

There is a storm of a different kind raging over whether climate change is actually happening.

Most of the scientific community is convinced it is but there are notable global warming deniers such as Nigel Lawson and Christopher Booker.

Many pious words will be spoken by politicians at next month’s climate change conference in Copenhagen.

They are being warned by climate change fundamentalists, who seem as blinkered and unwavering as their religious equivalents, that there will be more apocalyptic floods and other disasters unless we all stop heating our homes and using mechanical means of transport.

Harmful

Curiously, most of these fanatics are using the latest technology, including mobile phones, consuming plenty of power to make their points.

I do believe climate change is taking place, even though it appears to have levelled off recently and some parts of the world are actually getting colder. I don’t believe it is necessarily all harmful.

There could be many benefits, including opening up currently frozen areas of Canada and Russia for cultivating crops.

I lead a fairly green life, cycling and recycling, wasting and wanting not, because I do not want to leave footprints, carbon or otherwise, on the planet.

But I do not want to be told what to do by didactic, dull climate change fanatics who believe theirs is the only true way to world salvation.