Great weather for ducks, they say. This island has been deluged. Inundated. East to west, south to north. And it is, if anything, worse to the east. The Rhine is already many metres above normal as far inland as Köln. By the time it subsides, billions of marks worth of damage will have been done.

Ecologists have long warned about the effects of greenhouse gases, and have forewarned of global warming.

But maybe it won’t quite work that way. Maybe, instead, we’ll get global wetting.