Visible data

The beauty of someone making records about things like weather events over a very long period of time is that we're able to see trends in the data which simply aren't visible from year to year or indeed from generation to generation. In the case of Venice we have records from St Mark's Basilica reaching back 1,200 years and can confirm that this year it was flooded for the sixth time. The scary thing is not that it was flooded but that of the six flooding episodes four of then have occurred in the last 20 years (i.e. that's 70% of events in the last 2% of the period). Let's hope the Italians can come up with some kind of "plan" to save this irreplaceable treasure, I fear time may be up.