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AS anyone who works in a museum knows, art conservators can be slow to embrace change. But for Sarah Staniforth, director of historic properties at the National Trust in Britain, the eye opener came last September, as she contemplated photographs of a torrential downpour that had just invaded the billiard room of Cragside, one of the trust’s Victorian house museums.

Since 2000 catastrophic rainstorms have become so prevalent in England that the trust has gradually retrained its emergency teams to cope with floods, in addition to its time-honored enemy, house fires. Yet at Cragside, as with all of the trust’s 300-plus historic house museums, employees still use a standard British mid-20th-century conservation method — chiefly an electric or hot water heating system that maintains constant humidity levels — to protect irreplaceable treasures, like its painting by J. M. W. Turner and its early Burroughes & Watts billiard table.

nd now, in the photographs Ms. Staniforth viewed in her office, Cragside’s carefully tended electric conservation heating system was standing in a pool of water. So were the 19th-century fire irons and ornate wrought-iron fireplace seating unit, which had both rusted, and the billiard table, whose legs would take several months to dry out. (The room finally reopened to the public in late February.) “That photograph made me feel that we had just been fiddling while Rome burned — or, rather, flooded,” Ms. Staniforth said. “It made me see how important it is to get your priorities right, and not to worry exclusively about the humidity when your house can fill up with water as a result of climate change.”