TDB Today: The weather’s getting worse, and we did it

At The Daily Blog today I take a look at the latest report from the World Meteorological Organisation — The Atlas of Mortality and Economic Losses from Weather, Climate and Water Extremes 1970-2012 (pdf) — which demonstrates that major climate and weather disasters have increased fivefold since the 1970s. The implications are clear enough: damage from climate change is not something that will happen in the future — it’s here now, and we need to plan to be resilient to all the dislocation it will bring. Emissions cuts are important, but so is investing in policies that will help us to ride out the storm.

6 thoughts on “TDB Today: The weather’s getting worse, and we did it”

  1. Just finished reading the WMO report. Regular readers here will see that it pretty much sums up what many have been saying for some time. The analysis takes data up to 2012 – and we know that there have many more extreme weather events with catastrophic consequences world wide since then. The Philippines, Indonesia, and Australia features highly in the statistics for SW Pacific with the most deaths in the Philippines. The recent Typhoon Haiyan would of course not be included.
    How anyone can continue to maintain that continued Global Warming and its subsequent “Climate Change” is not catastrophic, is incomprehensible upon reading this report. Already well over 1 million lives lost in 30 years of Global Warming and the rate increasing decade by decade. The financial cost escalating as the storms increase in their ferocity and size. And the ability of the land to survive the intensifying droughts. The stark facts are all there for those who have the eyes to see and the willingness to comprehend.

      1. Why don’t you read the Report andy –
        But to save you the effort – here is a paragraph from the introduction on the first page
        ‘Another challenge for users of risk information has to do with the changing characteristics (frequency, location, severity) of weather-, climate- and water-related hazards Natural climate variability is now exacerbated by long- term, human-induced climate change, so that yesterday’s norms will not be the same as tomorrow’s The Working Group I contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis, released in September 2013, confirmed that rising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases have already changed weather patterns and the global water cycle The climate will continue to change throughout the twenty-first century and beyond

        1. I thought the IPCC attribute a low probability of climate extremes in the AR5 report.

          So any conclusions about the current trends seem a bit premature

Leave a Reply