Weather

Scientists warn that as the atmosphere warms, climate becomes not only hotter but much more unstable. In 2003, the World Meteorological Organization issued an unprecedented warning linking an increase of extremes in climate and weather, occurring all over the world, to climate change. Since that time extreme weather events have continued to increase with the past year 2005 likely to become the hottest, stormiest, driest and costliest ever. Catastrophic storms like Katrina and Stan took weather extremes across the globe to new levels, while flooding and heat waves struck almost every continent.

In June 2005, a thousand people died in India in unprecedented flooding brought about by the heaviest rainfall ever recorded there. This summer, a deadly heat wave gripped regions of the United States, intensifying droughts across the south and Midwest. Drought in portions of Africa led to crop failures that plunged 10 million Africans into food shortages and a hunger crisis. Scorching temperatures in southern Europe turned the region into a European Sahara with drought and wildfires raging from Portugal to Greece. The Amazon experienced its most severe drought in centuries. In China, 1,200 people were swept away in a rash of heavy storms and landslides set off by killer typhoons. And capping the year off, grass fires swept through drought stricken Texas and Oklahoma burning 20,000 acres and destroying 100 homes.

This year, the world has suffered more than 200 billion dollars in economic losses as a result of weather related events, making 2005 the costliest on record. Unless man-made greenhouse gas emissions are brought under control, scientists project the frequency and severity of extreme weather events will only increase.

Europe’s floods of 2001, in which 80 people died, are cited in a new report on what the continent can expect from global warming. Here, the River Seine in Paris burst its banks in March 2001, forcing people to walk on planks to get to boats.
Photo: Laurent Emmanuel / AP

By mid-August 2003 British Columbia experienced a two hundred percent increase of forest area burned over the twenty-year average.
photo: NASA