2010's world weather extremes: quakes, floods, blizzards
waves and flooding.
In the summer, one weather system caused oppressive heat in Russia, while farther south it caused flooding in Pakistan that inundated 62,000 square miles, about the size of Wisconsin. That single heat-and-storm system killed almost 17,000 people, more people than all the worldwide airplane crashes in the past fifteen years combined.
“It’s a form of suicide, isn’t it? We build houses that kill ourselves (in earthquakes). We build houses in flood zones that drown ourselves,” said Roger Bilham, a professor of geological sciences at the University of Colorado. “It’s our fault for not anticipating these things. You know, this is the Earth doing its thing.”
ABC News reports that the excessive amount of extreme weather that dominated 2010 is a classic sign of man-made global warming that climate scientists have long warned about. They calculate that the killer Russian heat wave — setting a national record of 111 degrees — would happen once every 100,000 years without global warming. Preliminary data show that eighteen countries broke their records for the hottest day ever.
“These (weather) events would not have happened without global warming,” said Kevin Trenberth, chief of climate analysis for the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
This is why the people who study disasters for a living say it would be wrong to chalk 2010 up to just another bad year.
“The Earth strikes back in cahoots with bad human decision-making,” said a weary Debarati Guha Sapir, director for the World Health Organization’s Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. “It’s almost as if the policies, the government policies and development policies, are helping the Earth strike back instead of protecting from it. We’ve created conditions where the slightest thing the Earth does is really going to have a disproportionate impact.”
ABC News offers this quick tour of an anything-but-normal 2010:
How deadly
While the Haitian earthquake, Russian heat wave, and Pakistani flooding were the biggest killers, deadly quakes also struck Chile, Turkey, China, and Indonesia in one of the most active seismic years in decades. Through mid-December there have been twenty earthquakes of magnitude 7.0 or higher, compared to the normal sixteen. This year is tied for the most big quakes since 1970, but it is not a record. Nor is it a significantly above average year for the number of strong earthquakes, U.S. earthquake officials say.
Flooding alone this year killed more than 6,300 people in fifty-nine nations through September,
