2010's world weather extremes: quakes, floods, blizzards
according to the World Health Organization. In the United States, thirty people died in the Nashville, Tennessee, region in flooding. Inundated countries include China, Italy, India, Colombia, and Chad. Super Typhoon Megi with winds of more than 200 mph devastated the Philippines and parts of China.
Through 30 November, nearly 260,000 people died in natural disasters in 2010, compared to 15,000 in 2009, according to Swiss Re. The World Health Organization, which has not updated its figures past 30 September, is just shy of 250,000. By comparison, deaths from terrorism from 1968 to 2009 were less than 115,000, according to reports by the U.S. State Department and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
The last year in which natural disasters were this deadly was 1983 because of an Ethiopian drought and famine, according to WHO. Swiss Re calls it the deadliest since 1976. The charity Oxfam says 21,000 of this year’s disaster deaths are weather related.
How extreme
After strong early year blizzards — nicknamed Snowmageddon — paralyzed the U.S. mid-Atlantic and record snowfalls hit Russia and China, the temperature turned to broil.
The year may go down as the hottest on record worldwide or at the very least in the top three, according to the World Meteorological Organization.
The average global temperature through the end of October was 58.53 degrees, a shade over the previous record of 2005, according to the National Climatic Data Center.
Los Angeles had its hottest day in recorded history on 27 September: 113 degrees. In May, 129 set a record for Pakistan and may have been the hottest temperature recorded in an inhabited location.
In the U.S. Southeast, the year began with freezes in Florida that had cold-blooded iguanas becoming comatose and falling off trees. Then it became the hottest summer on record for the region. As the year ended, unusually cold weather was back in force.
Northern Australia had the wettest May-October on record, while the southwestern part of that country had its driest spell on record. Parts of the Amazon River basin struck by drought hit their lowest water levels in recorded history.
How costly
Disasters caused $222 billion in economic losses in 2010 — more than Hong Kong’s economy — according to Swiss Re. This is more than usual, but not a record, Schraft said. This is because this year’s disasters often struck poor areas without heavy insurance, such as Haiti.
How wierd
A volcano in Iceland paralyzed air traffic for days
