2010's world weather extremes: quakes, floods, blizzards

in Europe, disrupting travel for more than seven million people. Other volcanoes in the Congo, Guatemala, Ecuador, the Philippines, and Indonesia sent people scurrying for safety. New York City had a rare tornado.

A nearly 2-pound hailstone that was eight inches in diameter fell in South Dakota in July to set a U.S. record. The storm that produced it was one of seven declared disasters for that state this year.

There was not much snow to start the Winter Olympics in a relatively balmy Vancouver, British Columbia, while the U.S. East Coast was snowbound.

In a 24-hour period in October, Indonesia got the trifecta of terra terror: a deadly magnitude 7.7 earthquake, a tsunami that killed more than 500 people, and a volcano that caused more than 390,000 people to flee. This is after flooding, landslides, and more quakes killed hundreds earlier in the year.

Even the extremes were extreme. This year started with a good sized El Nino weather oscillation that causes all sorts of extremes worldwide. Then later in the year, the world got the mirror image weather system with a strong La Nina, which causes a different set of extremes. Having a year with both a strong El Nino and La Nina is unusual.

In the United States, FEMA declared a record number of major disasters, seventy-nine as of 14 December. The average year has thirty-four.

A list of day-by-day disasters in 2010 compiled by the AP runs sixty-four printed pages long.

“The extremes are changed in an extreme fashion,” said Greg Holland, director of the earth system laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

For example, even though it sounds counterintuitive, global warming likely played a bit of a role in Snowmageddon earlier this year, Holland said. This is because with a warmer climate, there is more moisture in the air, which makes storms including blizzards, more intense, he said.

White House science adviser John Holdren said we should get used to climate disasters or do something about global warming: “The science is clear that we can expect more and more of these kinds of damaging events unless and until society’s emissions of heat-trapping gases and particles are sharply reduced.”

This is just the “natural disasters.” It was also a year of man-made technological catastrophes. BP’s busted oil well caused 172 million gallons to gush into the Gulf of Mexico. Mining disasters — men trapped deep in the Earth — caused dozens of deaths in tragic collapses in West Virginia, China, and New Zealand. The fortunate miners in Chile who survived sixty-nine days underground provided the feel good story of the year.

ABC News quotes Olson to say that in both technological and natural disasters, there is a common theme of “pushing the envelope.”

Colorado’s Bilham said the world’s population is moving into riskier megacities on fault zones and flood-prone areas. He figures that 400 million to 500 million people in the world live in large cities prone to major earthquakes.

A Haitian disaster will happen again, Bilham said: “It could be Algiers. it could be Tehran. It could be any one of a dozen cities.”

—Read more in:

World Health Organization’s Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters

World Meteorological Organization’s

Swiss Re report on 2010 natural catastrophes

U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Declared Disasters by Year or State