Is this year’s extreme weather down to climate change?

2010 has seen an unprecedented amount of weather related disasters. Ongoing questioning by scientists as to whether this is pure coincidence or due to the rise in the global temperature.

Scientists at Oxford University are worried that such extreme weather conditions will become a regular occurrence by the middle of this century.

Since the beginning of 2010 the world has seen earthquake's in Haiti, floods in Pakistan, droughts in Russia, hurricanes in Mexico, an earthquake in Chile, and a volcano in Iceland among other weather related disasters.

The number of people who were displaced or died is astronomic. Scientists are saying that had there been better adaptation in places where disasters were likely to occur, thousands of people would have been saved.

The Vice-President of catastrophic perils at the Swiss insurance company Swiss Re, said that disasters such as volcanoes and earthquakes, are constant, and we therefore need to adapt to such events so that so much devastation does not continue to happen.

The Port-au-Prince, Haiti earthquake killed more than 220, 000 people. Port-au-Prince has three times more inhabitants than it did 25 years ago. Most of these people are living in shacks, in the cities infamous shanty towns, meaning that they have little chance of survival from an earthquake hitting high on the Richter scale.

In February, Chile had an earthquake of 7.0 on the Richter scale. However, because it occurred in a less populated, less poverty stricken, and better constructed city, constructional and human fatalities were considerably lower.

Kevin Trenberth, Chief climate analyst for the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, US, said: "These [weather] events would not have happened without global warming."

He added, that the Russian heat wave that set a national record of 111F, would only happen once every 100,000 years without global warming.

Peter Stott, Head of climate monitoring and attribution at the Meteorological Office in the UK said in an article for the guardian: "Analysing the observational data shows clearly that there has been a rise in the number of extremely warm temperatures recorded worldwide and that there have been increases in the number of heavy rainfall events in many regions over land.

"Evidence, including in India and China, that periods of heavy rain are getting heavier, is entirely consistent with our understanding of the physics of the atmosphere in which warmer air holds more moisture. Our climate change predictions support the emerging trend in observations and show a clear intensification of extreme rainfall events in a warmer world"

He continued saying, you cannot blame climate change entirely for the extreme weather we have experienced this year, but it is a strong likelihood that part of the reason for the dramatic increase of such extreme weather events is down to climate change.

Aid agency, Oxfam, has declared that 21,000 of this year's deaths were weather related, which is more than the amount of people killed by terrorism.

Swiss Re states that weather related disasters have caused US$222 billion in economic loses. Swiss Re said that although this is a huge number, a record was not made due to the lack of insurance, as the disasters most frequently happened in poverty stricken areas.

Such was the amount of peculiar weather patterns, and extreme conditions that Associated Press have complied 64 pages of natural disasters.

It is hoped that the new Green Climate Fund, created as part of the Cancun Agreement, will help vulnerable countries adapt to climate change. Adaptation methods such as flood defences, irrigation systems and conservation projects will help these developing nations defend themselves against extreme weather conditions.

Author: Charity Knight | Climate Action

Image: Ani Carrington | flickr