- Extreme weather events are becoming more intense and more frequent.12,13 (IPCC 2007)
- Some of 2010’s major disaster events:
- Russian heat wave and fires.
The summer 2010 heat wave as well as the polluted air from the forest
fires caused fatalities in Moscow to double to a total of 700 people
per day. 14,15 (Russian Academy of Sciences) City
officials of Moscow, Russia reported a 60% increase in the mortality
rate this past summer, when nearly 11,000 of the city’s inhabitants
perished due to the effects of excessive smog and record high
temperatures. 16
- Pakistani floods. Massive
floods, the worst in nation’s history, result in about 2,000
fatalities, more than 20 million injured or homeless. One‐fifth of
country was underwater.17
- Chinese landslides. Nationwide
floods and landslides leave over 3,100 killed and over 1,000 missing
in 2010 alone. Floods across China increased sevenfold since the 1950s.
18
- Brazil was also struck by extreme heavy floods in April and June 2010 with hundreds of fatalities each time.19
- Poland suffered her worst flooding in decades in May 2010.20
- Forest fires raged in Portugal
in summer 2010, spurred on by low humidity levels, strong winds, and
temperatures reaching record highs of 40 degrees Celsius.21
- In Chad and Nigeria in 2010, drought then floods that wiped out the small amounts of food crops left after the drought.22
- Extreme cold and snow storms in 2010 in India, Northern Europe, North America, and South America
- A lot of earthquakes and volcano activity in 2010 disrupted Indonesia, Iceland, Turkey, Chile, Haiti, etc.
- Global
warming can cause ice-capped volcanoes like Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull
to more easily erupt due to the ice loss causing a release of pressure
on the hot rocks beneath the Earth’s surface. 23(Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 2010)
- Landslides and
avalanches in high mountains have increased over the past decade due
to global warming. Volcanoes are increasingly at risk of collapse with
mega-landslides that could bury cities. 24
(David Pyle, a volcanologist at the University of Oxford, Bill McGuire
of University College London and Rachel Lowe at the University of
Exeter, UK)
- Glacial lake outburst floods are increasing as lakes from glacial melt grow in number and size. 25(International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in Kathmandu, 2010)
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