I haven't posted much this year because my life has been troubled lately. However, I do have a long essay in the pipeline which I should be able to publish in the next few days. I'm posting today to let you know that I'm still following Schopenhauer's excellent advice — I'm still keeping busy, at least when life lets me.
— Dave
There's been a spate of articles lately on extreme weather events. 2013 was a big year for costly disasters, as Jeff Masters points out in Earth's Record 41 Billion-Dollar Weather Disasters of 2013.
Earth set a new record for billion-dollar weather disasters in 2013 with 41, said insurance broker Aon Benfield in their Annual Global Climate and Catastrophe Report issued this week.
Despite the record number of billion-dollar disasters, weather-related natural disaster losses (excluding earthquakes) were only slightly above average in 2013, and well below what occurred in 2012. That's because 2013 lacked a U.S. mega-disaster like Hurricane Sandy ($65 billion in damage) or the 2012 drought ($30 billion in damage.)
The most expensive global disaster of 2013 was the June flood in Central Europe, which cost $22 billion. The deadliest disaster was Super Typhoon Haiyan, which killed about 8,000 people in the Philippines. Six countries set records for most expensive weather-related disaster in their history, as tabulated by EM-DAT, the International Disaster Database, and adjusted for inflation:
Hmmm... that doesn't look good. It looks like something has changed.
As insurance brokers were tallying how much 2013 cost them, a new study says that extreme El Nino events will increase in the 21st century. Australians! Listen up!
The worst El Nino weather events, which are linked to devastating natural disasters and reduced Australian rainfall, will double with dangerous climate change, research has found.
In a study published Monday published on Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, an international team of researchers, including Australian scientists, for the first time predict ''extreme'' El Nino events will occur once every 10 years - instead of every 20 years as in the previous century - as the planet continues to warm due to human activity.
El Nino is a natural climatic event that occurs when water temperatures in the Pacific Ocean periodically rise, shifting rainfall patterns. A lead author of the study, Dr Wenju Cai from CSIRO, said the further the warming in the east Pacific stretched, and the higher the temperatures reached, the more extreme the El Nino...
'With a projected large increase in extreme El Nino occurrences, we should expect more occurrences of devastating weather events, which will have pronounced implications for 21st-century climate,'' the study says.
Some of you may recall that 1998 was a Big El-Nino Year here on Planet Earth.
The researchers point to El Nino in 1982-83 and 1997-98 as examples of extreme events that wreaked havoc and foreshadowed the dangers increased occurrences would present.
El Nino typically results in higher rainfall in some parts of South America, risking floods, and lower than average rain in south-east Asia and Australia, prompting drought, heatwaves and bushfire.
Previous US studies have found that the 1997-98 extreme El Nino - sometimes called ''the climate event of the 20th century'' - alone caused between $US35 billion and $US45 billion in damage and 23,000 deaths worldwide.
Dr Dr Wenju Cai said the event sparked huge wildfires in Indonesia and floods in Ecuador and Peru.
In the natural world, the 1997-98 event destroyed much of the anchovy population in the eastern equatorial Pacific, caused coral bleaching and decimated the native bird populations of the Galapagos Islands.
Speaking of wreaking havoc, Bloomberg says that Extreme Weather [is] Wreaking Havoc on Food as Farmers Suffer.
Too much rain in northern China damaged crops in May, three years after too little rain turned the world’s second-biggest corn producer into a net importer of the grain. Dry weather in the U.S. will cut beef output from the world’s biggest producer to the lowest level since 1994, following 2013’s bumper corn crop, which pushed America’s inventory up 30 percent. U.K. farmers couldn’t plant in muddy fields after the second-wettest year on record in 2012 dented the nation’s wheat production.
Source. Click to enlarge.
“Extreme weather events are a massive risk to agriculture,” said Peter Kendall, president of the U.K. National Farmers Union, who raises 1,600 hectares (3,953 acres) of grain crops in Bedfordshire, England. “Farmers can adapt to gradual temperature increases, but extreme weather events have the potential to completely undermine production. It could be drought, it could be too much rain, it could be extreme heat at the wrong time. It’s the extreme that does the damage” ...
“There’s no question, while there’s variability and volatility from year to year, the number and the cost of catastrophic weather events is on the rise, not just in the U.S., but on a global scale,” said Robert Hartwig, an economist and president of the insurance institute. “It’s all but certain that the size and the magnitude and the frequency of disaster losses in the future is going to be larger than what we see today.”
The number of weather events and earthquakes resulting in insured losses climbed last year to 880, 40 percent higher than the average of the last 30 years, according to Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurer.
You can find plenty more detail in that Bloomberg article.
It appears that we have turned a corner weather-wise.
Not the corner, a corner, for there are surely further escalations to come as we continue to heat up the Earth's surface during the 21st century.
So stay tuned, there's lots more fun to come as the Earth turns.
Indeed.
I hope your troubles resolve themselves in the best possible outcomes.
Posted by: Brian | 01/20/2014 at 03:11 PM