It’s a warmer world

“You can’t ever say that a hurricane or a flood or a drought is because of global warming,” said one disaster expert yesterday. “What you can say is that global warming makes any of these or all of them more likely.”

One of the first predicted results of the greenhouse effect was that a warmer world would be accompanied by a greater frequency of “extreme” events. This is because more heat should mean more evaporation and more wind energy, and therefore more violence.

So far, events have matched predictions with an eerie precision. Islands usually hit by a cyclone once in a century have been pounded four times in a decade. Rivers that used to dry up once every few decades are now failing to reach the sea on 100 or more days a year. Seven of the hottest years ever recorded were in the 1990s and the three next hottest were in the 1980s and during the last decade the cost of natural disasters added up to four times the bill of the 1980s. The hottest year of the decade was 1998. It was also, according to the reinsurance giant Munich Re, one of the most expensive, with a total of 80 separate natural catastrophes attributed to the influence of EI Nino, a cyclic blister of heat in the Pacific which periodically tips climate patterns upside down, sparking fires in tropical rainforests and floods on barren lands.

That year was marked by terrible floods in China, calamitous ice storms in the US, and a huge pall of smoke and flames over Indonesia. It also saw some of the most destructive hurricanes ever to hit central America, demolishing hillsides and sweeping away villages and cropland. And Red Cross experts pointed out that the following year, 1999 the fifth hottest recorded for the planet as a whole was almost as bad, with floods and windstorms battering communities which were only just beginning to recover from the last wave…

Excerpted from an analysis piece by Tim Radford in The Guardian’, April 28

No slowing of the boom across Asia
After an abrupt U-turn from bust to boom, Asia looks set to outpace economic growth in the rest of the world for a second year running.

A report by the Asian Development Bank said Wednesday that the regional economy should expand by about 6.2 percent this year, the same rate as last year and nearly three times that of 1998. In less than two years, Asia’s industrial production has returned to the levels seen before currency turmoil in mid 1997 triggered an economic crisis. If there is a potential hurdle down the road, analysts now fear, it is that momentum for restructuring may be lost.

The fast pace of recent growth was attributed to increased government spending, falling interest rates and strong exports to the United States. In addition, renewed international investor confidence helped send regional stock prices soaring by more than 25 percent in dollar terms over 1999. The surge in the stock market in turn helped spur domestic consumer spending.A potential slowdown of the US economy would present a danger to the region but could be blunted by growing trade within the region and by consumer spending, the report said.

Excerpted from a report in The International Herald Tribune’, April 27