Deirdre Fulton at Common Dreams writes—UN: Climate Talks Must Address Human Cost of Extreme Weather Disasters:
Underscoring yet another reason why an ambitious climate deal must come out of upcoming COP21 talks in Paris, a new United Nations report warns of the "high price" of extreme weather disasters that are spurred in large part by a warming globe and rising sea levels.
"Weather and climate are major drivers of disaster risk and this report demonstrates that the world is paying a high price in lives lost," said Margareta Wahlström, head of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR), in a press release on Monday.
The report and analysis compiled by UNISDR and the Belgian-based Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED)—entitled The Human Cost of Weather Related Disasters (pdf)—demonstrates that since the first UN climate change conference (COP1) in 1995, 606,000 lives have been lost and 4.1 billion people have been injured, left homeless or in need of emergency assistance, as a result of weather-related disasters including floods, storms, heatwaves, and droughts.
And the numbers have been climbing along with global temperatures, as weather-related disasters occurred almost daily over the last decade. In total, an average of 335 such disasters were recorded per year between 2005 and 2014, an increase of 14 percent from 1995-2004, and almost twice the level recorded during 1985-1995.
Though the report does not calculate what percentage of this rise is due to climate change, it does predict that "we will witness a continued upward trend in weather-related disasters in the decades ahead." Several recent studies have linked extreme weather with human-caused climate change.
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Blast from the Past
At Daily Kos on this date in 2008—The Choice to Clean Up the Bush Mess at Interior:
The litany of damage done by a government of, by, and for Big Oil really is too much to try to delve into in one essay. Suffice it to say, the Iraq War wasn't the only gift to the friends of Bush and Cheney out to maximize profit. When the nation was so willing to come together and make sacrifices for the nation in the wake of 9/11, and don't think anyone but BushCo had in mind sacrificing 50 million acres of our land, air and water quality, endangered species, ways of life. Surveying the wreckage is truly disheartening. It remains absolutely astounding how much damage could be accomplished in eight short years and on every imaginable front. It will also take an unimaginable effort to set it right, on every level.
Let's just take the last few months of midnight regulations as a start. Guns in National Parks. Uranium mining at the Grand Canyon. Oil and gas drilling in Utah's canyonlands, within in a few miles of a national park. Removing global warming as a consideration in endangered species listings. Allowing mining, drilling, logging and other extractive projects without consultation from scientists and federal habitat managers. Add on top of that the burrowing of some of Bush's most environmentally destructive political employees, and the incoming Obama team has a hell of a job on its hands.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show, Greg Dworkin rounds up polling & horse race news. Could Romney have won New Hampshire? Trump camp’s racism and xenophobia gets even worse, if you can believe that. Vitter vanquished. Hazy history, campus protests spill over, and the Civil War was about slavery. Sex slavery.
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