Natural Disasters Are in 90% of Cases Caused by Weather

With the coming of the annual Paris conference which focuses on global warming and climate change, where over 100 nation leaders will take part in, the United Nation’s Office for Disaster Risk Reduction has released numbers which show that natural disasters are in 90% of cases caused by weather.

These disasters have a tremendous impact to both the population at hand and as well the economic market, causing losses close to several trillions of dollars in the past twenty years. Almost 600.000 people have lost their lives during events such as floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and other such natural disasters, with over 4 billion of them being wounded.

Unfortunately, this does not stop here considering that other disasters are currently in the making as we speak in the form of virus outbreaks facilitated by increased global temperature.

Even though floods are the main antagonist, claiming over half of the deaths caused by natural disasters, water is not the only means of death. Massive heat waves bring forth an increase in wildfires which wipe out acres of forests or agricultural fields and also severe droughts which further contribute to the spread of diseases.

The probability of natural disasters occurring has doubled in the last ten years compared to twenty years ago, and this number will probably rise in the coming years. The US was hit by most of the natural disasters happening around the globe, mostly due to the excess of greenhouse gas emissions and its massive size. But Asia suffered the most during these twenty years, having periodical floods that claim the lives of thousands of people every couple of months.

One of the subjects that will be approached during the global conference in Paris will most likely be the 2C threshold which refers to the amount our Earth’s temperature rises each year. As of last week, the temperature already past the halfway point, making 2015 one degree Celsius hotter than last year, instilling a panic among scientists and researchers worldwide, mostly due to the fact that we currently do not know if we can stop it.

The only thing that we are currently able to do is lessening the amount of greenhouse gas emissions in our atmosphere in the hopes that the process of heating up will at least be slowed a significant amount.

Even if natural disasters are in 90% of cases caused by weather, linking them to global warming directly is still proving to be a bit of a challenge. Studies have shown that in truth, some of these extreme weather effects are still created without the direct influence of global warming as a whole. But the fact that global warming might prove to be our end in the future still remains.

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