Billion-dollar weather disasters smash record

Seth Borenstein in the Springfield News Leader: America smashed the record for billion-dollar weather disasters this year with a deadly dozen, and counting. With an almost biblical onslaught of twisters, floods, snow, drought, heat and wildfire, the U.S. in 2011 has seen more weather catastrophes that caused at least $1 billion in damage than it did in all of the 1980s, even after the dollar figures from back then are adjusted for inflation.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration added two disasters to the list Wednesday, bringing the total to 12. The two are wildfires in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona and the mid-June tornadoes and severe weather. NOAA uses $1 billion as a benchmark for the worst weather disasters.

Extreme weather in America this year has killed more than 1,000 people, according to National Weather Service Director Jack Hayes. The dozen billion-dollar disasters alone add up to $52 billion. The old record for $1 billion disasters was nine, in 2008.

Hayes, a meteorologist since 1970, said he has never seen a year for extreme weather like this, calling it "the deadly, destructive and relentless 2011." This year's total may not stop at 12. Officials are still adding up the damage from Tropical Storm Lee and the pre-Halloween Northeast snowstorm, and so far each is at $750 million. And there's still nearly a month left in the year.

Scientists blame an unlucky combination of global warming and freak chance. They say even with the long-predicted increase in weather extremes triggered by manmade climate change, 2011 in the U.S. was wilder than they had predicted. For example, the six large outbreaks of tornadoes cannot be attributed to global warming, scientists say....

The aftermath of the 2011 Joplin, Missouri tornado, by KOMU News, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license