
The greatest threat from extreme weather is to highly populated, poor regions of the world, the report warns, but no corner of the globe — from Mumbai to Miami — is immune. The document by a Nobel Prize-winning panel of climate scientists forecasts stronger tropical cyclones and more frequent heat waves, deluges and droughts.
The 594-page report blames the scale of recent and future disasters on a combination of man-made climate change, population shifts and poverty.
In the past, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, founded in 1988 by the United Nations, has focused on the slow inexorable rise of temperatures and oceans as part of global warming. This report by the panel is the first to look at the less common but far more noticeable extreme weather changes, which lately have been costing on average about $80 billion a year in damage.
“We mostly experience weather and climate through the extreme,” said one of the report’s top editors, Chris Field, an ecologist with the Carnegie Institution of Washington. “That’s where we have the losses. That’s where we have the insurance payments. That’s where things have the potential to fall apart.
“There are lots of places that are already marginal for one reason or another,” Field said. But it’s not just poor areas: “There is disaster risk almost everywhere.”...
Mumbai's skyline, shot by Aam422
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