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	Majority of disaster deaths in 2009 climate-related, says UN by Margareta Wahlstrom UN Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction   Dec 2009   More than three quarters of those people who died in disasters this year lost their lives to extreme weather events, which caused $15 billion in damages worldwide, the top United Nations official on disaster risk reduction announced today.   Preliminary figures for the period from January to the end of November 2009 show that 224 of the 245 disasters were weather-related, and accounted for 55 million out of 58 million people affected.   Data shows that the number of people killed in disasters is falling because countries are better prepared and have better early warning systems, Margareta Wahlström, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction, told reporters in Copenhagen, Denmark, where the historic UN summit on climate change is under way.   “But the cost of disasters are equally, steadily going up very dramatically from the 1980s into this decade, and that increase is continuing year by year,” she stressed.   For poorer nations, they have seen costs jump from $10 billion to $15 billion annually, Ms. Wahlström pointed out, while wealthier countries have experienced a cost surge from $20 billion per year to well over $70 billion.   She noted that droughts – the most “complicated” of disasters to capture in statistics are not well-represented in the results announced today.   “It is a major hazard, and it’s a slow-moving one that kills people through bad health, malnutrition, disease and undermines livelihoods,” the official said. For example, in Africa, droughts accounts for les than 20 per cent of reported disasters, but represents 80 per cent of all people affected.   Addressing the same press conference, Michel Jarraud, Secretary-General of the UN World Meteorological Organization (WMO), said that while natural hazards cannot be prevented, “we can provide the right information to prevent these extreme events from turning into disasters.”   With climate change being one of the complicating factors in hazards, “we know with great likelihood that a number of these disasters are likely or very likely to become more intense or more frequent,” he added.   He underscored that while climate information is crucial for analyzing hazard patterns, the past is no longer a good indicator to plan for the future given changing patterns, such as sea level rise, triggered by climate change.   For his part, Olav Kjorven, Assistant Administrator of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), stressed that climate-related natural disasters are not humanitarian catastrophes, but seriously jeopardize development gains.   “There is no doubt that they threaten the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals [MDGs], the time-bound targets that we have set for ourselves,” but they also could result in setbacks to affect generations to come, he said.   * Below is a link to Reuters Alertnet climate change feature. Visit the related web page
	2009: Second Warmest Year on Record; End of Warmest Decade by NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies USA   Jan. 2010   2009 was tied for the second warmest year in the modern record, a new NASA analysis of global surface temperature shows. The analysis, conducted by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City, also shows that in the Southern Hemisphere, 2009 was the warmest year since modern records began in 1880.   Except for a leveling off between the 1940s and 1970s, Earth"s surface temperatures have increased since 1880. The last decade has brought the temperatures to the highest levels ever recorded.   Although 2008 was the coolest year of the decade, due to strong cooling of the tropical Pacific Ocean, 2009 saw a return to near-record global temperatures. The past year was only a fraction of a degree cooler than 2005, the warmest year on record, and tied with a cluster of other years — 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2007 1998 and 2007 — as the second warmest year since recordkeeping began.   "There"s always an interest in the annual temperature numbers and on a given year"s ranking, but usually that misses the point," said James Hansen, the director of GISS. "There"s substantial year-to-year variability of global temperature caused by the tropical El Niño-La Niña cycle. But when we average temperature over five or ten years to minimize that variability, we find that global warming is continuing unabated."   January 2000 to December 2009 was the warmest decade on record. Throughout the last three decades, the GISS surface temperature record shows an upward trend of about 0.2°C (0.36°F) per decade. Since 1880, the year that modern scientific instrumentation became available to monitor temperatures precisely, a clear warming trend is present, though there was a leveling off between the 1940s and 1970s.   The near-record temperatures of 2009 occurred despite an unseasonably cool December in much of North America. High air pressures in the Arctic decreased the east-west flow of the jet stream, while also increasing its tendency to blow from north to south and draw cold air southward from the Arctic. This resulted in an unusual effect that caused frigid air from the Arctic to rush into North America and warmer mid-latitude air to shift toward the north.   "Of course, the contiguous 48 states cover only 1.5 percent of the world area, so the U.S. temperature does not affect the global temperature much, said Hansen.   In total, average global temperatures have increased by about 0.8°C (1.5°F) since 1880.   Climate scientists agree that rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases trap incoming heat near the surface of the Earth and are the key factors causing the rise in temperatures since 1880, but these gases are not the only factors that can impact global temperatures.   To conduct its analysis, GISS uses publicly available data from three sources: weather data from more than a thousand meteorological stations around the world; satellite observations of sea surface temperature; and Antarctic research station measurements. These three data sets are loaded into a computer program, which is available for public download from the GISS website. The program calculates trends in temperature anomalies — not absolute temperatures — but changes relative to the average temperature for the same month during the period of 1951-1980.   There"s a contradiction between the results shown here and popular perceptions about climate trends," Hansen said. "In the last decade, global warming has not stopped."   * The NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), at Columbia University in New York City, is a laboratory of the Earth Sciences Division of NASA"s Goddard Space Flight Center and a unit of the Columbia University Earth Institute. Research at GISS emphasizes a broad study of global climate change. Visit the related web page
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