Disasters quadruple over last 20 years

[Lone_Star_Dem]

Source: Reuters

LONDON (Reuters) - Weather-related disasters have quadrupled over the last two decades, Oxfam said in a report published on Sunday.

From an average of 120 disasters a year in the early 1980s, there are now as many as 500, with Oxfam attributing the rise to unpredictable weather conditions cause by global warming.

"This year we have seen floods in South Asia, across the breadth of Africa and Mexico that have affected more than 250 million people," said Oxfam's director Barbara Stocking.

"This is no freak year. It follows a pattern of more frequent, more erratic, more unpredictable and more extreme weather events that are affecting more people.

Read more: http://uk.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUKL2518480220071125?feedType=RSS&feedName=domesticNews

[Fool_Me_Once]

1. Hell yes they've Quadrupled...

Just look at Washington these days, a fucking disaster everywhere you look.

:hi:

[Double T]

2. And it will only become much worse with the increase in world human population.

STOP OVER-PROCREATION!!

[northzax]

6. ding ding ding

have there been more disasters, or are more people living in disaster zones?

[dysfunctional press]

9. that was my first thought as well...

i think it's a combination of that, and effects of global warming.

[noonwitch]

20. I was thinking that, too, with the southern migration even in this country

A great deal more people live in those zones than used to-just look at Florida, hurricane central.

then again, these stats listed the incidents, not the number of fatalities.

[raccoon]

13. STOP OVERCONSUMPTION OF RESOURCES, yall (and me) in the

(over) developed countries.

[Deja Q]

21. Look up the countries who like to fuck, tell them to stop, and see what happens.

[Quantess]

22. Ah yes, abstinence education has worked so well throughout the centuries. (eom)

[Joanne98]

3. Great news for the "diaster capitalists".

(sarcasm)

[xchrom]

4. this will mean greater displaced populations --

and greater stress on more established economies.

and more stress on emerging economies -- a scenario with tremedous challenges.

[TalkingDog]

5. To quote my departed mother: Signs of the End Times.

Which is what they've been striving for since Regan, if not before.

http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2004/10/27/scherer-christian/

from 2004:

Many Christian fundamentalists feel that concern for the future of our planet is irrelevant, because it has no future. They believe we are living in the End Time, when the son of God will return, the righteous will enter heaven, and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire. They may also believe, along with millions of other Christian fundamentalists, that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed -- even hastened -- as a sign of the coming Apocalypse.

We are not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers who hold or are beholden to these beliefs. The 231 legislators (all but five of them Republicans) who received an average 80 percent approval rating or higher from the leading religious-right organizations make up more than 40 percent of the U.S. Congress. (The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian Coalition was Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, who earlier this year quoted from the Book of Amos on the Senate floor: "The days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land. Not a famine of bread or of thirst for water, but of hearing the word of the Lord!") These politicians include some of the most powerful figures in the U.S. government, as well as key environmental decision makers: Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), Senate Majority Whip Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Senate Republican Conference Chair Rick Santorum (R-Penn.), Senate Republican Policy Chair Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, and quite possibly President Bush. (Earlier this month, a cover story by Ron Suskind in The New York Times Magazine described how Bush's faith-based governance has led to, among other things, a disastrous "crusade" in the Middle East and has laid the groundwork for "a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.")

...............


As committee chair, Inhofe has subtly chosen scripture over science. The origins of his 2003 Senate speech attacking the science behind global climate change, for example, reveal his two masters: the speech is traceable to fossil fuel industry think tanks and petrochemical dollars -- but also to the pseudo-science of Christian right websites. In that two-hour diatribe, Inhofe dismissed global warming by comparing it to a 1970s scientific scare that suggested the planet was cooling -- a hypothesis, he fails to note, held by only a minority of climatologists at the time. Inhofe's apparent source on global cooling was the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, a Christian-right and free-market economics think tank. In an editorial on that site called "Global Warming or Globaloney? The Forgotten Case for Global Cooling," we hear echoes of Inhofe's position. The article calls climate change "a shrewdly planned campaign to inflict a lot of socialistic restriction on our cherished freedoms. Environmentalism, in short, is the last refuge of socialism." Inhofe's views can be heard in the words of dispensationalist Jerry Falwell as well, who said on CNN, "It was global cooling 30 years ago ... and it's global warming now. ... The fact is there is no global warming."


.......................


Odds are it was in 1981, when President Reagan's first secretary of the interior, James Watt, told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. "God gave us these things to use. After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back," Watt said in public testimony that helped get him fired.


end

See? They can accomplish something when they set their minds to it.




My Favorite Master Artist: Karen Parker GhostWoman Studios

[Baby Snooks]

7. James Watt

The only explanation for Ronald Reagan's administration is that the Alzheimer's had begun to set in before he was sworn in.

The sad reality of them and those who followed is they really believe the world is coming to an end and that it is "divinely" ordained to and so the reponsbility is to save souls instead of the world.

Our founding fathers must be turning in their graves watching all of this. And then grimacing as Benjamin Franklin whispers "I told you so."

As vague as it is, the 1st Amendment was supposed to protect us from the very thing that has happened. The Bible has replaced the Constitution.

[lynnertic]

14. Makes you wonder what the fundies will do to their next planet

[DeepModem Mom]

8. K&R

[yardwork]

10. It's remarkable how many people even here on DU deny the truth of global climate change.

k&r

[Lone_Star_Dem]

11. Denial is can be a dangerous thing

Eventually they'll no longer be able to deny, but from my experience then most will simply pretend they were always believers.

[Triana]

12. Republicans/neocons LOVE it too....see Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine...

...the rise of Disaster Capitalism.


It's money to them. That's one reason Repubes don't want to do ANYTHING about climate change OR end the occupation of Iraq and why they want endless war and MORE terrorist attacks - they provoke them and create terrorist breeding grounds to keep disasters going - gives them a segway for their economic/privatization schemes.

Just look what happened after 9/11 and Katrina...of course I'm preaching to the choir here but it still needs to be said in black & white.

[FourScore]

15. Natural disasters have quadrupled in two decades: study

Source: AFP

More than four times the number of natural disasters are occurring now than did two decades ago, British charity Oxfam said in a study Sunday that largely blamed global warming.

"Oxfam... says that rising green house gas emissions are the major cause of weather-related disasters and must be tackled," the organisation said, adding that the world's poorest people were being hit the hardest.

The world suffered about 120 natural disasters per year in the early 1980s, which compared with the current figure of about 500 per year, according to the report.

"This year we have seen floods in South Asia, across the breadth of Africa and Mexico that have affected more than 250 million people," noted Oxfam director Barbara Stocking.



Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20071125/sc_afp/britainweatherclimate

[Bobbieo]

16. The disatsers have always been with us - it is the number of people who are being affected -

over population!!!

[aquart]

18. Not something we're going to need to worry about

For the next thousand years or so.

[gorbal]

28. I'm not buying that

The EFFECT of the numbers of peole and the waste they produce is effecting the number of disasters, I don't doubt it.

Look up what happened in New Orleans-It wasn't so much global warming but the disintegration of the wetlands that led to that disaster, but that is directly attributed to OUR behavior no matter what way people spin it.

[greenman3610]

17. does anyone have a link to this study?

population has not quadrupled in 20 years, yet disasters have.

[JackintheGreen]

19. Their policy analysis is here

http://www.oxfam.org/en/policy/

but this report doesn't seem to be up yet.

Curiously, a paper published by G.S. Mandal (erstwhile deputy dir. general of meteorology, Mausam Bhavan, New Delhi) in 1993 suggested that losses due to cyclones has dropped precipitously since the first substantive recordings in the early 18th century. To be sure, we cannot be sure that 300,000 people died in the 1737 cyclone in West Bengal, and the colonial administration had every reason to exaggerate, but where population is located has a great deal to do with such losses.

By the bye, the occurrence of natural disasters in the subcontinent has remained pretty constant over the last 300 years. Like the stock market, one must look over the long duree.

[superconnected]

23. good point!

[MilesColtrane]

24. Too bad Irwin Allen isn't around anymore.

[Duffer29]

25. flat out bald faced lie.

starting with their #s

"The number of people affected by disasters has risen by 68 percent, from an average of 174 million a year between 1985 to 1994 to 254 million a year between 1995 to 2004."

that would be 46% but what the hell, who's gonna notice you padded the stat 22%
after all people WANT to believe you
it probably helps to change the definition of "people affected"
it's all about the money.
read the last paragraph.

[Lone_Star_Dem]

26. Alas, imagine my surprise when I went to reply to this post and found this

[gorbal]

27. The droughts and floods are kind of freaky

When I see rivers of blood I am turning to christ.