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Posted Mon Aug 1 2011: from
Reuters:
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Weather disasters seen costly sign of things to come http://apocadocs.com/s.pl?1312220378
The United States is on a pace in 2011 to set a record for the cost of weather-related disasters and the trend is expected to worsen as climate change continues, officials and scientists said on Thursday.
"The economic impact of severe weather events is only projected to grow," Senator Dick Durbin said at a hearing of the Senate Subcommittee on Financial Services and Government, which he chairs. "We are not prepared. Our weather events are getting worse, catastrophic in fact."...
As of June, the United States has seen eight weather disasters exceeding $1 billion each in damage, and the annual hurricane season has hardly begun, said Kathryn Sullivan, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Environmental Observation and Prediction and NOAA's Deputy Administrator.
The record is nine in a single year, 2008. But April alone saw separate tornado, wildfire, flood and drought disasters.
"Any one such a event in a year would be considered quite notable, and we had four in totally different hazard categories in the space of a month," Sullivan told Reuters.
The costs of weather-disaster damages have climbed past $32 billion for 2011, according to NOAA estimates....
"Every weather event that happens nowadays takes place in the context of the changes in the background climate system," University of Illinois scientist Donald Wuebbles, who worked on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told the panel.
"So nothing is entirely 'natural' anymore," he said.
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[Read more stories about:
Very Scary Tags: weather extremes, drought, water issues ]
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