Climate change in world natural disaster in world

Climate Change has likely intensified the monsoon rains that have triggered record floods in Australia’s Queensland state, scientists said on Wednesday, with several months of heavy rain and storms still to come.

But while scientists say a warmer world is predicted to lead to more intense droughts and floods, it wasn’t yet possible to say if climate change would trigger stronger La Nina and El Nino weather patterns that can cause weather chaos across the globe.

“I think people will end up concluding that at least some of the intensity of the monsoon in Queensland can be attributed to climate change,” said Matthew England of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

The Queensland floods have killed 16 people since the downpour started last month, inundating towns, crippling coal mining and are now swamping the state’s main city of Brisbane.
The rains have been blamed on one of the strongest La Nina patterns ever recorded. La Nina is a cooling of ocean temperatures in the east and central Pacific, which usually leads to more rain over much of Australia, Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia.
This is because the phenomena leads to stronger easterly winds in the tropics that pile up warm water in the western Pacific and around Australia. Indonesia said on Wednesday it expected prolonged rains until June.
Weather Switch
The Pacific has historically switched between La Nina phases and El Ninos, which have the opposite impact by triggering droughts in Australia and Southeast Asia.

“The first thing we can say with La Nina and El Nino is it is now happening in a hotter world,” he told Reuters, adding that meant more evaporation from land and oceans, more moisture in the atmosphere and stronger weather patterns.
“So the El Nino droughts would be expected to be exacerbated and also La Nina floods because rainfall would be exacerbated,” he said, though adding it would be some years before any climate change impact on both phenomena might become clear.
He said the current La Nina was different because of the warmest ocean temperatures on record around Australia and record humidity in eastern Australia over the past 12 months.
Prominent US climate scientist Kevin Trenberth said the floods and the intense La Nina were a combination of factors.
He pointed to high ocean temperatures in the Indian Ocean near Indonesia early last year as well as the rapid onset of La Nina after the last El Nino ended in May.

He said a portion, about 0.5C, of the ocean temperatures around northern Australia, which are more than 1.5C above pre-1970 levels, could be attributed to global warming.
“The extra water vapor fuels the monsoon and thus alters the winds and the monsoon itself and so this likely increases the rainfall further,” said Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in        Boulder, Colorado.
“So it is easy to argue that 1 degree Celsius sea surface temperature anomalies give 10 to 15 percent increase in rainfall,” he added.
Some scientists said it was still too soon to draw a definite climate change link to the floods.
“It’s a natural phenomenon. We have no strong reason at the moment for saying this La Nina is any stronger than it would be even without humans,” said Neville Nicholls of Monash University in Melbourne and president of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society.
But he said global atmospheric warming of about 0.75C over the past half century had to be having some impact.
“It has to be affecting the climate, regionally and globally. It has to be affecting things like La Nina. But can you find a credible argument which says it’s made it worse? I can’t at the moment.”

flood history 2010 pakistan

Monsoon rains were forecasted to continue into early August and were described as the worst in this area in the last 80 years.[22] The Pakistan Meteorological Department reported that over 200 mm (7.88 inches) of rain fell over a 24-hour period in a number of places in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab and more should be expected.[23] A record-breaking 274 mm (10.7 inches) of rain fell in Peshawar during 24 hours,[24] previously 187 mm (7.36 inches) of rain was recorded in April 2009.[25] So far 500,000 or more people have been displaced from their homes.[22] On 30 July, Manuel Bessler, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, stated that 36 districts were involved, and 950,000 people were affected,[26] although within a day, reports increased that number to as high as a million,[27] and by mid-August to nearly 20 million affected.[28] By mid-August, according to the governmental Federal Flood Commission (FFC), the floods had caused the deaths of at least 1,540 people, while 2,088 people had received injuries, 557,226 houses had been destroyed, and over 6 million people had been displaced.[21] One month later, the data had been updated to reveal 1,781 deaths, 2,966 people with injuries, and more than 1.89 million homes destroyed.[2]
The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provincial minister of information, Mian Iftikhar Hussain, said "the infrastructure of this province was already destroyed by terrorism. Whatever was left was finished off by these floods."[29] He also called the floods "the worst calamity in our history."[30] Four million Pakistanis were left with food shortages.[31]
The Karakoram Highway, which connects Pakistan with China, was closed after a bridge was destroyed.[32] The ongoing devastating floods in Pakistan will have a severe impact on an already vulnerable population, says the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). In addition to all the other damages the floods have caused, floodwater have destroyed much of the health care infrastructure in the worst-affected areas, leaving inhabitants especially vulnerable to water-borne disease.[33] In Sindh, the Indus River burst its banks near Sukkur on 8 August, submerging the village of Mor Khan Jatoi.[31] There is also an absence of law and order, mainly in Sindh. Looters have been taking advantage of the floods by ransacking abandoned homes using boats.[34]


Affected areas as of August 26, 2010In early August, the heaviest flooding moved southward along the Indus River from severely-affected northern regions toward western Punjab, where at least 1,400,000 acres (570,000 ha) of cropland were destroyed,[31] and the southern province of Sindh.[35] The affected crops included cotton, sugarcane, rice, pulses, tobacco and animal fodder. Floodwaters and rain destroyed 700,000 acres (3,000 km2) of cotton, 200,000 acres (800 km2) acres each of rice and cane, 500,000 tonnes of wheat and 300,000 acres (1,000 km2) of animal fodder.[36][37] According to the Pakistan Cotton Ginners Association, the floods destroyed 2 million bales of cotton, which led to an increase in futures of the commodity in international market.[38][39] 170,000 citizens (or 70% of the population) of the historic Sindh town of Thatta fled advancing flood waters on 27 August 2010.[40]

By mid-September the floods generally had began to recede, although in some areas, such as Sindh, new floods were reported; the majority of the displaced persons had not been able to return home.[2]