In the first decade or so of the twenty-first century there have been an exceptional number of unprecedented extreme weather events. Many of these have resulted in major economic damage and human suffering. Record-breaking floods, droughts, heatwaves, tropical cyclones and tornadoes have occurred all across the globe and 2010 — the warmest year on record — brought to an end the warmest decade ever recorded. Extreme weather has continued in 2011 and 2012. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that these events have prompted considerable debate in the media and the scientific community about their relationship to global warming.
The extreme weather of 2010 was discussed in Environment Today in GEOGRAPHY REVIEW Vol. 25, No.1. An intense heatwave in Russia and catastrophic flooding in Pakistan and Australia illustrated just how destructive extreme weather can be to communities, wherever they are. In August 2010, the World Meteorological Organization issued a statement on what it called the ‘unprecedented sequence of extreme weather events’, stating that it ‘matches Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections of more frequent and more intense extreme weather events due to global warming’.
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