The devastating earthquake in Turkey last August was one of more than 700 natural disasters counted in 1999 by a major insurance company.
Dec. 29 — As 1999 comes to an end, two new reports suggest it was a particularly bad year for Mother Earth. 1999 saw a record number of natural disasters, according to an insurance company with a financial stake in nature. And a U.N. agency reports that 1999 was the fifth warmest year on record — establishing the decade as the warmest on record, and the century as the warmest of the millennium.
MUNICH RE, a company that insures other insurance firms, counted well over 700 natural disasters this year — and 70,000 deaths. The review did not cover deaths from drought and disease, a number in the tens of millions.
The calculation was part of a millennium review by the company’s 14-member scientific research group that’s been collecting disaster data for 25 years. Gerhard Berz said global warming might be partially to blame for the increase in disasters, but to what extent is impossible to say.
Still, his team figures, the world should expect more of that. “We have a feeling that climate changes will play an increasing role in the future,” he said. Munich Re watches disasters because it often has to pay for them. It calculates that economic losses from catastrophes surged to $535 billion per decade in the 1990s, compared with $38 billion in the 1950s in price-adjusted terms.Other factors explaining the huge increase in financial losses include urban growth and growing population density.
MILLENNIUM PICTURE
The review found that more than 15 million people died in more than 100,000 natural catastrophes over the last thousand years, with some 3.5 million deaths this century alone.
The latter is less than half the fatalities of World War II, but excludes the unknown millions who died of drought and famine.
But contrary to the impression given by the record number of disasters and the thousands of deaths this year, death tolls seem to be declining, Munich Re said, thanks to improved construction and early warning systems.
In terms of deaths, the worst natural disaster of the millennium was a Chinese flood that killed 900,000 in 1887.
This century’s worst natural disaster was an earthquake in July 1976 that killed 290,000 people in the Tangshan region of northeast China.
SO MANY VARIABLES
While the warming debate won’t end any time soon, both sides agree that the climate is so complicated and has so many variables that further studies are needed.
A recent study, for example, suggests that winds at the North Pole are causing climate shifts, actually warming temperatures. One question is whether those winds might explain the recent rise in surface temperatures. John Wallace, one of the study’s researchers and a University of Washington atmospheric scientist, doesn’t think so, estimating the impact is “a small fraction of the observed global warming.”