At global level, the ‘70s natural disasters have started to cause more victims than in the past. In most cases we have been affected by inundations and droughts. From this decade the climate literally began to “go crazy”. Events such as torrential rain, hurricanes and tornados have become usual, more severe and more frequent, and in the ‘90s the situation continued to worsen. Poor and developing countries are more vulnerable to natural calamities, and they should be helped and protected. For example, the floods that occurred in Pakistan in 2010 and 2011 were so destructive that there was a lot more rainfall than expected in those few weeks than in the whole monsoon rainy season. As a result thousands of little towns were flooded and there were thousands of victims and millions of acres of land were inundated.
Hurricanes (called cyclones in the northern part of the Indian Ocean and in the Gulf of Bengal and known as typhoons in the western part of the Pacific Ocean) and tornados have not only increased their intensity and their magnitude in the areas where they are common, but they have also occurred in areas which have never been previously affected, as in the case of Nova Scotia, in Canada with hurricane Juan, which caused serious damage in September 2003. Other examples are New York, which in August 2011 was threatened by hurricane Irene, which, in the end, thankfully, never made landfall, or Brazil, which for the first time in history was hit by a hurricane in 2004.
In the last few decades, floods have become more frequent and more intense as well. This is due to precipitation increase, caused by the rise in global temperatures, which alters the Earth’s hydrological cycle. The more the atmospheric temperature increases, the more humidity is produced, and, consequently, there is more water vapour and rainfall. More humidity produces more violent storms.
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