As 1998 heads for the history books, it surely will rank as one of the century's most memorable in terms of the number and scope of its natural disasters and weather extremes. Epic floods, severe droughts, tropical forest fires, global temperature extremes, powerful Atlantic hurricanes, the list seemingly is endless. And unfortunately, things could get worse.
The Worldwatch Institute in Washington recently estimated that weather-related disasters in 1998 cost at least $89 billion. More important, at least 32,000 lives were lost and hundreds of millions were driven from their homes. In China alone, spring and summer floods affected more than 300 million people - roughly equivalent to the population of the United States. Clearly, concerns about the weather have taken up residence in peoples' lives the way nuclear war did a generation ago.
Sea and air temperatures set new records in 1998, adding fuel to the global warming fire. Except for October, every month in 1998 thus far has established a new record high for mean global temperatures. But this phenomenon isn't anything new - the earth has been warming for the past century.
What is unusual, however, is the increased pace of the warming trend. Ten of the warmest years on record have occurred since 1980, and 1998 is poised to break 1997's record as the warmest yet.
Jonathan Overpeck, chief of the paleoclimatology program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), recently noted that this century's warming trend is the most profound in 1,200 years. ``There is no period that we can recognize in the last 1,200 years that was as warm on a global basis,'' Overpeck told a gathering this week of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco. ``Twentieth century global warming is a reality and should be taken seriously.''
Although Overpeck's speech may not have won many converts among the assembled scientists, this year's capricious and oftentimes violent weather undoubtedly changed a few minds among the general populace.
``This definitely was a year characterized by weather extremes,'' says Rob Quayle, chief of the Global Climate Lab at NOAA's National Climate Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, N.C.
``Hurricane Mitch was just horrendous in terms of damage and loss of life. And the temperature extremes - especially the warming - was very serious. I think we'll see that 1998 will be the warmest year yet.''
Earth's warming also is affecting the oceans, where sea surface temperatures in some areas are the warmest ever recorded. And those heated waters are being blamed - at least in part - for this year's bumper crop of tropical storms, hurricanes, and ultra-heavy rainfalls in some areas of the world. The warmer waters also are being blamed on a massive die-off of coral reefs around the world, which not only serve as hearth and home to marine life, but also as natural barriers to tsunamis and other damaging coastal waves.
The result of all this warming is that the storms that roar in from the oceans are larger, are laden with unusually large amounts of moisture, and are powered by stronger winds, all of which serve to make life miserable for those living in their paths. NCDC Director Tom Karl has acknowledged that ``we're seeing increases in extremes of precipitation, including heavy downpours'' that lead to flashfloods, mudslides, and massive destruction.
Herewith, a brief glimpse at the meteorological madness that characterized so much of the year.
Among the more memorable disasters were this spring's epic floods in China and, to a lesser degree, Southeast Asia. Along the Yangtze River and some of its tributaries, months of exceptionally heavy rains led to flooding that killed more than 3,700 people, forced an astounding 223 million people from their homes, inundated millions of acres of cropland, and created $30 billion in economic losses. Months later, tens of thousands of Chinese flood victims still are living atop levees and in temporary shelters.
Other countries also found themselves under water, including Korea, India and Bangladesh. Bangladesh was especially hard hit.
For months, nearly two-thirds of the country, which essentially is one vast alluvial plain, was submerged by unusually heavy floods along the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers.
The floodwaters damaged 10,000 miles of roads, sent 30 million people packing, and devastated the poverty-stricken nation's critical rice harvest. Economic costs were estimated at $3.4 billion - a staggering sum for a country with a per capita income of about $1,200.
Although heavy monsoon rains and floods aren't unusual in these countries, the severity of this year's disaster crop was. In northern stretches of India and China, new records were established both for rainfall totals and flood levels. In China's Qinzhou, an incredible 68.28 inches of rain fell between June and July. Hundreds of deaths in India, China, and Korea were blamed on mudslides, where the combination of torrential rains and denuded landscapes sent entire hillsides slumping down over villages and their inhabitants.
And Asia wasn't alone. Floods in Turkey cost more than $2 billion; in Argentina and Paraguay, the price tag reached $2.5 billion; in Peru, an El Nino-inspired deluge created a new, 2,300-square-mile lake; in Africa, thousands died in flashfloods; and in Papua New Guinea, more than 2,000 perished beneath three monstrous tsunamis. Across the globe, natural disasters and weather extremes simply became a part of life. Few were spared Mother Nature's wrath.
In the United States, the world's tornado capital, the number of twister-related deaths reached its highest level in 24 years. This despite one of the most sophisticated warning systems in the world. Three F5 tornadoes, the rarest and most powerful of the twisters, touched down in the first half of the year - two of them in the southeast, where tornadoes are rare in contrast to the Midwest's Tornado Alley.
Rainfall totals in the Ohio Valley, New England, the upper Mississippi valley, and Los Angeles were more than 200 percent above normal. Northern California experienced its wettest May ever, with some regions receiving precipitation levels a whopping 800 percent above normal.
Some of those torrential rains could have been used in Mexico, Indonesia, the southern United States and elsewhere during a year when severe droughts and catastrophic fires plagued much of the earth's equatorial latitudes.
Indonesia and Brazil kicked off 1998 in much the way they ended 1997 - with monstrous fires raging through pristine tropical rainforests. In Indonesia alone, the economic toll from fires was estimated at $4.4 billion. In Brazil, fires claimed 52,000 square miles of land, much of it in Amazonia. In Indonesia, the figure was 20,000 square miles, the resulting smoke so thick it prompted an unprecedented international apology from Indonesian political leaders for polluting their neighbors' airspace.
In Florida, nearly 500,000 acres were scorched during a three-month period of severe drought where large portions of the state suffered from desert-like conditions.
The fires forced 120,000 people from their homes and required the services of firefighters from nearly every state in the country. Despite the fact few homes or businesses were lost to the flames, the final price tag still exceeded $400 million.
In Mexico this spring, some of the last great virgin forests of Chiapas state succumbed to the flames. At one point the fires became so bad that poor air quality warnings were issued in Dallas and other Texas cities. The pall of smoke stretched as far north as the U.S. Dakotas.
What made these fires especially troubling was their location. Normally, tropical rainforests are too moist to erupt into widespread conflagrations. But the abundant vegetation created by a warm moist winter was transformed into abundant tinder during the hot, dry summer - a perfect recipe for serious wildfires.
And what a long, hot summer it was for some areas. From Southeast Asia to Mongolia, from Africa to Texas, major droughts caused billions in crop losses or, worse, thousands in famine-related deaths. In the United States, Texas, Florida, Louisiana, and Georgia received only 25 percent of their normal rainfall. In Texas, triple-digit temperatures gripped most of the Lone Star State for more than a month, driving countless ranchers and farmers out of business. The final cost of the drought was estimated at $1.7 billion for Texas, $2 billion for Oklahoma, and $400 million for Georgia.
In fact, if an epitaph was to be written for 1998, prominent mention would be given to the enormous disparities between rainfall totals in some parts of the globe, and the near-absence of that same precipitation in others.