A calculated risk

摘要

Australian meteorologists introduced two new colours to their weather maps this January, during the country's hottest summer on record. Two years earlier, eastern Australia saw its worst flooding in decades following its wettest recorded December. Last autumn, Superstorm Sandy pummelled the US east coast, after devastating drought and wildfires scorched a huge swathe of the central states. Within the past three years, there have also been a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami in Japan, epic flooding in Thailand and East Africa's worst drought in 60 years. In a 2012 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that climate change has already increased the frequency of some extreme weather events globally, and that more are on the way.