Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
Are hurricanes, India floods signs of global warming?
We seem to hear more and more about natural weather disasters – are these signs of global warming?
Or do they just illustrate the unpredictability of the weather?
Luckily, Hurricane Gustav doesn’t seem to have inflicted devastation on the U.S. Gulf coast comparable to Katrina in 2005. On the other side of the world, the worst floods in India’s Bihar province in 50 years have displaced about three million people and killed at least 90.
Achim Steiner, head of the U.N. Environment Programme, says that more powerful hurricanes and more floods are in line with predictions by the U.N. Climate Panel of ever more disruptions linked to a build-up of greenhouse gases. 
The panel said in a 2007 report that global warming was already “unequivocal” and that it was at least 90 percent likely that human activities — led by burning fossil fuels — were the main cause of warming in the past 50 years.
