Introduction - The Global Climate System: Patterns, Processes, and Teleconnections - page 16

because their impacts on societies, economies, and environments can be
disruptive if not devastating, as the climate histories of most regions have
shown. Anomalies are also influenced by regional and local factors as well as
sea surface temperature changes in the Pacific and in other oceans.
In industrialized societies, meteorological extremes are also very disrup-
tive. For example, a major storm system in the eastern half of the USA, called
Superstorm93, encompassed 26 states and in a matter of a couple of days, left
more than 280 people dead and caused an estimated $2 billion in damage. Its
spatial extent affected Cuba as well as eastern Canada. As another example,
the 1998 ice storm in Quebec caused relatively few deaths but generated
considerable misery and suffering when electric power lines were toppled due
to excessive ice accretion, causing loss of electricity for several weeks in the
middle of winter. Also, the 1988 drought in the US Midwest, America's
breadbasket, was estimated to have cost $40 billion, the costliest ''natural''
disaster in US history (see Section 8.4 ).
In developing countries, natural disasters can be very costly in terms of
lives lost and in terms of loss of livelihood. Hurricane Mitch (1998) caused
the death of more than 10 000 Hondurans; mudslides in Venezuela (1999)
resulted in the death of more than 50 000; a tropical cyclone in 1970 was
responsible for the deaths of more than 300 000 people in East Pakistan (now
Bangladesh); drought-linked famine in Ethiopia in the early 1970s claimed
more than one million victims. The list of such climate-system-related epi-
sodes is quite lengthy.
In addition to the immediate death and destruction, disruption of family
and village life and widespread illness can plague the affected societies well
into the future. For example, because of the predominant dependence of
people in sub-Saharan Africa on rain-fed subsistence agricultural produc-
tion, each year for many farm families there is what is called ''a hunger
season,'' a period where they must work the hardest during the pre-harvest
time but their nutritional intake is poor. Thus, any disruption of the natural
flow of the seasons can lead to a situation in which men are often forced to
abandon their villages and families for varying lengths of time in search of
food or funds. Some never return home from the urban slums or from
refugee camps.
Policy makers at various levels of government can rise or fall, depending
on whether or how they choose to deal with such extremes, such as droughts
or floods. US city mayors have been voted out of office because of poor
political responses to forecasts or impacts of blizzards or ice storms
(e.g. as happened in Chicago and Denver). There are also examples from
Africa of drought- and flood-related political changes of governments
(e.g. either by coup, as in West Africa and Ethiopia in the mid 1970s, or
by election).