As if Japan hasn’t suffered enough already in 2011, the country recently experienced two of its greatest typhoons in recent memory. And like the devastating tsunami of March 11, nobody really saw these natural disasters coming, right?
Well sort of. Back in 2009, Our World 2.0 published what seemed like a conventional article on climate change impacts in the future, including predictions to 2090. In Wilder typhoons may mean bigger yen loses, author Miguel Esteban estimated that typhoons alone would cost Japan ¥687 billion annually. As data like this continues to be refined and updated, we can learn a lot from such forecasting, even if many of us will no longer be around when the worst consequences occur.
It is often argued that a single weather event, be it a typhoon, flood or bushfire, cannot be attributed to climate change. But at what point do we consider a collection of exceptional weather events to be more than just a coincidence, or a “one-in-a-hundred-years” incidence?
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