MOTHER NATURE IN 2010

At the start of every year, we celebrate and wonder what the next 365 days will bring in. 2010 started with the devastating earthquake in Haiti and the relief efforts to assist this oft forgotten Caribbean country through aftershocks, storms, and cholera.When I was kid I was taught that besides my mom,I have 2 more motherly figures to worship,namely cow & my motherland(India).But,when I grew up I realized that some people even associate the term "Mother" with " Nature".

I realize that Mother Nature is not actually a person, but she certainly made her presence felt in 2010. From the historic Snow storms that struck the US Mid-Atlantic region at the start of the year, the brutally hot summer that set records around the world – including the hottest summer seen in 1000 years of recorded Russian history and the highest temperature ever recorded in Asia (53.5 C/128.3 F in MohenjoDaro, Pakistan) – an extremely active hurricane season in the Atlantic, and catastrophic flooding in Pakistan, China, Australia, India(Leh,Karnataka,Andhra Pradesh) Mother Nature seemed to have a point to prove this past year. And just in case the weather wasn’t getting your attention, she also threw in a devastating earthquake in Haiti and one of the strongest ever recorded in Chile before erupting a volcano in Iceland that created the biggest disruption to air travel since World War II and a volcano in Indonesia that displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

It also appears that 2010 was the warmest year ever on record with 2000-2010 being the warmest decade recorded. As Maxime Larive pointed out on the European Union blog, scientists have been warning for years that global warming would bring about more extreme weather patterns and this will only continue with greater frequency as climate change continues. The simplistic equation of more snow = no global warming is a fallacy as shifting weather patterns due to climate change make storms occur in places that would not generally see such storms and intensify those storms. The same goes for heat waves, hurricanes, severe rain storms and other extreme weather.

What makes 2010 different from previous crazy weather years is not just the extreme nature of the weather around the world, but also the undeniable human impact it had. Death tolls from the heatwave in Moscow reached a peak of 700 people a day before the heat finally broke on August 18. The snowstorms in Europe and the US cost hundreds of millions of dollars for the cleanup.The ongoing flooding in Queensland, Australia has displaced 200,000 people and is projected to cost $5 to $9 billion dollars and it remains unclear the long term impact on the overall economy as crops and transportation lines are washed away. And this is all in the developed world; developing nations are often less equipped to absorbs and prepare for such shocks to the natural system, as seen with the flooding in Pakistan over the summer,when almost 1/4th of Pakistan was submerged.These events put a spotlight on the issue of climate refugees, a term that we will probably be seeing a lot more of in the coming years.

So while not an actual person, it is my sincere belief that 2010 belonged to Mother Nature. If nothing else, the past year reminds us that “saving the planet” campaigns are not really about saving the Earth, which has been here long before we were and will likely be here long after we are gone. Instead it is about saving ourselves and the spaces we call HOME. A recent post by the Capital Weather Gang in DC took a look at what our world may look like in 2076 if these trends don’t stop, reiterating Mother Nature’s actions this past year that the rights of billions for simple things like land, food security, shelter, and water are at stake.