Al Gore  "An Inconvenient Truth"

Part 3 (37:05 - 39:45)                     

Insurance

What is often unnoticed is the fact that global warming causes more precipitation, but more of it coming in one time big storm events because the evaporation off the oceans puts all the moisture up there when storm conditions trigger the downpour before it falls down.

The insurance industry has actually noticed this. Their recovered losses are going up. See the damage from these severe weather events. And 2005 is not even on this yet. When it does, it will be off that chart.

Effects of Global Warming

Europe has just had a year very similar to the one we’ve had where they say nature has just been going crazy, all kinds of unusual catastrophes like a major hike through the book of Revelations.

Flooding in Asia, Mumbai, India this past July (2005): 37 inches of rain in 24 hours, by far the largest downpour that any city in India has ever received. A lot of flooding in China also.

Global warming paradoxically causes not only more flooding, but also more drought. This neighbouring province right next door had a severe drought at the same time these areas were flooded.

One of the reasons for this has to do with the fact that global warming not only increases precipitation worldwide, but it also relocates the precipitation. Focus most of all on this part of Africa just on the edge of the Sahara. Unbelievable tragedies have been unfolding there and there are a lot reasons for it. Darfur and Niger are among those tragedies.

One of the factors that has been compounding this is the lack of rainfall and the increasing drought.

This is Lake Chad, once one of the largest lakes in the world. It has dried up over the last few decades to almost nothing.

That has been complicating the other problems that they also have.

The second reason why this is a paradox: Global warming creates more evaporation off the oceans that seeds the clouds, but it also sucks moisture out of the soil. Soil evaporation increases dramatically with higher temperatures. And that has consequences for us in the United States as well.