Funny how you get ideas. A mate of mine and I were sitting outside a pub in Oxford, the river Thames - which should have been 200 yards away - lapping round our ankles, and thinking "the weather this year has been crazy". We both work for Oxfam and our next thought was, "it seems to have been like this all over the world". And then our third thought - as both of us have - sadly - been with Oxfam for a long time - was "do you remember, back in 1983 when we were just starting, Oxfam put out a report called Weather Alert about the world's crazy weather?".

So the next day we found it and dusted it off. It all sounded eerily familiar - droughts and floods and storms. What is different now is that scientists are much more certain that such whacky weather - especially more intense rainfall and more heatwaves - can be attributed to man-made climate change (back in 1983, Weather Alert didn't mention "climate change").

I thought it'd be fascinating to update it and see what's happened in the intervening near-25 years. And the result is our new report, Climate Alarm. One worrying trend is, that climatic hazards are certainly on the increase. Another is that there are just more people, in more places, and often in poverty, who are being affected. And risk = hazard X vulnerability, which means more disasters are happening - that is, losses of life and property. But one encouraging thing to report is that governments and communities have got better at dealing with mega-disasters - reducing loss of life by better preparation, early warning and emergency response.

As I was just finishing the report, the news came in that a massive cyclone had hit Bangladesh. Climate change scientists say cyclones are likely to get more intense, if not more frequent, and this was almost as big as the one that hit the country in 1991 killing 138,000 people. But more extreme weather needn't bring massive loss of life if people are prepared, and it looks like this time, people were. People were warned - sirens on minarets, warnings from the mosque loudspeakers, teams of volunteers fanning out to help people evacuate to special storm shelters. It still looks like several hundred people were killed, and of course, most people's houses are flimsy structures and will have been blown away, so the impacts are terrible. But, not so terrible as they could have been.

So some good news. But there's not much hope of being able to keep ahead of emergencies if temperatures keep climbing as they are doing. Starting at the UN Conference in Bali in December, the world must get serious about internationally cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Without prevention, there's ultimately no cure.

John Magrath, Climate change researcher, Oxfam