John Magrath

I finished writing Climate Alarm back in November last year. It's a new Oxfam report that describes how climate change is contributing to a rising tide of weather-related disasters.

I'm glad to say, it got pretty good publicity when it came out, particularly on Radio 5 Live in the UK, on BBC 24 Hour News, and Al Jazeera internationally. And as a result, I was asked to speak to it at a major conference called "Future Shocks - disasters and relief in a changing world" organised by the excellent organisation RedR UK (Register of Engineers for Disaster Relief). Other speakers included Randolph Kent, who has vast experience of handling massive humanitarian emergencies, and Sophia Tickell, chair of SustainAbility Ltd. It was particularly telling, I think, that though there are numerous potential dangers that could cause future disasters, speakers kept coming back to climate change as "the big one". All the lectures have been transcribed and are up on the RedR website.

But outside the conference, some people, both meteorologists and disaster response workers, said to me that that queried Climate Alarm and asked, just how "real" is this apparent trend towards weather-related disasters?

They call for caution on two connected counts. First, they say, major bad weather "events" have always happened but weren't known about; what's happening now is that they are being better monitored and reported. Second, an "event" only becomes a "disaster" when there are people around to get killed and injured; in other words, more disasters is more to do with population growth and movement than changes in the climate. So the trend is "created" by better data.

There's truth in both caveats and Climate Alarm recognises them as genuine and important. Better reporting has to be welcomed, in fact, because it tends to indicate better disaster preparedness. But I believe that there is a genuine trend towards increasingly unpredictable weather, which the data reveals. And that isn't necessarily - yet - towards really severe crises, like more intense hurricanes. It's more about smaller and "everyday" things like more intense rainfall and seasons going haywire.

People who are poor, especially poor farmers, find a succession of small shocks grinds them down and increases their poverty which in turn increases vulnerability and so on in a downward spiral. And when regularly crazy weather keeps knocking back their chances of making a livelihood, that in turn increases the temptation to up sticks and move in the hope of finding better prospects; but they may finish up in a situation where they are exposed to new weather hazards.

Several organisations, led by the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), are going to start talking soon about how we can all improve the data in future.

The fact is, human societies everywhere would be facing serious problems even if climate change didn't exist, with all the pressures on our environment from the destruction of forests and wetlands, drainage of aquifers, diversion of rivers, and erosion of soils.

But climate change interacts with all these, acts through them and makes them worse. If temperatures continue to rise as they are doing, then the climate change "signal" will become increasingly, alarmingly, apparent. That's why it's so crucial to keep campaigning to build on the beginings of progress made at the Bali climate conference.

John Magrath, climate change researcher, Oxfam