Scientists To Meet To Predict Next Climate Disaster

(NewsCore) - Top climate scientists from around the world were due to meet in Colorado this week to thrash out plans to set up an early warning system to predict meteorological disasters, The Observer reported Sunday.

The meeting was set up amid fears that storms, hurricanes, droughts, flooding and other extreme weather phenomena could threaten large-scale devastation in many parts of the world in the coming decades.

Scientists fear that recent events -- including a record-breaking heatwave in Moscow that blanketed the Russian capital in smog, the splintering of a giant island of ice from the Greenland ice cap and floods in Pakistan that claimed the lives of at least 1,600 people -- could become more frequent as a result of climate change.

Scientists hope to use the meeting in Boulder, Colo., to develop more precise predictive techniques to help pinpoint the location and severity of extreme weather earlier so that thousands of lives could be saved.

"The events in Moscow and Pakistan are going to focus our minds very carefully when we meet in Colorado," said Paul Stott, head of climate monitoring at the U.K.'s Met Office. "On both sides of the Atlantic, we have been monitoring what has been going on with the aim of understanding their precise causes so that we can provide better warnings for future disasters."

The meeting would be the first full session of the Attribution of Climate-related Events, which was set up by scientists from the world's three leading meteorological organizations: the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, the Met Office and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.