A new report from Environment Missouri presents data on U.S. federally-declared weather disasters from 2006 to 2011, and says climate change will make extreme weather events like droughts and storms more common – and more severe.
State advocate for Environment Missouri, Ted Mathys, says 2011 was a particularly bad year for extreme weather in Missouri and across the country.
Mathys says the public can track recent weather disasters by geographic location, using an interactive online map.
“And so if you go to the Environment Missouri website and go to the map, you can click on any county in Missouri and it will show you which weather-related disasters – so whether it was severe storms, or flooding, so forth – occurred over the last five years in that county," Mathys said.
Mathys says that since 2006, all 115 Missouri counties have been affected by at least one weather-related disaster.
And, says Mathys, climate change will only make things worse.
“We know that extreme weather is happening, we know that it is causing very severe problems for every county in Missouri, and we know that global warming increases the likelihood that we’ll see even more extreme weather in the future,” Mathys said.
The report urges the federal government to move ahead with addressing climate change by limiting carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles and coal-fired power plants.
