At Least 500 Dead In S. Asia After Storms - Riots Break Out In Pakistan - AFP

[hatrack]

Pakistani police fired tear gas to disperse a protest by some of the 1.1 million victims of a cyclone Friday, as fresh storms hit India and flooded villages awaiting help in Afghanistan. About 500 people have now been killed by more than a week of severe weather that has swept across the coastlines, plains and mountains of South Asia with the approach of the annual summer monsoon.

In Pakistan, 1,000 protesters smashed up the mayor's office in the largely-submerged southwestern town of Turbat, saying they had received no relief goods since tropical Cyclone Yemyin struck on Tuesday.

Six people were wounded including the local police chief when police launched tear gas shells and fired live bullets in the air, an AFP photographer said. "Our homes have been destroyed, there has been no drinking water and no food for the last four days. There is water everywhere," said farmer Ghulam Jan, 27.

Blazing sun scorched people still sheltering on the rooftops of houses and mosques after the rain stopped in Turbat, but helicopters bearing aid were again grounded because of continuing downpours elsewhere. Khuda Bakhsh Baloch, the relief commissioner for Baluchistan province, said 1.1 million people were now known to have been affected by the cyclone. About 250,000 of them are homeless, while at least 21 have died.

EDIT

http://www.terradaily.com/2007/070629150833.at4ew83y.html

[IndyOp]

1. The climate crisis already kills 150,000 people each year...

Earth's warming climate is estimated to contribute to more than 150,000 deaths and 5 million illnesses each year, according to the World Health Organization, a toll that could double by 2030.

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Health and climate scientists at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who conducted one of the most comprehensive efforts yet to measure the impact of global warming on health, said the WHO data also show that rising temperatures disproportionately affect poor countries that have done little to create the problem. They reached their conclusions after entering data on climate-sensitive diseases into mapping software.

"Those most vulnerable to climate change are not the ones responsible for causing it," said the study's lead author, Jonathan Patz, a professor at the university's Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and its department of population health sciences. "Our energy-consumptive lifestyles are having lethal impacts on other people around the world, especially the poor."

The regions most at risk from climate change include the Asian and South American Pacific coasts, as well as the Indian Ocean coast and sub-Saharan Africa. Patz said that was because climate-sensitive diseases are more prevalent there and because those regions are most vulnerable to abrupt shifts in climate. Large cities are also likely to experience more severe health problems because they produce what scientists refer to as the urban "heat island" effect.

WaPo article from 2005...