Climate action must be part of national plans

CLIMATE-RELATED disasters are on an alarming trajectory. Great floods in China, India and Thailand, super storms in the Philippines and the United States, and summer heat waves in the Northern Hemisphere in recent years are manifestations of this trend.

The 2010s may well go down as the decade when the trendline of these events headed aggressively north after a noticeable rise in their intensity and frequency since the 1970s. The underlying link to all this is climate change.

Scientists have been cautious about linking a particular climatic episode to climate change, but they are now beginning to attribute extreme weather in various instances to climate change. For example, scientific evidence points to global warming for making Japan's unusually hot summer this year 1.5 to 1.7 times more l…