A study by the University of Louvain's School of Public Health in Brussels revealed here Monday that 90 percent of global natural disasters so far this year were caused by extreme weather, killing 7,000 people and causing US$19 billion in economic loss, with some $15 billion from natural disasters. "From 245 disasters recorded in 2009, 224 were weather related, affecting 55 million people, 7,000 of those were killed," Debarati Guha-Sapir said, a professor at Louvain and director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED). The study was jointly made by the WHO Belgium office, CRED, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Experts warned that temperature rise due to global warming would trigger more extreme weather, ranging from prolonged droughts to large floods, mainly occurring...