In Mozambique, 300,000 people were left homeless and hundreds were killed in devastating floods. In France, storms caused 90 fatalities, destroyed 270 million trees and triggered £7.5 billion worth of damage. In Austria, a series of avalanches swept 11 people to their deaths. And in the Arctic, scientists discovered that over the past two decades the polar ice cap has thinned from a modest 10-foot thickness to a flimsy 6 feet.

And that is just a brief selection of the environmental horrors that have beset the planet over the past few weeks, although it is enough to confirm meteorologists' worst fears. With wearied resignation, they are now admitting what was long suspected--that global warming must be accepted as the trigger for increasingly unstable weather fronts, storms, melting glaciers and rising seas.

The world is slowly sliding into climatic uncertainty--and there is little sign that we are capable of taking action that can halt this descent into elemental catastrophe.

At 5:46 AM on the morning of January 17, 1995, a major earthquake struck the Japanese city of Kobe. Within hours 6,425 people were dead, with tens of thousands wounded.

The energy of eight Hiroshima bombs was released in the 20 seconds it took the earthquake to leave its devastating mark on the city. The physical toll was immense, with 240,932 houses completely or partially destroyed. Eighty percent of victims in the coastal city were crushed to death by falling debris.

In Japan every kid grows up with earthquake exercises. But the Kobe quake surprised the nation. The crisis managers were paralyzed, emergency vehicles and fire engines got stuck in huge traffic pile-ups. Cars escaping the nightmare jammed the roads all the way from Kobe to Osaka. Houses certified to withstand earthquakes folded, and the thick supporting pillars of major highways broke like matchsticks.

The bureaucrats recovered their senses after a few days. They started with planning. In the clearing of debris the Japanese are perfectionists. They even vacuum the autumn leaves from their parks and streets.

At the Tokyo Metropolitan Disaster Prevention Center, all sorts of disaster scenarios have now been stored on computers. The new disaster center is located in Tokyo's newest high-rise complex in the busy Shinjuku district. The staff there have coldly calculated the number of dead and wounded should another earthquake occur--this time under the city of Tokyo.

The last big quake to strike Tokyo was the massive Kanto earthquake which flattened the city in 1923. If a similar sized earthquake were to occur on a weekday at 6 PM with sunny weather and only mild winds, it would leave 156,431 dead, say the disaster specialists. In addition, 155,416 houses would be destroyed.

The room looks like a stage set for the next Bond movie. Cameras and Orwellian eyes have been installed in vantage points on buildings all over Tokyo to record the disaster. Today the pictures on the screen are of the traffic-thronged streets and the human sea moving in and out of subway stations. If an earthquake strikes, the monitors will show the damage of a burning and collapsing city, the biggest disaster movie ever made.

The fires which will break out after the next Tokyo quake have also been finely calculated: Twelve percent of Tokyo would be destroyed by fire and exactly 324,288 houses would collapse. Earth fault lines have been followed and put on computer maps to see where they match water and gas pipelines.

"The Kobe earthquake destroyed the myth that big cities are safe," says a worker at the disaster center. "Even modern cities can be severely destroyed. We should not be complacent."

An expanse of Arctic sea ice the size of Texas has vanished in the space of 19 years because of manmade global warming, according to new research. The study by United States climate experts is the first to show that human activity is chiefly to blame for the retreat of northern hemisphere sea ice observed since the 1950s. Computer models showed that the probability of such a loss occurring purely as a result of natural climate forces was less than 2 percent. The study has shown a downward trend of 37,000 square kilometers per year, meaning a loss each year of an ice area equivalent to half that of Tasmania.

William Gray, one of the most prominent American hurricane forecasters, announced that a new era of intense hurricane activity is about to unfold. Likely to be hit more than ever, he said, will be the Caribbean islands, the East Coast of the United States and the Florida Peninsula. The last intense era of hurricane activity ended in the 1960s, Mr. Gray said, when Florida and the East Coast were not nearly so extensively developed. "If this new period of increased landfalling storms is now with us, it could pose serious threats to safety and to property," Mr. Gray said.

The world experienced more major earthquakes in 1999, and deaths caused by them were double the annual average, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. More than 22,000 people were killed by earthquakes last year, with 17,000 killed by the 7.4 earthquake that hit Izmit, Turkey, in August. An average 10,000 annual deaths occur worldwide from earthquakes. Fatalities totaled 8,928 in 1998, while 2,907 people were killed in 1997, the USGS said.

Nature plagued the world with a record number of disasters in 1999. Munich Re, one of the world's largest reinsurers, said that about 70,000 people were killed in well over 700 disasters this year, including up to 30,000 who died in floods and mudslides in Venezuela recently. More than 15 million people died in over 100,000 natural catastrophes over the last thousand years, with some 3.5 million deaths this century alone, Munich Re said.

The total amounts to less than half the fatalities of World War II but excludes the uncountable millions who died of drought and famine. Earthquakes are the biggest killers, accounting for 47 percent of deaths. Windstorms claim 45 percent, followed by floods with seven percent.