Bill Read, the top U.S. hurricane forecaster for the last 4-1/2 years, says researchers may be edging closer to finding the "holy grail" of hurricane forecasting.

But Read, who steps down as director of the Miami-based National Hurricane Center on June 1, acknowledged in an interview it could be the end of this decade before there is any significant improvement in forecasting the rapid intensity changes in a hurricane.

"That's still the holy grail if you will in hurricane forecast research, to try to capture those rapid changes in intensity," Read told Reuters.

Natural disasters, such as Japan's earthquake and floods in Australia and Thailand, cost the global economy a record $370 billion in 2011, with losses for the insurance industry the second largest ever, Swiss Re (SRENH.VX) said on Wednesday.

Insured catastrophe losses more than doubled in 2011 to $116 billion, Swiss Re said on Wednesday in its study of natural catastrophes and man-made disasters. That was up from a December forecast for $108 billion.

When at least 80 tornadoes rampaged across the United States, from the Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico, last Friday, it was more than is typically observed during the entire month of March, tracking firm AccuWeather.com reported on Monday.

According to some climate scientists, such earlier-than-normal outbreaks of tornadoes, which typically peak in the spring, will become the norm as the planet warms.

Disasters led by the Japan earthquake cost the world a record figure of more than $380 billion last year, a UN official said Monday.

While countries are managing to control the disaster death toll, economic costs are increasing more than ever before, said Margareta Wahlstrom, the UN special envoy on disaster risk reduction.

She called the $380 billion figure "the minimum" cost, two thirds higher than the last record in 2005 when the United States suffered huge losses from Hurricane Katrina.

The number of Americans who believe global warming is happening is on the rise, according to a Brookings Institution report on the latest National Survey of American Public Opinion on Climate Change (NSAPOCC) survey conducted in December of 2011.

Insurance industry damage claims from natural disasters like the earthquakes in Japan and New Zealand reached a record $105 billion in 2011, said Munich Re, the world's biggest reinsurer.

The cost to insurers from the earthquake and tsunami in Japan in March, which caused nearly 16,000 deaths, was estimated at $35-$40 billion, the company said on Wednesday in a review of last year's natural disasters.

An earthquake in New Zealand in February added a further $13 billion to insurers' claims payout for the year, Munich Re said.

Much media reporting of climate change exaggerates its impact, it’s necessary to get real now

High winds returned to the Los Angeles area early on Saturday as over 100,000 homes and businesses lost power, due to fallen trees and other damage from an ongoing windstorm.

Southern California Edison said that at mid-afternoon it still had 73,600 customers affected by the outages, which were mainly concentrated along the San Gabriel Valley foothills east of Pasadena.

The area saw "near hurricane force winds" that caused flying debris to knock over power poles, said Edison spokesman Gil Alexander.

Small island states may disappear under rising seas if an international agreement to tackle climate change is delayed for another decade, an official said on Monday.The European Union is calling for a global deal to be reached by 2015 and implemented by 2020, but the 43-member Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) said that would be too late to reverse rising sea levels that threaten to submerge the vulnerable states.