* 150 nations meet in Geneva to improve weather information * Meeting's aim is to help developing nations (Refiles with dropped year 2008 in paragraph 5) By Alister Doyle and Laura MacInnis GENEVA, Aug 31 (Reuters) - Delegates from 150 nations met in Geneva on Monday to try to plug gaps in climate information to help the world cope with global warming and threats like floods, wildfires and rising sea levels. The Aug. 31-Sept. 4 World Climate Conference aims to improve everything from weather monitoring to distributing forecasts, especially to help poor nations adapt in areas such as health, agriculture, fisheries, transport, tourism and energy. "There's a major gap: how can we better link decision-making with information?" Michel Jarraud, secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization which is a leading organiser of the talks, told a news conference. "What we need is a formal system that all people can trust to access vital information that can save their lives and protect property and economies," he said of the planned "Global Framework for Climate Services" to be agreed in Geneva. People living on the coast, for instance, are sometimes not alerted in time to a looming storm. Cyclone Nargis killed about 84,000 people in May 2008 in Myanmar. In the longer term, shifts in monsoon rains could affect where a company decides to site a hydro-power dam. Better understanding of ice sheets in Antarctica or Greenland could help predict sea level rise and risks of coastal floods. "It's not only governments, it's the private sector, it's individuals, it's farmers -- everyone who has to make a decision that is affected by the climate," Jarraud said of the spinoffs of the planned framework. The conference, of about 2,500 delegates with leaders from about 20 nations and ministers from 80 attending the final two days, is due to agree to set up the framework and a task force to work out details. HURRICANES Better advance warning of disasters like hurricanes has already helped cut the number of people killed in climate-related disasters to 220,000 in the decade to 2005, from 2.66 million in the decade to 1965, U.N. data show. But the number of weather-related disasters rose almost tenfold and economic losses surged 50-fold in the same period, it said. Damaging wildfires, such as those in California now, are projected to become more frequent with rising temperatures. Delegates said most of those taking part in the talks were scientists and big disputes were unlikely. "There is an expectation that we are closely aligned -- everybody wins if we move forward on this," said Sherburne Abbott, associate director for environment at the White House. She told Reuters that a lot could be achieved with available resources, rather than new cash. Jarraud also said the initiative would not lead to the creation of a new U.N. agency. Among people left out, farmers in the Horn of Africa were not told of a widely predicted drought in 2006, said Gro Harlem Brundtland, a special envoy for U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at the conference. If they had been alerted, they could have slaughtered and sold their animals earlier, rather than see them starve to death. "It is always the poor who are left out of the information stream," she said.
Hurricane Jimena is pictured south of the Baja California Peninsula in the eastern Pacific Ocean, in this satellite photograph taken and released on August 31, 2009. Jimena, a dangerous Category 4 ...
