In a year that opened with devastating wildfires in Australia and ended with snow in the streets of Cairo, a year scarred by catastrophic floods in Asia and Europe and appalling windstorms in India and the Philippines, Britain's yuletide serving of gales, floods, toppled trees, power failures and rail shutdowns doesn't sound so extreme. But it could possibly count among the year's climate-related disasters. Compared to what happened when typhoon Haiyan hit the Philippines in November, it rates as nothing, but disasters are personal things: each matters horribly to those in the way.

There is a second reason for taking Britain's winter windstorms seriously. Things could have been so much worse. There was warning, and the UK is a relatively wealthy society with the machinery for coping.

In a disaster, preparedness is everything. Haiyan killed more than 6,000 people – another 1,800 are still unaccounted for – and blasted more than a million homes. Cyclone Phailin, an almost equally ferocious windstorm, hit the coast of India at Odisha in October and took only 21 lives. The devastation was real but, in an exercise that now looks like a model of forethought and good government, almost a million people were evacuated in time. The story of the two tropical windstorms is a practical illustration of the argument that there is no such thing as a "natural" disaster: the hazards are real, but the loss of life and property follows because people were not warned, or were warned but took no action, or were housed in dangerous structures.

There is a third reason for taking seriously the damage of relatively small-scale sporadic flooding and wind damage: it exacts an enduring economic cost. The UN office for disaster risk reduction recently counted up the toll of small disasters. These are events in which more than 10 people die, that affect more than 1,000 people, or are followed by a national request for international assistance. They can be slow, almost imperceptible events, such as droughts that turn into famine, or a sudden landslip on a hillside crowded with makeshift homes.

Researchers looked at 83,000 historical records from 10,000 municipalities in 16 countries in the Caribbean and Latin America between 1990 and 2011. They found that half of all disaster-related deaths and most of the economic losses were the consequence of droughts, wildfires, landslides, windstorms, floods, heat waves and small earthquakes that were largely unreported: small-scale tragedies in small communities. The accumulated bill for the damage during that period was estimated at $53bn. This is comparable to the cost of Superstorm Sandy in the US in 2012: the difference is that Americans are comparatively wealthy, and they have insurance. When disaster strikes, the poorest are more likely to lose their lives, and when they lose their homes, they lose everything. Those worst hit by the weather in Britain will recover, but some of those, too, will be paying for years to come.

There is an even more bleak reason for taking Britain's winter horrors seriously. Britain is a nation in a temperate climate zone, and even its extremes will be relatively temperate. There is no serious evidence that any freak storm or flood anywhere can be blamed on global warming but, as average global temperatures rise, it seems reasonable to expect extremes to become more extreme.

In a year marked by increasingly urgent warnings from national laboratories and academies, and from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that manmade climate change presents ominous dangers, the worst events of 2013 might simply be these: that Australia decided to scrap carbon taxes, and that Japan renounced a commitment to cut carbon emissions, and that international agreement seems as far away as ever. The real disaster could be, once again, the steps not taken.