Natural Disasters Heralding End of The World?

Over the last few years, it will have caught everyone's attention that there have been several large-scale natural disasters, the largest being the Asian Tsunami of 2004. I have heard it said by some that with these disasters occurring with less than a year from one to the next, that this is a sign that the world may end soon or a new era is about to dawn upon us. I believe that nothing is further from the truth, and that the world has always been subject to natural disasters occurring in spates, as opposed to the view that some must hold that they are normally neatly dispersed in a pattern of x years. To prove so, I have conducted a little research and noted periods in history which have also suffered extensive natural disasters. I will include death-tolls, even though that is not a like-for-like comparison for destruction with the population of the Earth ballooning over the last century.

To begin with, here is a list of notable natural disasters since 2000 (up to 2007):

2001
Magnitude 7.6 and 6.6 earthquakes struck El Salvador, killing 1,159
Magnitude 7.9 earthquake struck India and kills 17,000
2002
Magnitude 6.0 earthquake struck Afghanistan, killing over 2,000
2003
Magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck Turkey, killing 177
2004
Magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck off the Indonesian coast, the ensuing Tsunami kills at least 230,000
2005
Hurricane Katrina kills 1,836
Guatemalan Mud Slides kill around 1,500
Magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck Pakistan, killing 25,000
2006
Magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck Java, killing 5,782
2007
Magnitude 8.0 earthquake struck Peru kills 510

Fair enough, you might say, that sounds like quite a few. The thing is, when I have been talking to people about this, they tend to ignore or be completely unaware of the majority of the earthquakes, instead focussing on the two that are ingrained upon the West because of the media (Katrina and the Tsunami), and the fact that in the last few years there have an above average number of hurricanes in the Caribbean. The assumption therefore seems to be made with disasters of a non-earthquake nature, which leaves us with two in 7 years. Contrast the 2000s with the period 1918-1928:

1918
Influenza epidemic kills 22,000,000 over 2 years
1919
Volcano Keluit (Java) erupts, killing 5,500
1920
Magnitude 8.6 earthquake hits China, killing 230,000
1921
Famine in USSR kills 5,000,0000 over 3 years
1922
Two typhoons hit Swatow, China, killing 60,000
1923
Magnitude 8.2 earthquake hits Japan with a death toll of 140,000
1925
Tornado hits mid-west USA, kills 689
1926
Hurricane strikes Florida, killing 450
1927
Magnitude 8.0 earthquake strikes China, kills 41,000
Mississippi flood kills 313
1928
Famine in China kills 3,000,000
Hurricane hits America & the Caribbean, kills 5,000

This period seems just as dreadful with disasters, although it is interesting to see fewer earthquakes. To pick one more period, this time we will look at 1876-1887:

1876
Famine in India kills 5,000,000 over 2 years
Famine in China kills 13,000,000 over 3 years
Tsunami hits Japan, kills 28,000
Cyclone hits Bengal, kills 100,000
1878
Yellow Fever strikes southern United States, kills 14,000
1881
Hurricane strikes USA, kills 700
1882
Tsunami strikes India, kills 100,000
1883
Krakatoa erupts and finally explodes, killing between 40,000 and 120,000
1884
Cyclone hits southern US, kills 800
1887
Earthquake hits France & Italy, killing 2,000
Floods in China kill 1,500,000


Another nasty period, particularly in 1876. Once again though, disasters continue unabated. I think that this shows that we will always experience such disasters on Earth, and that there is nothing exceptional in a spate of disasters occurring in a short time period, certainly nothing that suggests that Armageddon is around the corner. If that were true, given what has happened in the history of the world, we surely would not be here today.

Equally, if the following hypothesis is true, that people nowadays tend to focus upon disasters that are not earthquakes when forming the opinion that the world is going crazy, then imagine if they had been alive in either of the two periods documented above! I think more than anything, this attitude stems from a lack of awareness or refusal to accept that the world is a dangerous place to live in, and that there is a good deal of chance involved in being safe, no matter what governments may say.