"Natural disasters are turning the world into an uninhabitable hell"

From The Daily Mail:

The number of natural disasters around the world has doubled since the turn of the century, with climate change to blame according to the United Nations.

Speaking on Monday, the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction said 1.23 million people have been killed in natural disasters since 2000.

Around the world, 7,348 disasters including earthquakes, tsunamis and droughts have cost nearly $3 trillion, nearly double the numbers for the previous 20-year period.

That sounds a bit worrying, but is it really?

Remember that most 'natural disasters' are failures of town planning. If you build in areas prone to earthquakes, floods, forest fires or tornadoes; on cliff edges or unstable ground; if inequality is so extreme that people are forced to live in shanty towns on steep slopes or flood plains or do subsistence farming on marginal land (yes, it always boils down to land inequality...), then it's only a matter of time.

Although they try to pin this all on 'climate change', they state that "Geo-physical events such as earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes have killed more people than any of the other natural hazards reviewed". If more than half died as a result of "geophysical events"*, that brings the total deaths which might or might not have been caused by 'climate change' (rather than failures of town planning or land inequality) down to about 600,000 in about 7,000 events classified as natural disasters over 20 years.

That averages out at 350 events a year (or two per country per year) with 85 people dying in each event = 30,000 deaths per year. There are over seven billion people, about 100 million of whom die each year on average. The extra 30,000 deaths a year (slightly less than the number of road deaths in the USA each year) are nowhere near turning the world into an "uninhabitable hell", are they? And $3 trillion is a lot of money, but that averages out at $150 billion a year. Global GDP is about $80,000 billion a year, so the cost of sorting this all out is about 0.2% of global GDP or about $20 per person per year. And half of that is due to earthquakes and volcanoes.

* I think that's what they meant. The two biggest disasters were caused by earthquakes, which have nothing to do with 'climate change'. About 450,000 people died in the Boxing Day Tsunami and the Haiti earthquake (Haiti is an uninhabitable hell anyway, I believe, that's a political thing), with plenty of other earthquakes and volcanic eruptions which you've forgotten about that would bring up the total deaths to more than half the headline 1.23 million.

Giant kilometre long crack in the earth's surface of the week

Submitted by Pablo:

Makes you proud to be human

From the BBC:

Barely half an hour after they were jolted by a major earthquake on Tuesday, people of the Pakistani coastal town of Gwadar had another shock when they saw a new island emerge in the sea, just over a kilometre from the shore.

A local journalist, Bahram Baloch, received the news via a text message from a friend.... Mr Baloch and some friends landed on the island on Wednesday morning to check it out and to take pictures...

"There were dead fish on the surface. And on one side we could hear the hissing sound of the escaping gas," Mr Baloch said...

So what did our intrepid explorers do next?

Although they couldn't smell gas, they did put a match to the fissures from where it was oozing, and set it on fire.

"We put the fire out in the end, but it was quite a hassle. Not even the water could kill it, unless one poured buckets over it."

Gloriously Irreverent Headline Of The Day

The Soaraway Sun's headline(s) above the story about Cornish people worrying about getting their feet wet:

Land's End of world as we know it
Ooh Arr-pocalypse* Now... Cornish tsunami fears

* The headline in the paper version was "Ooh Arr-mageddon", which I thought was better.

UPDATE: Mark in Mayenne submits "Ooh arr-mageddon my feet wet" and wins this round.

As Peter Lilley said, "There is a thing called a telephone which has been recently invented....

... and most foreigners speak English."

From The Daily Mail:

A massive earthquake off Portugal could trigger a tsunami which would wipe out the Isles of Scilly and lay waste to the Cornish coast, scientists said today.

Experts say that much of the south-western British coast including outlying islands would be destroyed by a 10ft wall of water within four to six hours if there were to be a repeat of the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755.

Fears of the natural disaster have been raised by the Devon and Cornwall Local Resilience Forum (LRF), which wants an early warning system like those used across Asia and America* to avoid a British version of the devastating 2004 Boxing Day tsunami.

Unless of course the members of the LRF think that the Portuguese are so spiteful they wouldn't ring up and tip us off.

* The early warning buoys are of course NOT "used across Asia and America", they are floating about in the Pacific Ocean. How they tether them to the ocean floor is another question..?

Absolutely bizarre

From The Metro, earlier today:

Rome officials are preparing for thousands of residents to leave the city today amid widespread fears of an earthquake - which was apparently predicted by seismologist Raffaele Bendandi more than 30 years ago. [He] made a series of predictions that the Italian capital would be destroyed by a huge quake on May 11th 2011, which would be followed by two more events next year.

Bendandi's reputation for accuracy was cemented by his correct prediction of a similar earthquake in 1923 that killed more than 1,000 people. The meteorologist, who died in 1979, was honoured by former Italian leader Benito Mussolini in 1927 and he is so respected in Italy that his prediction of today's events has led to mass panic in Rome...

From the BBC, later this evening:

At least 10 people were killed after a magnitude 5.3 earthquake toppled several buildings in southern Spain, near the town of Lorca, officials say.

The quake struck at a depth of just 1km (0.6 miles), some 120km south-west of Alicante, at 1850 (1650 GMT), the US Geological Survey reported. Lines of cars lay crushed under tonnes of rubble and a hospital was evacuated as a precaution...

Apart from the fact the earthquake was a thousand miles to the west (not a huge distance in tectonic terms), was Bendandi really on to something or is this just a blind coincidence?

Parody Singularity

Comments in the Australian Daily Telegraph on the tsunami which hit Indonesia:

Wearing Weather of Sydney: Wow - our Earth is not happy ! The weather is crazy and out of whack. I'm glad the Aussies are ok.

Pat of nsw: Wow how lucky are they especially with how the Earth has decided its time to start shaking things up. What next as the Earth is definitely not happy with all the weird weather changes and earth quakes volcano's, so much for so skeptics for climate change. Hope all Aussies are safe and well.

Chunks of North Dullsville: "Our Earth is not happy"? You do realise that earthquakes area perfectly natural event that occur because the crust of the planet is made up of tectonic plates that move around over vast periods of time? The Earth isn't some sort of temperamental goddess, it's a planet.

"Costly payout after earthquake"

Oooh! Big Numbers!

"The Association of British Insurers (ABI) said claims were "likely to run into the low tens of millions of pounds"

Although this "Earthquake [was] felt across much of the UK", 'low tens of billions' is still barely one percent of one year's buildings insurance premiums (premia?) of around £3,000 million (page 4, 25 million households x 64% x £188 per annum). Such earthquakes only happen every few years anyway.

So, yet another BBC non-story, eh?

"Earthquake hits much of England"

Wow! Not much more a humble blogger can add to that.

And wow again! Another earthquake has hit Northern Ireland ... oh.