The pin drop heard round the world

Earthquakes!  Tornadoes!  Tsunamis!  Diseases!  Famines! 

Every night you sit down and watch the world news there is no escape from hearing more and more about terrible things going on in the world.  Is it really that bad out there?  Have things gotten out of control?  Have we really screwed up this world that these things are happening?  I don't think so.

Let us go back in time to the 1500's.  Easter Island was at it's peak with about 7000 inhabitants.  By the time anyone ever found this place, it was 200 years later and the society had diminished to a few hundred.  It took settlers over 200 years to find these people, but now we can see everything going on around the world at a moments notice via satellite.  The advent of the internet in the 1980's only helped narrow the access time to next to nothing by allowing all information to be accessible almost instantly.  Now think, that society existed for 100 years before anyone discovered them, how many different disasters have we missed as well?  We did not have hundreds of weather stations or instruments of any kind of real accuracy.  We didn't have the variety of measurements either.

In the last 40 to 50 years, we have been able to take measurements with an increasing amount of accuracy.  This leads to a much better understanding of current trends, but does nothing with providing any details as to what happens in the past.  There is an old adage that says "if a tree falls in the woods, and no one heard it, did actually happen?"  I think that holds well in this situation, that there are many many more people now than there ever was in the past.  More people to see, record, tell their friends about, any kind of thing is now being witnessed and recorded.  The USGS website, in relation to whether or not there are more earthquakes now, "A partial explanation may lie in the fact that in the last twenty years, we have definitely had an increase in the number of earthquakes we have been able to locate each year. This is because of the tremendous increase in the number of seismograph stations in the world and the many improvements in global communications. In 1931, there were about 350 stations operating in the world; today, there are more than 8,000 stations..."  This relates directly to many of the recorded graphs in the Millennium Assessment that they either go back only about 60 years or so, or the technology upon with those recording were recorded from were very inaccurate or poor, as well as limited in number. 

So as with many things, there really isn't anything new under the sun.