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(page xiv)p. xiv(page xv)p. xv
Preface: where will it all end?
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Published:August 2014
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Que será, será
Whatever will be will be
The future’s not ours to see
Que será, será
‘Que Será Será’: Jay Livingston and Ray Evans
In a normal year on the disaster front—if there can ever be such a thing—a staggering 106,000 people, on average, lose their lives to Nature’s random culls. Over the last seven years, natural catastrophes took more than 600,000 lives and cost an astonishing one trillion dollars—the 2011 Tohuku earthquake and accompanying tsunami alone ringing up a staggering US$210 billion bill—and there is little sign of any respite. On the contrary, the ever-upward trend of extreme weather events, driven by climate change, points to a future of more severe droughts, even bigger floods, and more powerful windstorms.
Notwithstanding the growing devastation and the enormous death tolls, however, society has not collapsed, nor has our planet been obliterated. No volcanic super-eruption has plunged our world into bitter cold, and comets and asteroids—barring the mini version that exploded above Siberia in 2013—have kept their distance. The prospect of another ice age has receded, while global warming has not (yet) begun to do its worst. So thankfully, despite the continuing geophysical mayhem, I am still here to write this updated version of Global Catastrophes, and you are still here to read it. But how long can this situation persist? Our world and our society remain fragile entities that continue to prevail solely by Nature’s consent. Although it may not seem like it to those caught up in flood or drought, volcanic blast or quake, modern human civilization has developed against a background of relative geological and climatic calm. Looking back into deep time, however, it quickly becomes apparent that such stability is far from normal, so that our society owes its explosive growth and break-neck technological development to a dozen or so millennia of tranquillity shoe-horned between the last Ice Age and the one—global warming permitting—to come. In the absence of the huge quantities of greenhouse gases with which we continue to contaminate our precious atmosphere, the ice sheets would be advancing again in a few thousand years, and we would be faced with the prospect of a return to a frigid planet. As it is, due to our polluting activities, the Earth is now warming at an unprecedented rate, bringing the prospect, not of a world of ice, but of a tropical hothouse.
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