In the Long Run

I think extreme weather like Typhoon Haiyan and Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy will move people to work harder to create a more permanent solution regarding the long term survival of the human race.

I think because there are 7 billion or more people on earth now (there were only 1 or 2 billion when I was born around 1950) it is easy for people secretly to say to themselves, (Oh, a lot of people are dying in storms but where I live it is okay). In the first place this isn't a solution to think this way because it makes the general outlook of the human race cruel. For us to survive we have to find a compassionate but fair way in regard to how people come in and how they go out. Otherwise there will only be many wars, some bloody and some just really difficult between nations and regions of the world. Until there is a solution that enough people can agree on things are going to keep getting worse and more and more people are going to die directly and indirectly from Typhoon Haiyan and all the other ongoing weather Earthquake and Tsunami events worldwide ongoing. Though the most horrific in the last 10 years was the Indonesia earthquake and Tsunami that killed 225,000 to 250,000 people  around Christmas 2004 and the second worst was the Earthquake and Tsunami in Japan that killed 25,000 to 30,000 people including completely wiping out many small towns in 2011, the present Typhoon Haiyan is for me the scariest so far.

The aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan is in some ways the scariest of them all because it is an ongoing harbinger of the future. EArthquakes and Tsunamis have always been flukes and if you go back about 100 years you can hear of 250,000 people or more dying in one Earthquake and Tsunami in places like Japan or China. So, this isn't unheard of.

However, what is happening in a storm like Typhoon Haiyan is much more scary because it likely means there will be more like it (once a year or every few years into the future). Imagine if Japan had to deal with  10 more 2011s in the next 10 or 20 years? or if Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka and India had to deal with 10 or more 2004 tsunamis in the next 10 or 20 years? However, this is exactly what the Philippines may be looking towards right now. And this is not a pretty picture for anyone living in the Philippines. Because for the poor, the Philippines could be a death sentence in any one of the future storms. But, for the rich, when they hear about something like this they will just fly to where it isn't going to hit.

So, even though I think a lot of progress is made every time a weather event like Katrina, or Sandy or Typhoon Haiyan hits, it is not going to create a permanent fix.

IN studying human nature down through history it likely would take a loss of about half the population of the earth (3 1/2 billion) over 1 or 2 centuries from bad weather to make people change enough so the ones left might survive the future. Hopefully then it won't be too late to prevent human extinction on planet earth eventually from temperatures that just keep going up into the 100s and 200s and beyond like Venus did.