Natural disasters

The catastrophic flood in Nepal was astounding.  We saw bridges and buildings get destroyed, and people getting swept up as they fled.  It was heart wrenching, yet was a reminder of nature's fury.

The reality is that we keep seeing these kinds of things happen, with a greater frequency every year.  Recorded history tells us there are more events, and they cause increasingly more damage. 

And yet, we can’t seem to wrap our heads around it, and spend time foolishly debating about the cause of disasters. And as a result, we don’t spend much energy on understanding them, and even less on being more proactive in our response. 

This rush of water was caused by a piece of a glacier that detached. Some people simply want to say that it’s the old “act of nature” for purely political reasons, setting aside any notion of science telling us there is a change happening. 

We can see our climate is changing with our own eyes. Glaciers haven’t simply fallen off like that in our recorded history. So something is happening. And it’s our duty to investigate what’s going on and try and prevent more disasters like this. 

Of course, you can apply it to other things as well. Hurricanes are something we’ve known about for a very long period of recorded history. We’ve been studying them and trying to understand what’s going on with them. And yet, for purely political reasons this administration simply does not care and has no intention of doing anything other than letting us know one might be coming - without any sort of understanding of how it’s formed, where it might go, and more importantly why…

And of course there was the assertion that Canada "is (somehow?) responsible for" the fires this year, as a way to cast aspersions, rather than using logic to try and address the underlying problem.  

The one piece of good news is that while the number of these natural disasters has been on the uptick, the deaths resulting from them have been on the decline due to better infrastructure and preparedness.