That's... great. Any chance you want to share that idea with us?

I’m guessing he means ‘the media’

Well I thought it was quite obvious, but yes. It’s us. As everyone knows, fear sells. Nice good stories about how much better off we are now? Mmm, not so much. This doesn’t mean that huge problems don’t exist in the world. We have the duty to report on them. I personally try to do things differently than this, and I cover tech, so it’s easier and more neutral. If anything good stories about tech and progress still sell. I feel very detached from the trends of my industry, and so do many colleagues of mine with no power to take policy or business decisions.

There seem to be a lot more natural disasters than there used to be.

- Is this because better communications makes them better reported?

- or are there really more natural disasters?

I would suspect the former. There are so many 24/7 news/weather outlets that need to fill air time and draw in viewers with something. Natural disasters are easy ratings.

30+ years ago (pre-CNN), an earthquake in Jakarta, or a typhoon reaching Thailand might get a blurb on an inner page of the NY Times. Those events certainly wouldn't have something like Weather Channel reporters on site pretending to brace themselves in the wind to dramatize the shot...

Beyond "if it bleeds it reads" media reporting, we now have exponentially more ways to observe the occurrence of natural disasters globally than we did even 20 years ago. Statistically these things should probably be observed and compared over climatological and geological scales before we can determine if there are abnormally more or less natural disasters.

I find this similar to how the over-reporting of child abductions and other black swan crimes led to helicopter parenting. Hyper awareness of every single one of these events, rare though they may be statistically, gives the appearance of "a lot more".

I would say both, to some extent. It appears that climate change is driving more extreme weather events such as hurricanes. And when natural disasters do occur, it's a lot easier to report on them when people almost anywhere on the planet can provide a video of it.

I suspect the effect of natural disasters is also greater because of more people. A larger global population means more people are likely to be in the vicinity of natural phenomena, and higher population density means more people can potentially get into trouble at one time.

Can you point to some graphs/data to support your claim regarding more extreme weather? There doesn't seem to be much actual evidence of that according to https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica... which says:

    Despite the apparent increases in tropical cyclone
    activity in recent years, shown in Figures 2 and 3,
    changes in observation methods over time make it 
    difficult to know whether tropical storm activity has 
    actually shown an increase over time.

And this survey (https://www.omicsonline.org/open-access/trends-in-extreme-we...) says

    It is therefore surprising to discover that by all the 
    various real world data considered here, the weather in 
    the first half of the 20th century was, if anything, 
    more extreme than in the second half. I have not found 
    any data, including in SREX, that contradicts these 
    trends. Furthermore there are no signs of this trend 
    changing (i.e. lessening and reversing) in recent years."

Sure. This seems like a good summary: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate-guide/climate/what-affe...

One of your links refers to hurricane activity, where there seems to be less evidence of links with climate change.

You forgot 3

- lots more people, so if there is a natural disaster, someone is going to be there to be affected by it

Rosling covers that pretty well in the book also.