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 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.
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.
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."One of your links refers to hurricane activity, where there seems to be less evidence of links with climate change.
- Is this because better communications makes them better reported?
- or are there really more natural disasters?