Bruce Sterling State of the World 2005 - ongoing slow discussion

This tsunami is a healthy reminder that the world has disasters worse than those we inflict on ourselves. We seem to be in the time of the "Sixth Great Extinction" thanks to the human impact on the biosphere, but hey, there were five other Great Extinctions that really did happen long before we started playing with matches...

We're doing practically nothing useful about climate change and it's a steadily mounting disaster. I do think the next decades are going to see a whole lot of paramilitary Operations Other Than War in reaction to astonishingly bad weather. So, well, an event like the tsunami gives us the chance to refine our disaster-response chops. They could use the improvement.