The century of Disasters
Meltdowns. Floods. Tornadoes. Oil spills. Grid crashes. Why more and more things seem to be going wrong, and what we can do about it. By Joel Achenbach This will be the century of disasters. In the same way that the 20 th century was the century of world wars, genocide, and grinding ideological conflict, the 21 st will be the century of natural disasters and technological crises and unholy combinations of the two. It'll be the century when the things that we count on to go right will, for whatever reason, go wrong. Late last month, as the Mississippi River rose in what is destined to be the worst flood in decades , and as the residents of Alabama and other states rummaged through the debris of a historic tornado outbreak , physicists at a meeting in Anaheim, Calif., had a discussion about the dangers posed by the sun. Solar flares, scientists believe, are a disaster waiting to happen. Thus one of the sessions at the American Physical Society's annual meeting was devoted