Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

History is a race between education and catastrophe.

We worry about the seemingly ever-increasing number of natural catastrophes. Yet this is mainly a consequence of CNN - we see many more but the number is roughly constant and we manage to deal much better with them over time. Globally the death rate from catastrophes has dropped about fifty-fold over the past century.

If left unchecked global change will create violent conflict torrential storms shrinking coastlines and irreversible catastrophe.

It's not catastrophes murders deaths diseases that age and kill us it's the way people look and laugh and run up the steps of omnibuses.