And increasing intensity of droughts and floods will severely impact breadbaskets of the world, causing massive famines and economic decline.

Similarly, the inclusion of climate change as an underlying risk factor for disasters was greatly debated at the World Conference on Disaster Reduction.

On the contrary, the scale of violence appears to be increasing from day to day, with untold suffering and loss of life and limb among innocent Iraqi civilians.

There has been an increase, between May 2004 and May 2005, in attacks on Afghan civilians and members of the Afghan and international security forces, with the resulting increased rate of injury and loss of life.

We end up with things we've heard about before red tides, for example, which are blooms of toxic algae floating through the oceans causing neurological damage.

And then to make the matters even worse, the virus started to spread out of these four places, especially northern India and northern Nigeria, into much of Africa, Asia, and even into Europe, causing horrific outbreaks in places that had not seen this disease for decades.

It is thought that the Earth itself coalesced from material in orbit around the Sun roughly 4500 Ma, or 4.5 billion years ago (Ga), and may have been struck by a very large (Mars sized) planetesimal shortly after it formed, splitting off material that formed the Moon (see Giant impact hypothesis).

December 4, 2013 marked the thousandth day since a powerful earthquake triggered a tsunami that hit the island of Japan on March 11, 2011, killing more than 15,000 people, devastating parts of the country, and causing a nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.