USA is under siege.... by Sandy

[mrsswordfisherman]

Some of the many, many pics being thrown around fb and online

[tw9635]

Feel so sorry for the people in the US and hope everything plans out. We should appreciate how lucky we are to be away from all that.

[Catchin Jack]

Ground Zero from 9-11 flooding.

A handout photo released by the US Coast Guard on 29 October 2012 shows the HMS Bounty, a 180-foot tall ship, submerged in the Atlantic Ocean during Hurricane Sandy approximately 90 nautical miles southeast of Hatteras, N.C.

Tim Kukl/U.S. Coast Guard/European Pressphoto Agency

[rockfisherman]

There certainly has been a lot of natural disasters this year.

Fishingphase

[GreyNurse]

There's been a lot of natural disasters every year. The fact is, with improvements in communications and media reporting, we hear a lot more about them in both quantity and detail than we did even 50 years ago. And because we occupy a lot more real estate than we did yesteryear, we are impacted more directly by the disasters.

We often hear people state that the weather is "the worst we can ever remember". But human beings are pretty poor witnesses when we come to rely on our memory alone.

And when it comes to the weather, we haven't been recording long enough to know whether there's a cyclical pattern or not. I'm not saying that humanity has not impacted the climate. We certainly have, going by evidence gained from archeological and ice core studies. But the wowsers would have us believe that it's all our own doing, while the critics scoff at climate change totally. The truth lies somewhere in between.

But one thing is for certain. If humanity disappeared from the face of the planet tomorrow, the natural disasters would continue and the weather would keep changing over the millenia.

We, as individuals, just need to do our bit to keep the local environment as clean and pristine as we can. I'm confident that the Fish Raiders members lead the way by example.