We have a state of flux regarding sea levels, climate and extreme weather on a local front. The global crust itself is slowly changing and humans were always under threat living on the margins. The world was never a perfect place.

Rising populations depending on the margins is the issue today, not Greenhouse.

Greenhouse is only a threat if we can’t adapt to high density living in fragile places however many people believe Greenhouse will become the issue soon as more margins succumb to attack by the elements in any transition.

An accelerated attack is likely if nature can’t restore the balance quickly. Environmental vandalism will certainly add to our problems like deforestation of tropical and other areas where sudden rainfall and floods will remove the very fertility we depend on.

When do we act as dampers? Only when we are part of the flotsam! Some things are not immediately recycled either and we stink.

Living on seaside sand dunes, cays and piers, steep woody hillsides, even mountain tops must be at best a calculated risk. The world at large owes us nothing; we need to realize that before we find our true perspective in any disaster.

A smart emergency service should know no boundaries.

Another broad-brush environmental article with no mention of population. The closest Chris Hails comes is “human activities”.

The single most inexplicable thing that I have come across in 20 years of environmental lobbying is this extraordinary lack of expression and action from environmental groups on population size and growth. WWF, Greenpeace, the Australian Conservation Foundation, etc, etc have all been woeful in this regard. It does not compute. They are all just a bunch of “ambulance chasers”

Like too many (if not all) other UN expensive opuses produced upon sixty-year history of this comfortably nesting the privileged-from-around-a-globe organization, the UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and Kyoto protocol are contemporary toys for international bureaucracy only with no practical long-term outcome at all as to be concluded in the next century by still remembering these papers, some defined number of experts in history of international affairs.

“Where was security when the floodwaters wrecked New Orleans? We thought we had the engineering prowess to build a city on a silt-based river delta, interrupting the natural deposition cycle and lulling hundreds of thousands of people into the false sense of security that it was OK to live next to and below sea-level” - it is not a false sense of security, it is false assumption based on pure false rationalization and ignorance of locally collected data. The Netherlands are still in situ as many other places.

“A stable, sound environment will not guarantee safety in the wake of colossal natural disasters - like the Asian tsunami or American hurricane - but the evidence is there before us that it reduces the risks” – playing English at Australian / some other universities and international/UN meetings for overpaid instead engineering the creative applied solutions is a weak response to disasters that are already a part of of environment.

“The United Nations took the threat seriously enough to establish a high-level panel on challenges to global threats and security” – that is exactly what it is good for: spending money on own wages rather than on development projects.

Unfortunately those concerned with environmental sustainability are genuine pacifists, while whose that champion economic growth are more than happy to use whatever force is required to achieve it.
At what stage of global deterioration do we become aggressive in our quest to save the world, Or will we meekly protest peacefully until the end?

Hails: "By the time enough scientific data has accumulated for scientists to state with confidence that climate change is to blame, we may have experienced many more Katrinas."

This seems to be another example of the scientific method as interpreted by greens. Perhaps the data won't show what you presume to be true.

Hails: "This is a pity because we know that climate change is giving us more extreme weather events."

No, we don't.

As for the finding that more human lives were lost in areas where there was human activity than in mangrove swamps, well, is that supposed to be surprising?

I am quite tired of these kind of articles that leverage human tragedy to push an agenda and pull in some money. The tsunami was caused by an earthquake, which if anything should show that, far from being the fragile, delicate mother the greens brand it as, the earth is more powerful than us, and our best defense against such disasters is human engenuity.

And what on earth is a post-tsunami world?

Lizardman, a “genuine pacifists” is not synonymous to not thinking really of data collated. Playing someone emotions is a very common thing by manipulating a reality.