A couple of weeks ago we had a major ice storm here in Kansas. The atmosphere was sandwiched, with cold air at the surface, warm and wet above. It rained steadily for a whole day, the drops freezing on contact with the chilled surfaces, encasing every branch, leaf, needle, and blade of grass in ice. In such miserable weather we just stayed inside where it was dry and warm, hoping the electric would hold steady. We were lucky in that regard: I counted three sharp brownouts but no outages. When I finally went out a couple of days later, I was surprised at how much destruction the storm had left. Most of the trees in the city had broken branches, many huge, which in turn took down power lines. Over 50,000 had lost their electric power -- many, as it turned out, for a week or more. It was the most extensive storm damage I had ever witnessed. You may take that as evidence that I have led a sheltered life, but I've seen several other bad ice storms, a hurricane, a tornado or two or three, a lot of nasty squalls.

This event happened a few days before mudslides and avalanches in California made the news. It happened a week-plus after the far more destructive Indian Ocean tsunami -- as I write now the death toll there is lurching toward, or possibly past, a quarter of a million people. The early reports came from Thailand, since that's where the tourists were, but the ill-reported destruction in Sumatra must have been unfathomable. I recently read Simon Winchester's book on the tsunami unleashed by the 1883 explosion and collapse of the volcano Kratakau in the straits between Sumatra and Java, but the destruction then was largely contained by the straits -- even though the effect was unmistakable in Jakarta and measurable in England.

These disasters each have a political impact, which is not to say that they have a political cause. Sure, one can argue that people take risks in living in dangerous places because they unreasonably expect stable environments, but people have to live somewhere, and most places entail risks. (I'd argue that California is riskier than most places; others might point to Kansas tornados, which I take seriously but don't worry much about.) Rather, the impact is that these and virtually all other disasters weren't budgeted for. Now the electric company here is moaning about the need to raise rates to cover its extraordinary expenses, while the city government has to reallocate money to clean up broken limbs. These are small stakes compared to the damage the tsunami caused, but all of these cases underscore the core fact that when something goes wrong we (as in everybody) expect government to come in and fix things.

What this means is that as disasters mount up government has not merely become the insurer-of-last-resort, it's increasingly becoming the only insurer of note. This should give us pause, especially as the political geniuses of the Republican party have set out on a program to systematically bankrupt government. In doing so they run the risk of leaving us in the rubble. The Bush administration's response to the tsunami crisis is a good example of how this is going to work: a tiny pittance, maybe a bit more after the media shames them, plus whatever the charitably inclined might pitch in; meanwhile the government's contribution gets delivered through the military -- the only U.S. government agency functioning beyond U.S. borders these days -- and only after they work out the payola angles.

One thing we have to realize is that such disasters are inevitable. The tsunami was caused by a major slip along the undersea fault that separates the Indo-Australian plate from Southeast Asia. One doesn't need to check the historical data to determine that such earthquakes are inevitable. All one needs to know is that the limestone that crowns the Himalayas 29,000 feet above sea level was formed in a shallow sea millions of years ago, before India's northward momentum smashed into Tibet and raised the mountains and the plateau behind them. Whether another such earthquake/tsunami happens next year or a hundred years from now or a thousand years from now may be uncertain, but it is absolutely certain that there will be thousands of such slips over the next few millions of years. That this one caught us by surprise just means that we weren't paying attention.

Of course, there are Bush-people who don't buy all of this plate tectonics, millions-of-years, only-a-theory hogwash. Their short-term plan is to ban such inconvenient science from the schools. Their only slightly long-term hope is to hasten armageddon and apocalypse. They are making alarming progress on both fronts.

One more note: After the tsunami I saw at least one normally sane blogger attempt to link the tsunami to global warming. There are several things wrong with this. It is true that global warming will, in general, increase the energy accumulation of tropical storms, and this will tend to increase the tidal surges created by those storms. But it's extremely difficult to get a surge that comes anywhere near the power of this level of tsunami, and any such surge would only have local effects -- nothing at the distance of the coasts of India or Somalia. On the other hand, the worst case global warming scenario would also be incomparable to the tsunami -- it could be far worse. The worst case scenario, at least as I understand it, would be for the East Antarctica Ice Sheet to destabilize and rapidly slide off into the ocean. This would dramatically add to the volume of the world's oceans, and as such would raise the sea level -- everywhere. This would produce waves like a tsunami, but unlike a tsunami they wouldn't recede: huge stretches of real estate, including many of the world's major cities, would be drowned.