Tsunami horror

With estimates of the number of dead rising steadily, it is beginning to appear that the Japanese tsunami could turn out to be the greatest natural disaster in human history. Newsreel photographs of that wall of water and debris grinding inexorably across the landscape should remind us of our relative impotence in the face of nature's convulsions. Hopefully the world will unite to succour Japan in its hour of need.

There will be huge economic consequences. The financial damage to earth's already weakened economies will be incalculable. Ships full of goods have gone missing. Factories have had to be closed down. Five nuclear reactors have been damaged; there is danger of meltdown. The insurance payouts will run into billions.

And there may be more to come. Astrophysicist Piers Corbyn, whose long range weather forecasts now consistently out-perform those of the Met Office, had predicted - in advance of the present disaster - that the world would suffer major quakes and geological events for the next two years. Mr Corbyn's thesis is that weather on the Sun is the main determinant of what happens on Earth. The sunspot cycles have been abnormally low for a couple of years now, and the current quake was preceded by a coronal ejection of record size, hurling billions of tons of matter in our direction.
Let's hope that, for once, he is wrong.