We refer you to the posting today (August 12) by fellow blogger Phil Palin, titled Fire, flood, and famine are white swans. He asks why we continue to be surprised about disasters that are in fact quite predictable. Granted the recent natural disasters in Pakistan, China, and Russia are huge even if the disaster agent if not unusual.

Also unusual, yet not unpredictable, is the huge ice chunk that broke away in Greenland this past week. Presently, this is a new threat and not yet a disaster, but it poses serious future problems.  See Huge ice island could pose threat to oil, shipping

An island of ice more than four times the size of Manhattan is drifting across the Arctic Ocean after breaking off from a glacier in Greenland.

Potentially in the path of this unstoppable giant are oil platforms and shipping lanes — and any collision could do untold damage. In a worst case scenario, large chunks could reach the heavily trafficked waters where another Greenland iceberg sank the Titanic in 1912.

It’s been a summer of near biblical climatic havoc across the planet, with wildfires, heat and smog in Russia and killer floods in Asia. But the moment the Petermann glacier cracked last week — creating the biggest Arctic ice island in half a century — may symbolize a warming world like no other.