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It was the defining event and remains a thousand degrees hot.

We have record high temperatures and record high energy prices across the country, and we've seen the dangerous effects caused by extreme temperatures in the past.

Our house was bombed, and the roof fell in. We were sitting under the stairs of the basement, and we were quite safe, but it brought home the realization. In two nights 400 people were killed in small town.

Back in the 1960s, the number of deaths each year from unintentional poisoning was 15 times greater than it is today.

When Katrina struck in 2005, roughly 300 deaths were recorded at hospitals, long-term care facilities and in nursing homes, according to a recently published study of death certificates and disaster mortuary team records. Many of them might have been saved if they had been evacuated sooner.

We saw in 2003 the beginnings of an outbreak of an illness called SARS. SARS ended up killing 800 people which is a significant number of deaths, but nowhere near as high as it could have been.

Every day, it seems, a new extreme weather catastrophe happens somewhere in America, and the media's all over it, profiling the ordinary folks wiped out by forest fires, droughts, floods, massive sinkholes, tornadoes.

The financial crisis that began in the summer of 2007 was an extraordinarily complex event with multiple causes.

More people die on a yearly basis crossing the Florida Straits than ever died trying to cross the Berlin Wall.

Had I been in Toronto, I would certainly have been killed in this attack. In the room where I normally sleep, the flames and the smoke and the soot is such that the gases would have killed me.