One reason why recent weather events, or other natural disasters, are described as "worse" than those which came before is that, these days, there are many more people and chunks of infrastructure in the way. Hence the personal and economic consequences of extreme weather events are much greater than they used to be.

And the design of the infrastucture is often based on the deadly assumptions that only short term profits matter and "really bad things rarely happen here". Hence all those 'jerry-built' schools in the path of the recent Chinese earthquake ...