I think this is my first letter to the editor of a magazine (when I'm elderly, I'll probably be one of those people cranking out persnickety letters all day). I get angry when large media outlets unnecessarily play up doom and gloom just to be sensational. Time magazine just published a decade in review editorial titled "The 00's: Goodbye (at Last) to the Decade from Hell".

There was at least one factual error that I didn't correct in my letter. In the article, the writer said that Katrina was the worst natural disaster in history with a death toll of about 1,500. Oh really? The San Fransisco earthquake/fire resulted in at least 3000 deaths, and similar economic destruction as in Katrina. The Gavelston Hurricane killed between 6,000 and 12,000 people in 1900. The Johnston flood in 1889 killed over 2000 people in Pennsylvania when a dam burst. The Cheniere Chaminade hurricane of 1893 killed around 2,000 people in Lousiana. I would have expected Time to fact check (they are not OK! magazine afterall).

Anyway, here was my response:

Dear editor,

the Decade from Hell? Not quite. There were a lot of bright spots in the '00s. How about the advances made for gay rights and equality? The increased number of women entering politics and leading businesses? What about the continuing strides in science like the incredibly successful rovers on Mars? The discovery of massive amounts of water on the moon? All the exoplanets we've begun to find? What about new therapies and insights into curing so many forms of cancer? What about the rise of disciplines like genomics and proteomics that will no doubt play an important role in future medicine? And in technology, what about the rise of cloud computing, where the cost of storage space has become insignificant just when our appetite for data has reached the stratosphere? What about Web 2.0, the explosion of open source, and the Long Tail?

All of these things may be part of a slow and steady progress, but they continue to build a strong foundation for the future. When our descendants look back at this decade 90 years from now, they will see that our imagination, hard work, and perseverance ultimately trumped our greed, self-interest, and lassitude.

I'm also surprised that in an article full of doom and gloom that there was no mention of climate change. That we found out this decade that it was happening faster than originally thought, and that we worked out how it could progress if we do nothing, it was the worst news of the decade by far. At best though, our dying planet is a rallying cry for everyone in the world to work together. It may be the very thing we need to have long and lasting peace.