Declining value of the Y axis

This NYT graph (from late May) claims that, over the last century+, the worldwide number of disasters ranges from close to zero to 390 in 2006. We’ll leave the Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disaster’s methods and other specifics for later, and make one general observation. If indeed variations in lots of things (weather, economics, extinction, etc) are becoming more and more extreme, as long as we maintain the convention of using the x axis to denote time, the y axis faces serious inflation.