The problems I have with that one:
1. When this was written, Pompeii was still a thriving city then. Rome was just getting to the point of tiffed with the Christians, and already at that point of kicking the Jews out of their land. The average life expectancy in Rome at that time was about 30 years old, because they didn't yet know drinking out of lead cups was a bad idea, and there were a lot of people carrying a lot of diseases in and out of the area. Matter of fact, it was about to get much worse for the whole region when an Emperor decided to annihilated all of that new cult -- Christians.
Then...
2. I can't think of a time in civilization where there weren't a bunch of natural disasters, famine and sickness going on somewhere. The more we know of the world, the more we hear of it. When I was young, someone calculated up that there were 50 years in the entire history of mankind when there wasn't war. There have been a few years since then that America wasn't at war, but the USSR/Russia was when we weren't.
I can see ebbs and flows of all these things, but I can't see getting-worser at all. If anything, it tends to be getting a little bit better, because now when a nation has a famine or huge natural disaster, other countries send supplies.
If this was birth pangs, then was childhood any easier? Or are we really going to go so global on the natural disasters that it makes the destruction of the Roman Empire, WWI and WWII seem like a cake walks?