[PTTG]

Lucky

Since 1950, every hurricane has remained at sea. It's taken as a minor mystery of meteorology that hurricanes somehow "know" to avoid land, but it's not an easy thing to track down. Likewise, there have been no earthquakes above a 4.0 (the same amount of energy was instead released over many quakes), and no droughts lasting longer than two years, anywhere on the planet. This state of events has persisted from that year to now (2011), and there seems to be no reason for it to stop now.

One last protection, the economy has had stock collapses, but though those wipe out a great deal of hypothetical money, none of these crises have seriously affected the everyman. Some researchers believe this may be a second-order effect rather than a first.

A more-or-less universal 10% increase in wealth exists around the planet, with most of it concentrated in infrastructure and construction. The population is not significantly larger (maybe 10 million more people, all told). Science is not accelerated, but visitors could think otherwise because most cities show their tech more, with trillions of dollars of investment in freeways, maglevs, megastructures, and ports.

The greatest difference between this worldline and our own can be seen in the American southeast. The equivalent of several billion dollars of avoided costs was added to its economy every year, the region grew even faster than ours did in that time.