I would suspect the former. There are so many 24/7 news/weather outlets that need to fill air time and draw in viewers with something. Natural disasters are easy ratings.
30+ years ago (pre-CNN), an earthquake in Jakarta, or a typhoon reaching Thailand might get a blurb on an inner page of the NY Times. Those events certainly wouldn't have something like Weather Channel reporters on site pretending to brace themselves in the wind to dramatize the shot...
Beyond "if it bleeds it reads" media reporting, we now have exponentially more ways to observe the occurrence of natural disasters globally than we did even 20 years ago. Statistically these things should probably be observed and compared over climatological and geological scales before we can determine if there are abnormally more or less natural disasters.
I find this similar to how the over-reporting of child abductions and other black swan crimes led to helicopter parenting. Hyper awareness of every single one of these events, rare though they may be statistically, gives the appearance of "a lot more".
Do you have a link to the Fermi paradox article you mentioned?