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By Root 570 0

guess that 27,000 species are dying out every year, that equates to just 2.7 per cent a century (there are thought to be at least ten million species), a long way short of 50 per cent in sixty years. As for Diamond’s other worries, the trends are getting better, not worse: the radioactive dose his sons receive today from weapons tests and nuclear accidents is 90 per cent down on what their father received in the early 1960s and is anyway less than 1 per cent of natural background radiation. The amount of oil spilled in the sea has been falling steadily since before the young Diamonds were born: it now is down by 90 per cent since 1980.

One ingenious argument for apocalypse relies on statistics. As related by Martin Rees in his book Our Final Century, Richard Gott’s argument goes like this: given that I am roughly the sixty billionth person to live upon this planet, it is plausible to believe that I come roughly half way through my species’ run on Broadway, rather than near the beginning of a million-year run. If you pull a number from an urn and it reads sixty, you would conclude that there are more likely to be 100 numbers in the urn than 1,000. Therefore, we are doomed. However, I do not intend to turn pessimist on the strength of a mathematical analogy. After all, the six billionth and six millionth person on the planet could have made exactly the same argument.

Pessimism has always been big box office. It plays into what Greg Easterbrook calls ‘the collective refusal to believe that life is getting better’. People do not apply this to their own lives, interestingly: they tend to assume that they will live longer, stay married longer and travel more than they do. Some 19 per cent of Americans believe themselves to be in the top 1 per cent of income earners. Yet surveys consistently reveal individuals to be personally optimistic yet socially pessimistic. Dane Stangler calls this ‘a non-burdensome form of cognitive dissonance we all walk around with’. About the future of society and the human race people are naturally gloomy. It goes with the fact that they are risk-averse: a large literature confirms that people much more viscerally dislike losing a sum of money than they like winning the same sum. And it seems that pessimism genes might quite literally be commoner than optimism genes: only about 20 per cent of people are homozygous for the long version of the serotonin transporter gene, which possibly endows them with a genetic tendency to look on the bright side. (Willingness to take risks, a possible correlate of optimism, is also partly heritable: the 7-repeat version of the DRD4 gene accounts for 20 per cent of financial risk taking in men – and is commoner in countries where most people are descended from immigrants.)

As the average age of a country’s population rises, so people get more and more neophobic and gloomy. There is immense vested interest in pessimism, too. No charity ever raised money for its cause by saying things are getting better. No journalist ever got the front page by telling his editor that he wanted to write a story about how disaster was now less likely. Good news is no news, so the media megaphone is at the disposal of any politician, journalist or activist who can plausibly warn of a coming disaster. As a result, pressure groups and their customers in the media go to great lengths to search even the most cheerful of statistics for glimmers of doom. The day I was writing a first draft of this paragraph, the BBC reported on its morning news headlines a study that found the incidence of heart disease among young and middle-aged British women had ‘stopped falling’. Note what was not news: the incidence of heart disease had until recently been falling steeply among all women, was still falling among men, and was not yet rising even among the female age group where it had just ‘stopped falling’. Yet all the discussion was of this ‘bad’ news. Or note how the New York Times reported the reassuring news in 2009 that world temperature had not risen for a decade: ‘Plateau in temperature adds difficulty