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Apocaholics (the word is Gary Alexander’s – he calls himself a recovering apocaholic) exploit and profit from the natural pessimism of human nature, the innate reactionary in every person. For 200 years pessimists have had all the headlines, even though optimists have far more often been right. Archpessimists are feted, showered with honours and rarely challenged, let alone confronted with their past mistakes.

Should you ever listen to pessimists? Certainly. In the case of the ozone layer, a briefly fashionable scare of the early 1990s, the human race probably did itself and its environment a favour by banning chlorofluorocarbons, even though the excess ultraviolet light getting through the ozone layer in the polar regions never even approached one-five-hundredth of the level that is normally experienced by somebody living in the tropics – and even though a new theory suggests that cosmic rays are a bigger cause of the Antarctic ozone hole than chlorine is. Still, I should stop carping: in this case, getting chlorine out of the atmosphere was on balance the wise course of action and the costs to human welfare, though not negligible, were small.

And there are things that are getting worse, without doubt. Traffic congestion and obesity would be two big ones, yet both are the products of plenty, and your ancestors would have laughed at the idea that such abundance of food and transport was a bad thing. There are also many occasions on which pessimists have been ignored too much. Too few people listened to anxieties expressed about Hitler, Mao, Al-Qaeda and subprime mortgages – to name a handful of issues at random. But pessimism is not without its cost. If you teach children that things can only get worse, they will do less to make it untrue. I was a teenager in Britain in the 1970s, when every newspaper I read told me not just that oil was running out, a chemical cancer epidemic was on the way, food was growing scarce and an ice age was coming, but that my own country’s relative economic decline was inevitable and its absolute decline probable. The sudden burst of prosperity and accelerating growth that Britain experienced in the 1980s and 1990s, not to mention the improvements in health, lifespan and the environment, came as quite a shock to me. I realised about the age of twenty-one that nobody had ever said anything optimistic to me about the future of the human race – not in a book, a film or even a pub. Yet in the decade that followed, employment increased, especially for women, health improved, otters and salmon returned to the local river, air quality improved, cheap flights to Italy began from the local airport, telephones became portable, supermarkets stocked more and more kinds of cheaper and better food. I feel angry that I was not taught and told that the world could get much better; I was somehow given a counsel of despair. As are my children today.

Cancer

By now this generation of human beings was supposed to be dying like flies from cancer caused by chemicals. Starting in the late 1950s, posterity was warned that synthetic chemicals were about to create an epidemic of cancer. Wilhelm Hueper, chief of environmental cancer research at America’s National Cancer Institute, so convinced himself that exposure to small traces of synthetic chemicals was a big cause of cancer that he even refused to believe that smoking caused cancer – lung cancer came from pollution, he believed. Rachel Carson, influenced by Hueper, set out in her book Silent Spring (1962) to terrify her readers as she had terrified herself about the threat to human health caused by synthetic chemicals and especially by the pesticide DDT. Whereas childhood cancer had once been a medical rarity, she wrote, ‘today, more American school children die of cancer than from any other disease’. This was actually a statistical sleight of hand; the statement was true not because cancer was increasing among children (it was not), but because other causes of childhood death were declining faster. She expected DDT to cause