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would prevent large direct wars between the superpowers, that the Cold War would end, the Soviet empire would disintegrate, global arms spending would fall by 30 per cent and three-quarters of all nuclear missiles would be dismantled, you would have been dismissed as a fool. ‘Historians will view nuclear arms reduction as such an incredible accomplishment,’ says Greg Easterbrook, ‘that it will seem bizarre in retrospect that so little attention was paid while it was happening.’ Perhaps this was just a stroke of luck, and admittedly the danger is far from over (especially for Koreans and Pakistanis), but nonetheless notice that things have got better, not worse.

Famine

One of the hoariest causes for pessimism about the fate of humanity is the worry that food will run out. The prominent eco-pessimist Lester Brown predicted in 1974 that a turning point had been reached and farmers could ‘no longer keep up with rising demand’. But they did. In 1981 he said that ‘global food insecurity is increasing’. It was not. In 1984, he proclaimed that ‘the slim margin between food production and population growth continues to narrow’. Wrong again. In 1989 ‘population growth is exceeding farmers’ ability to keep up.’ No. In 1994, ‘Seldom has the world faced an unfolding emergency whose dimensions are as clear as the growing imbalance between food and people’ and ‘After forty years of record food production gains, output per person has reversed with unanticipated abruptness.’ (A turning point had been reached.) A series of bumper harvests followed and the price of wheat fell to record lows, where it stayed for a decade. Then in 2007 the wheat price suddenly doubled because of a combination of Chinese prosperity, Australian drought, pressure from environmentalists to encourage the growing of biofuels and willingness of American pork-barrel politicians to oblige them by sluicing subsidies towards ethanol producers. Sure enough Lester Brown was once again the darling of the media, his pessimism as impregnable as it was thirty-three years before: ‘cheap food may now be history,’ he said. A turning point had been reached. Once again, a record harvest followed and the wheat price halved.

The prediction of global famine has a long history, but it probably reached its apocaholic shrillest in 1967 and 1968 with two bestselling books. The first was by William and Paul Paddock (Famine, 1975!). ‘Population-food collision is inevitable; it is foredoomed’ was the title of the first chapter. The Paddocks even went so far as to argue that countries such as Haiti, Egypt and India were beyond saving and should be left to starve; the world’s efforts should, on the Verdun principle of triage, be focused on the less desperate cases. By 1975, with the world not yet starving, William Paddock was calling for a moratorium on research programmes designed to increase food production in countries with high population growth rates – almost as if he wanted to bring about his own prediction.

The following year saw the publication of an even bigger bestseller that was even more misanthropic in tone. The Population Bomb allowed Paul Ehrlich, an obscure butterfly ecologist, to metamorphose into a guru of the environmental movement complete with MacArthur ‘genius’ award. ‘In the 1970s and 1980s,’ he promised, declaring a turning point, ‘hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.’ Ehrlich not only argued that mass death was inevitable and imminent, that human numbers would fall to two billion and that the poor would get poorer, but that those who saw that population growth was already beginning to slow were as foolish as those who greet a slightly less freezing day in December as a sign of approaching spring; in later editions, he added that the Green Revolution then transforming Asian agriculture would ‘at the very best buy us only a decade or two’. Four decades later, Ehrlich had learnt his lesson – not to give dates: in his