No one’s telling you these powerful facts about the state of the world
The news has felt pretty grim for a long time now. War in Europe and the Middle East, with no end in sight. The cost of living continuing to bite. A climate crisis which is increasingly affecting all of us. As winter turns to spring, with more green leaves appearing every day, when will there be good news?
Our news and social media are set up around the truth that people’s attention is drawn more quickly to the negative than the positive. The old maxim is still true: ‘If it bleeds, it leads.’ This week it is an outbreak of meningitis in Kent and the bombing of Iran. We continue to have a background of the cost of living crisis in the west. We are primed to listen to prophecies of doom and gloom.
There is another approach. In an age where many people live in an echo chamber, receiving information curated by an algorithm to reinforce their own views, we have the freedom to seek out something better. We live in an information age; the problem is we are not always very good at sifting through the sheer volume of data available to us.
Last summer I read an excellent book by a data analyst (stay with me, it’s interesting!): Not the end of the world: Surprising facts, dangerous myths and hopeful solutions for our future on planet earth by Hannah Ritchie. The starting point is that we are bombarded with doomsday headlines about climate change, but if you dig deeper into the data you find a much more hopeful picture. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve heard people say several times that we have more wars today than at any time in history. In fact, the opposite is true. On numerous measures, ‘there is no better time to be alive than today’, as Ritchie argues.
Infant mortality is the lowest in human history. Until relatively recently, a newborn baby stood around a 50/50 chance of survival. Since 1993 the number of children dying under the age of five has more than halved, from 12 million to 5 million worldwide. (Of course, that’s still a huge number.) Many of us do not know of any children under five who have died. This is an enormous generational change which we do not talk about.
At the same time, a mother’s chance of dying in childbirth is also lower than ever before. Maternal mortality rates have plunged in developing countries over the last few decades. Life expectancy is at an all-time high worldwide, hunger and malnutrition at an all-time low. More people than ever have access to clean water and electricity. Fewer people than ever live in poverty.
When it comes to the climate crisis, there are many alternative facts to the doom-laden headlines we are used to. Consider air pollution. Most headlines I can remember talk about how bad it is in our cities. However, London’s air pollution is a fraction as bad as it used to be. In 1952 smog choked the city and is thought to have killed around 10,000 people, with 100,000 becoming ill. Since then, coal has been phased out completely from the UK’s power generation. Governments know how to reduce air pollution, and by and large they are taking action to do so: giving people access to clean cooking fuels, ending winter crop burning, removing sulphur from fossil fuels, encouraging people to drive less, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and so on.
Our mass media is more tuned into natural disasters than ever before. This can lead to the perception that more of them are happening, with more deadly consequences. In a 2017 survey, nearly half the people asked thought the number of people dying in natural disasters had doubled over the last century. Not so. Since the first half of the twentieth century, death rates from natural disasters have fallen roughly ten-fold.
The public perception is also that greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise exponentially. Most people are not aware that per capita emissions worldwide have already peaked and are falling; total emissions continue to rise owing to population growth, but it is possible that they will peak in the next few years. Low carbon technologies are getting cheaper and cheaper: when it comes to power generation, building new solar and wind power is now the cheapest way to provide it. Many developing countries are seeing increased living standards alongside falling emissions.
There is also a lot of misinformation around deforestation. It is commonly claimed that the Amazon rainforest produces around 20% of the world’s oxygen. The truth is that the world’s forests consume about as much oxygen as they produce. Many people believe that deforestation is at an all-time high; in fact it peaked in the Amazon in the late 1990s and has been falling since then. Campaigners have boycotted palm oil, as rainforest has sometimes been cleared to grow it. The reason it is popular, though, is that it is a very efficient way to produce oil; if we do not use palm oil, we will use other forms of oil which will take up more land to grow and will cost more.
For hundreds of years, people have been arguing that the world cannot sustain its growing population. It has regularly been asserted that we will see massive famines with millions dying as we run out of food, but it has not happened, even though the world population is at an all-time high. In fact the world already produces enough food to feed 10 billion people, which is incidentally the number at which the global population is predicted to peak in around 2050. At the same time, agriculture is becoming more efficient, using less land and developing hardier crops which need less fertilizer. If we increase crop yields at the rates being achieved by the best farmers worldwide, and begin to eat less red meat and more plants, we will have no problems feeding everyone. Our global food supply is hugely wasteful, and we already have many solutions for this, we just need to act on them. There are many obstacles to these things happening, but the trend is certainly not towards our food supply failing to keep pace with our rising population.
For those who despair of the USA’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement under President Trump, it is worth reflecting that the vast majority of decarbonisation in the US is controlled by private enterprise, and the trends here are strongly positive. The President has less than three years left in his term, and it is common in democracies to see a reaction to an incumbent. What happens after Trump will be as important as what happens during his time in office. One world leader, however powerful, cannot buck a worldwide trend. China’s carbon emissions are beginning to reduce, alongside other developing countries. The global market for renewable energy is rapidly outstripping fossil fuels owing to their rapidly reducing cost.
I have given a brief outline of some of the good news from Hannah Ritchie’s fantastic book. There is plenty more you can discover for yourself. One thing I have learned to do is to consume my news media more critically and ask more questions. During Covid, when we were all sanitising our hands and using anti-bacterial soap, I was struck by the claim that this soap removes 99.9% of bacteria. This claim is meaningless unless you know how much bacteria is removed by normal soap. This week our news is zeroing in on cases of meningitis, but there are always background cases of meningitis which have not been newsworthy until now. If you are thinking about how serious an outbreak is, you need to know what the normal level of infection is. When you are being presented with facts which appear to lead to a particular conclusion, ask yourself, are there other facts I need to complete the picture?
Christians believe that Jesus’ resurrection gives us hope and a future. Better things are coming when Jesus returns and inaugurates a new heaven and a new earth. The story outlined in the Bible is not one where humanity annihilates itself. To believe in a doom-laden narrative of global destruction is to buy into all sorts of facts which are not true, and to ignore a lot of data to the contrary. We are called to be good stewards of our planet, and to cherish God’s good creation, so it is vital that we face the reality of the huge challenges for humanity from the climate crisis. However, better things are possible and they are on the way.