Apocalypse? No

Data scientist Hannah Ritchie takes a mostly untravelled path between climate scepticism and climate doomerism.

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Swedish public health doctor Hans Rosling liked to survey attendees at international conferences on their basic understanding of health, development and poverty: How many children lived in absolute poverty? What percentage of girls in developing nations went to school? What percentage of the world's one-year-olds were vaccinated against measles? And how have these numbers changed in recent decades?

He found their responses were less accurate than random guesses - "Beaten by the chimps," as he put it - and they were always wrong in a pessimistic direction. They thought the world was a worse place than it was. Their perceptions were often subject to a host of cognitive biases and/or based on old statistics, outdated theories and obsolete predictions. They hadn't refreshed their models of reality, Rosling complained, and if they didn't know the world was moving in the right directions, they might support misguided policies that stopped or reversed those positive trends.

Rosling died in 2017 but he has many disciples -including Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist at Oxford University and deputy editor of Our World in Data (a website you were probably addicted to during the early stages of the Covid pandemic when its cheerful visualisations depicting viral transmission numbers and per capita death rates swept through social media).