On February 1, 2024, reader @Mihai Balaban commented on the article The Paradox of Progress (I). The media onslaught of negative news (2019) and then asked the question:

Congratulations for the article, for the documentation!
Now we are in 2024 after a pandemic and two wars, do you have a study with data that also takes these two important events into account?

A gauntlet thrown down or, in Romanian, a challenge. I accepted this because I was already planning on re-updating the series The paradox of progress.[1]

What I described in 2019:

…extreme poverty has decreased dramatically; increased literacy; durability increased more than twice; child mortality (under 5 years) decreased; the use of child labor has significantly decreased; economic prosperity (measured by GDP per capita) is growing significantly, albeit unevenly; average world income per capita has almost doubled over the past 30 years; the share of the world’s population practicing open defecation has halved; 2.6 billion people gained access to improved water sources; The risk of death from air pollution – the biggest killer of the environment – ​​has dropped significantlyAnd so on

it could describe almost every year since the beginning of the last century (with the exception of the pandemic-affected years 2020 and 2021).

But how can you characterize the past year? Despite the military conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza and Yemen, 2023 was (in many ways) the best year in human history.[2] Most of the parameters listed in 2019 continued to record values ​​confirming progress in 2023. Other new parameters appeared: a record number of countries eliminated chronic diseases; the fight against cancer has won new battles; malaria vaccine reaches Africa; new drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy have revolutionized the treatment of obesity. Most places in the world are safer than they were before, the global homicide rate is at an all-time low, and so on. List with description 66 good news you haven’t heard about in 2023 can be read here. A TIME publication was detected 13 ways the world will be a better place in 2023.

From my point of view, I would like to add to the long list of triumphant achievements of recent decades an example that, coincidentally or not, does not appear in the lists published so far.

Greening the planet due to CO emissions₂ and climate change

In January 2024, the journal Global ecology and nature conservation published a study called Global greening continues despite increased drought stress since 2000. The data and analyzes of this recent study complement data from other works such as China and India are leading the way in greening the world through land use management (naturally2019), Characteristics, drivers and feedback of global greening (naturally2019) Human activity in China and India dominates the greening of the Earth, NASA research shows (THE GODMOTHER2019) times Greening of the Earth and its drivers (Nature Climate change2016).

Between 2001 and 2020, nature added so many new leaves that the additional area covered by them is equivalent to 1.3 times the area of ​​the contiguous United States of America, or 2.7 times more. annual than in Great Britain (Fig. 1).

Global greening is occurring in most of the world (55%), but especially in China, India, Europe, the African Sahel, southern Brazil, and the US/Canada. Combined with meteorological variables, CO2 emissions have dominated the global greening trend, while climate change has largely driven the greening trend.

Increasing the greening of the planet, which is created and maintained by increasing the concentration of CO₂ (the main food of terrestrial vegetation), is the only correct use of the adjective “green” in a climatic context. Coloring some types of energy in green is inappropriate and manipulative.

On the other hand, the demonization of carbon dioxide as a pollutant, i.e. poison, is a cynical abomination. Poison by definition kills people and other creatures. But how many people or plants died from “poisoning” of CO.₂? Lethal concentration of CO for humans₂ is 40,000 parts per million, a value never reached in the 4.6 billion years of Earth’s history. Is the gas that supports life together with oxygen a poison?! At a concentration of 420 ppm?! In contrast, the combination of modern fossil fuel-powered agricultural machinery, synthetic fertilizers produced from fossil fuels, and CO2 fertilizers has resulted in record global agricultural yields needed to feed the world’s growing population. This aspect of human progress is too easily forgotten or ignored for the sake of climate propaganda.

One of the most categorical supporters of the word combination SO₂ = polluting gas is a newspaper New York Times, along with other progressive publications (not related to the paradox in the title of the article). In 2021, in response to growing concern about the role of the fossil fuel industry in climate change, New York Times vowed to ban oil and gas companies from sponsoring “his climate newsletter, his climate summit or his podcast” The Daily“.

But this promise seems to have limits. Since 29.01.2024 The Daily ran a BP ad touting the oil giant’s climate achievements. Millions of podcast listeners could hear from the very beginning how “green” BP is (the method is called greenwashingi.e. manipulative landscaping similar to brainwashing):

Last year, BP added more than $70 billion to the American economy through investments from coast to coast. Investments such as the acquisition of America’s largest biogas producer, Archaea Energy, and low-emission natural gas production in the Permian Basin.

What podcast listeners didn’t learn about The Daily is that BP has said it will double oil production by 2030 and increase liquefied gas production to 30 million tons a year.

I mean, only three years later, the New York media giant conveniently forgot, in exchange for the money it got from BP, what it said about banning hydrocarbon sponsorships. To paraphrase the immortal policeman Gice Pristanda, I would say A difficult mission, the mission of a journalist…(supposedly neutral and objective).

Why are we (still) pessimistic?

Because no matter how numerous and important the achievements on the path of humanitarian progress are, the paradox described in 2019 continues to operate:

The better things get, the worse they seem and the more dissatisfied people become. Although modern societies have made enormous progress in solving a wide range of social problems, from poverty and illiteracy to violence and infantilism, most people believe that the world is getting worse.

One of the culprits, as I also demonstrated in the first episode of my series, is the mass media or, in Romanian, mass media. A negative news media attack based on the principle If it bleeds, it leads, focusing only on horrible, creepy, horrible or sinister things (murders, casualty accidents, rapes, suicide bombings, plane crashes, massive fires, etc.). .) , (deliberately) ignoring the good things all affect people, instilling in them the illusion that the world will soon go to hell, and that climate Armageddon is lurking around the corner to wipe out the human race.

Besides the media’s onslaught of almost invariably depressing news, there are other situations or rules that generate pessimism (Maarten Boudry recently called them Seven laws of pessimism), which are useful to hack in order to destroy them faster and easier.

1. Transparency to the invisibility of good news. “Negative news is punctual and can be reported immediately with some effect (make a rating). Positive news cannot be denied Sensation because they either do not exist as alternatives to negative ones, or are not of interest (not evaluated). For example, I have never seen a TV journalist look into the camera and say: I am broadcasting live from the country where No emigrants stormed either from the gymnasium where No no one is shot or from the city that No damaged by a hurricane or wave No no accident occurred). (Paradoxically, if you remove the negative no, you get the same negative type of news Sensation). Add to the occasional occurrence of negative news the colossal impact caused by the proliferation of billions of smartphones, viral videos on social media, blogs, vlogs, YouTube, and more. and get an approximately correct picture of the pandemonium of negativity.’ (Cranganu, 2019 – Onslaught of negative news in mass media)

Daily positive news becomes more transparent and therefore less visible in the absence of negative news, because human progress creates and depends on an infrastructure that works quietly in the background without apparent disruption. Pessimism arises when problems transform invisible infrastructure.

2. The speed of spreading negative news is enormous, especially with the advent of social networks and mass communication. The above examples of human progress, as many as they are, cannot completely eliminate the disasters that fill the evening news. There will always be enough terrorist attacks, brutal murders, car thefts, fatal accidents, catastrophic hurricanes, etc. to keep viewers glued to their small screens (TVs, tablets, smartphones).

The speed of negative news is ingeniously used by terrorists of all stripes. For example, the climate Taliban destroy works of art in Western European museums or block traffic on highways, whose main task is to film crimes and publish them almost instantly on as many social networks as possible. If the media stopped reporting on these terrorist attacks, the public would probably be outraged that they are not fully informed and would no longer visit those media outlets or social media. So, the problem here is demand, not supply. And then, it turns out, pessimism is good for business, right?! The consequence is the following:

3.The more pessimistic the news, the more it is consumed. The prevalence of chronic pessimism is an ontological and deontological characteristic of modern mass media. The mantra of American journalism (and probably elsewhere) is that “serious news” should only be about “what’s going wrong.” The pessimism of “prophets” is more attractive to the public than the optimism of “magicians”.

In Article Prophets and Wizards: Between Ecoapocalypse and Technooptimism I remembered that:

“…Optimism is usually viewed with suspicion, and often even considered ridiculous. Philosopher-optimist John Stuart Mill wrote in his 1828 speech: I have noticed that it is not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, that is admired by many as a wise man.. In other words, techno-optimistic wizards are less likely to be seen as possessing special mental qualities such as wisdom. There is still an opinion that prophets, even proven liars, should be respected intellectually.” On the other hand, no charity has ever raised money for its cause, saying that things really are getting better.[3] Pessimism quickly fills the coffers with donations.-Read the entire article and comment on Contributors.ro