Top Highlights

• Smart people especially seek to be well informed and so tend to be voracious consumers of news. Since journalism focuses on dramatic things and events that go wrong, the nature of news thus tends to mislead readers and viewers into thinking that the world is in worse shape than it really is.
• This mental shortcut causes many of us to confuse what comes easily to mind with what is true;
• World population will likely peak at 9.8 billion people at around 2080 and fall to 9.5 billion by 2100 in the medium-fertility scenario calculated by demographer Wolfgang Lutz and his colleagues at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
• The global tree canopy increased by 2.24 million square kilometers (865,000 square miles) between 1982 and 2016, reported researchers at the University of Maryland in a September 2018 study in Nature.26 That’s a land area larger than Alaska and Montana combined.