FROM APOCALYPTIC media to the Queen’s Christmas message, 2005 is seen as the annus horribilis of anni horribiles.

So what would they have made of 1816? Drastic climate change afflicted Europe after the eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia the previous year (92,000 people died). Frosts persisted until June, reappearing in August, storms unleashed abnormally heavy rainfall causing severe flooding — 200,000 people died. War had just ended. There was famine, with food riots and violence. High levels of ash produced glowering sunsets, affecting the palettes of painters such as Turner. Rain kept Mary Shelley, John Polidori and their friends indoors, resulting in Frankenstein and The Vampyre. All was doom. “Was this the ending of the world?”

No more so, of course, than in 2005. The sin of “presentism” — the conviction that everything in our time is worse than at any preceding period — is the curse of the age.

The year 2005 does not enter the top league of disaster years, even if we include the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004. The 20th century alone witnessed ten years in which those killed by natural disasters numbered millions. Moreover, individual events in 2005 do not compare with past horrors. How does Hurricane Katrina, bad though it was, match the terrible 1970 Bhola cyclone in East Pakistan that killed 500,000 people? How does the Himalayan earthquake equate with the 1976 Tangshan earthquake that destroyed 242,000 more, or the 1556 Shaanxi earthquake that resulted in a death toll of 830,000?

We indulge, to use Michael Crichton’s telling phrase, a “state of fear” whipped up by political activists. We need to regain our sense of history and not be swayed by those who exploit today’s disasters for their own agendas. Not to do so is an insult to those who have died in the multifarious calamities of the past; it also denies our remarkable capacity to adapt.

Many of us live longer, safer lives than ever before. But we must help those still afflicted by this ever restless Earth to achieve similar levels of progress. We cannot do this if we let Despair and Conspiracy — the twin offspring of presentism — take root. We must dismiss the nightmare demons that kill our will.

Philip Stott is Emeritus Professor of Biogeography at the University of London