A California Fire firefighter lights a backfire while battling the Oak Fire. Photo / Getty Images
Russian tanks racing over a European border.
Deadly wildfires engulfing Spanish and French homes and fields amid record temperatures.
Sri Lankan protesters taking a dip in an ousted president's swimming pool.
A gunman shooting dead 19 American children in their classroom.
A former Japanese prime minister being assassinated on a street corner.
People queuing for days for food and fuel across the world.
A global pandemic that continues to linger.
A little over halfway through 2022 and we already appear to have hit a whole new level of turmoil, even when compared with recent years.
The news cycle of gloom is relentless. To many, it seems as if the world is falling apart and they are living through the opening scenes of a post-apocalyptic movie.
But to what extent is this cascade of calamity really unprecedented, or does it just feel that way?
Even before 2022 began, the world had been buffeted by the Covid pandemic and seen politics in various countries become venomous and polarised.
But Vladimir Putin's invasion of neighbouring Ukraine in February has added unprecedented headwinds for already fragile nations to struggle through.
Tens of thousands have been killed by the fighting, unleashing the horrors of conventional international warfare on Europe.
Putin's weaponisation of grain supplies has thrown supply chains into disarray and further pushed up food prices which have increased by 50 per cent in the past two years, the biggest hike since records began.
The war and the aftermath of Covid-19 lockdowns have also sent inflation soaring. Average petrol prices in the UK have hit record levels of 192p per litre in the past month. Economic indicators resemble the dark days of the 1970s or early 1980s.
Price hikes are painful for UK shoppers, but they can be deadly in other parts of the world, where for example in the horn of Africa increases are pushing millions towards famine.
Conflicts and turmoil in countries like Syria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Colombia, Afghanistan and Yemen, mean nearly 60 million people have left their homes.
"The world is falling apart, too many countries are falling apart," said Jan Egeland, Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council earlier this year.
Democracy has also appeared in retreat in recent years, after decades in which its march seemed unstoppable. According to research by the V-Dem Institute, there has been a gradual increase in the proportion of the world living under autocratic regimes.
In 1952, some two-thirds of the world lived in autocracies, a figure which slowly declined in the post-Cold War period. By 2001 the figure reached as low as 46 per cent.
But there has been a steady creep up in recent years with India's demotion to an "electoral autocracy", due to increased pressures on journalists and attacks on Muslims under Narendra Modi. Presently, there is a bigger proportion of people living under more autocratic regimes than at any time since the 1970s.
On the health front, Covid refuses to go away and other diseases threaten. Polio has reared its head in the UK and America and monkeypox has been declared a global health emergency.
Such a list of afflictions may seem unique, but that is misleading, says Dr Indrajit Roy, a senior lecturer in global development at York University's politics department.
"Human beings are very persistent. We like to feel like we are living in very unique moments.
"In some ways it appears that things are going down, there's a lot of conflicts, a lot of war, a great deal of discrimination and exploitation. All of that is true, but to say that it's worse than it's been in the past, I think I would really qualify that."
Development metrics like life expectancies, literacy and living standards have all risen to historic highs in recent decades, while at the same time hunger, child mortality and extreme poverty have all dropped, improving life for huge numbers.
"The world has become a better place than it used to be 50 years ago or certainly 100 or 200 years ago, in many ways," said Roy.
'Reason is on the run'
Perhaps the sense of unease over today's problems may not be because they are unique, but because current politicians and states feel particularly not up to the task, said Andrew Potter of Max Bell School of Public Policy in Montreal.
In his recent book, On Decline, he argues the problems the world faces are essentially political. Yet growing polarisation, suspicion, social media-fed conspiracy theories, and even distrust of science all mean that politicians are not rising to the challenge.
"Our coming decline will manifest itself in many ways, including uncontrolled pandemics, environmental degradation, collapsing birth rates, and economic stagnation. It might even result in World War Three," he said.
"But it is at its heart a political problem, caused by our increasing inability to confront and resolve the myriad collective action problems that bedevil our species at our current stage of development. The reason is on the run, and I see little hope for an end to the spread of political rot across the Western world."
Conventional economic and development indicators also do not capture factors like social disaffection or how we feel about the state of the world.
"Alongside that tremendous growth in the economy and that improvement in the human condition, we've released 1.5trn tons CO2 into the atmosphere, we have driven a million species to the edge of extinction, and we have seen rising inequality and social disaffection," said Matthew Agarwala, a Cambridge University economist specialising in sustainable development.
"These three things, climate change, the biodiversity crisis and rising inequality, threaten to wipe out that century's worth of gain."
And while wars and economic turmoil may have been commonplace in history, climate change is a new and pressing issue.
The United Nations earlier this year said three-quarters of the world's population could be exposed to "deadly heat stress" by the end of the century. The world has missed its chance to entirely avoid the effects of a warming world, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned. Emissions need to be cut sharply and quickly, the UN says.
Temperatures have risen and fallen in the past million years, but the current climate change risks accelerating too quickly, exposing as much as 10 per cent of animal species to extinction.
"They have got nowhere left to run," said Professor Chris Thomas, director of York University's Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity, which looks at humans' impact on the natural world.
"What we are dealing with is such a large perturbation to the system that the only thing that makes sense is to … try to stop climate change. The rest of everything we do is effectively putting sticking plasters on a gaping wound."
Given such bleak messages, it is easy to give up and sink into despair. But such fatalism has to be avoided, argues Roy.
"While it's important to take note of the challenges that we face, it's not enough. It's an armchair luxury to just talk about how everything is declining without actually doing the hard work of seeing what people are doing to resist that."
NYT: The number of hate groups is resurging after a period of decline, experts say.