As we begin 2015, there is the customary air of gloom, dread and uncertainty.

Ukraine, Islamic State, Ebola, food banks, climate change, Katie Hopkins... Fear of the future is as much a part of the festive season as hangovers and indigestion.

However, what we learned during the referendum campaign is that positive thinking can work. If people think things can get better they're more likely to want to make things better - and that unleashes huge latent potential in society. Negativity just leads to apathy and passivity.

So, for just one day and one column I reserve the right to say that while there is no shortage of things that are going wrong, there are also quite a few things that are going right.

Take, sexual and gender equality. Scotland's first same sex marriages took place yesterday with little fanfare. Yet only a couple of decades ago, gay people lived in fear, homosexuality was illegal and gays were victimised. Fifty fifty gender balance in the Scottish cabinet shows that feminism too has come of age. Young people are to get the vote.

The world may be a dangerous place, but here at home we're safer than ever. Crime has fallen across the board by nearly a quarter in the last four years alone according to Police Scotland, with violent crime falling fastest. Glasgow's booze and blades culture is largely a thing of the past. The number of young men convicted of crime has fallen by more than 70 per cent in Scotland in a generation. Those imaginative approaches to reducing gang behaviour really work.

Criminologists are puzzled by all this because crime, especially property theft, normally rises in times of economic hardship and recession. One contributory factor is the fall in heroin use and indeed in all forms of substance abuse in the past few years. Burglary tends to follow smack. Edinburgh became a burglary hot spot in the 1980s when heroin gripped the city of Trainspotting.

Alcohol consumption in Scotland is also way down, by the annual equivalent of 38 million pints of beer since 2009, according to NHS Health Scotland. We are all drinking and smoking less, irrespective of age and social class, but young people are drinking the least. The percentage of under 15s who regularly drink is down by two thirds and so is the number taking up smoking.

We are all living longer. Deaths from coronary heart disease in Scotland fell by 12 per cent last year alone according to the General Register Office for Scotland and stroke deaths were down 13 per cent last year too. These are quite remarkable figures. Normally, medical trends move in long slow increments, but Scots have transformed their life chances in the past decade and a half. The risk of premature death from the big killers has halved since 1999.

The reasons? Boring things like health education, the smoking ban, exercise, improved diet and probably most important: early detection and treatment by an improving NHS, which really is getting better despite all the scandals. There is a long way to go of course. Scotland still has some of the worst health problems in the developed world and 1,800 Scots still have heart attacks every year.

A quarter of Scottish adults still smoke cigarettes, the leading cause of preventable ill health. However, the emergence in 2014 of Vaping shops on every high street could indicate a significant change for the better. If smokers can be persuaded to use steam as a delivery system for nicotine instead of toxic smoke products, then health improvement will follow.

Aids, Malaria, even cancer is now being cured. In Poland, a paralysed man, Darek Fidyka, was able to walk again thanks to a British-funded breakthrough in cell transplantation. In America, Igor Spetic became first human to have a prosthetic arm connected to his nervous system so that he could feel again. I know - you read about "medical miracles" every day and we increasingly take them for granted. But here's something you don't read about: the decline in global poverty.

Ten years ago,100,000 people marched in Edinburgh to Make Poverty History. All those well-meaning folk dressed in white joining hands, urging the world's governments to implement the UN's Millennium Development Goal of halving global poverty by 2015. Well, surprising, it worked. Extreme poverty has indeed halved from 2bn to 1bn ahead of schedule.

It is now possible to say that dire poverty, defined as living on less than $1 a day at 1990 prices, can and probably will be eliminated totally by 2030, provided that countries like Britain do not cut their aid budgets. There really is no excuse.

Of course, there is still a lot of poor people around - three billion live on less than $3 a day. Society is becoming more and more unequal as the top 1 per cent seize an ever greater share of global wealth. But the decline in the very worst worst poverty has sparked a revolution in longevity. India has a higher life expectancy today than Scotland had in 1945.

There are downsides. The fall in poverty has been associated with a rise in GDP in developing countries and this is putting immense pressure on the environment. Accelerating climate change remains the biggest medium term challenge to humanity. But again, negativity won't stop global warming, only international action combined with technological innovation.

And at least we can say in 2015 that the intellectual argument if finally is over: no one seriously disputes the science of climate change any more. All governments - North Korea excepted - now accept their responsibility to reduce emissions even if they are not living up to it. China, with a quarter of the world's population is starting to clean up in a big way by investing in renewable energy.

The advance of green energy has been one of the untold stories of 2014. In October enough electricity was generated by wind to power every home in Scotland. Huge solar farms are being built across the world. Researchers at MIT have found a way of storing sunlight in molecules, leading to the possibility of cheaper solar panels. New batteries are being developed which can re-charge in about five minutes.

It is naïve to believe that there is a technological "fix" for climate change but the problem cannot be tackled without scientific advance and the collectivisation of knowledge. Thanks to the to the information revolution, society now has the capacity to make big societal changes in a very short time. Look at how our working lives have changed with computers. Thanks to broadband, African countries can develop without having to go through the dirty industrialisation that the northern hemisphere inflicted on the planet.

There is every evidence that the pace of scientific progress is actually accelerating. In 2014, we landed a spacecraft on a comet, , gravitational waves were discovered, computers learned to speak. The internet of things is going to be the big story of 2015.

So, there you have it. More positivity than you can shake a stick at. And not a mention of missing planes, beheadings, paedophilia or any of the stuff that's dominated the headlines in 2014. The one thing we can say with certainty in 2015, surprisingly, is that most of us will be healthier, wealthier, happier and above all safer than ever before in history.

Happy New Year.