1. Apocalypse Whenever? (Title due to Andrew Ferguson). This article provides useful background reading for listening to the apocalyptics (if one must):

This year is the 40th anniversary of Paul Ehrlich's influential The Population Bomb, a book that predicted an apocalyptic overpopulation crisis in the 1970s and '80s.

Ehrlich's book provides a lesson we still haven't learnt. His prophecy that the starvation of millions of people in the developed world was imminent was spectacularly wrong — humanity survived without any of the forced sterilisation that Ehrlich believed was necessary.
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Ehrlich was at the forefront of a wave of pessimistic doomsayers in the late 1960s and early '70s. And these doomsayers weren't just cranks — or, if they were cranks, they were cranks with university tenure.

Despite what should be a humiliating failure for his theory of overpopulation, Ehrlich is still employed as a professor of population studies by Stanford University. Similarly, when George Wald predicted in a 1970 speech that civilisation was likely to end within 15 or 30 years, his audience was reminded that he was a Nobel Prize-winning biologist.

I thought this account contained a factual error. Ferguson correctly said (in 1990), "Now, Dr. Ehrlich was an entomologist by training, and some immediately recognized that after many years of rigorous study he had lost the capacity to distinguish between an army of hideous little arthropods swarming over his desk in a Stanford laboratory and an upwardly mobile population of Homo sapiens building tract houses in Palo Alto." (Dixie Lee Ray used to routinely refer to Ehrlich as the bug man.) But, according to Wikipedia, he is now the Bing Professor of Population Studies. Apparently, he's not the only one at Stanford who can't tell the difference.

2. Good news or bad? Depends on what global warming is all about.

Natural gas reservoirs in Michigan’s Antrim Shale are providing new information about global warming and the Earth’s climate history, according to a recent study by Steven Petsch, a geoscientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The study is also good news for energy companies hoping to make natural gas a renewable resource.

Petsch found that carbon-hungry bacteria trapped deep in the rock beneath ice sheets produced the gas during the ice age, as glaciers advanced and retreated over Michigan. “Bacteria digested the carbon in the rocks and made large amounts of natural gas in a relatively short time, tens of thousands of years instead of millions,” says Petsch. “This suggests that it may be possible to seed carbon-rich environments with bacteria to create natural gas reservoirs.”