I saw one "good" piece of news recently. Some think our coal reserves may be much smaller than estimated before, which means the total amount of CO2 we will be able to emit may be smaller than forecast. They were even saying that the IPCC should lower their worst case global warming predictions. The reason this doesn't comfort me much is that if the worst case predictions came true, it would be absolutely horrible, and we have plenty of coal for that to happen. Also, things have turned out much worse than their worst-case predictions so far, so they need to revise them the other direction. It probably won't matter if we have less coal than we thought. We still have way more than enough to trigger feedbacks that will ruin the world for humans and most other species.
Today there was another piece of bad news. If you've read and/or seen "Six Degrees" yet, you know that even 1 or 2 more degrees will be really bad for us, and 6 degrees higher will be almost unimaginable. Now scientists at MIT predict that it will rise another 5 degrees (9 degrees F) by 2100 if current trends continue. If we implement an aggressive worldwide climate change policy, then it will "only" go up a little more than 2 degrees, still very scary. So most likely it will end up somewhere between those two numbers. But there is still much uncertainty, especially in the area of what use humans will do about the situation.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/environment/2009-05-20-global-warming_N.htm
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