Apocalypse now? No, the doomsters are wrong again

The demand for food, water and energy will surge - and "the key driver is population increase". The population of the world is currently growing by six million a month, he points out.

So what can we do about it? Challenged on this, Professor Beddington played it safe. The first thing to do is recognise the problem - and then invest in science and technology. Problem sorted! Or not.

Many people find any more radical discussion of "overpopulation" not just objectionable but meaningless. They have a point. The great Jeremiahs of overpopulation have had a remarkably poor record of prophecy.

Dr Paul Ehrlich is still a patron of the Optimum Population Trust, as it is carefully called. Yet in his most famous book, The Population Bomb (1968), he forecast that by 1985, after terrible famines, the world would only be able to support 1.5 billion human beings. Its population currently stands at over 6.8 billion.

The Optimum Population Trust is a troubled operation. Its members subscribe to a cumbersome but quasi-religious credo: "The Optimum Population Trust believes that the Earth may not be able to support more than half its present numbers before the end of this century, and that the UK's long-term sustainable population level may be lower than 30 million." Some of its luminaries, like Sir Crispin Tickell, have put the feasible, desirable figure even lower, at 20 million.

Yet the Optimum Population Trust also prominently states it is "absolutely opposed to any form of coercion in family planning". What it does urge for the UK is bringing immigration and emigration into numerical balance, reducing teenage pregnancies and somehow encouraging couples to stop at two.

The undertones of even these policies are obviously disturbing. And actually I suspect that under-pinning the motives of those who interest themselves in this way in overpopulation there's quite a vengeful belief - a form of apocalyptic romanticism, seen at its most extreme in James Lovelock's new book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia.

There Lovelock forecasts that "in a few decades the Earth could cease to be the habitat of seven billion humans; it will save itself as it dispatches all but a few of those who now live in what will become the barren regions".

Lovelock thinks that just enough people will survive to "carry on our species", no more. It'll be what he terms the "revenge of Gaia", a peculiarly emotional phrase. He and his admirers think they will ultimately be proved right by cataclysm, the disbelievers swept or burned away.

We have been here before. It may actually be science this time. It's faith and fantasy, too, though. And truly disturbing. No wonder the chief scientist chose to look on the bright side.

Jamie's got such faith in us

It seems we need a guide now to do anything. Jamie Oliver has just published the second issue of his own personal journal, Jamie Magazine. A "credit crunch special", it promises recipes to help us survive the times. Jamie's urge to get people to cook for themselves continues to be truly evangelical.

Meanwhile, hoping to cash in on the rise in home-cooking and the collapse in dining out, an entirely new food monthly is being launched by another publishing group later this month, under the superbly bald title: Eat In. Eat in! What's that then? We'd completely forgotten. I wonder if you need your own knife and fork?

Good news from TfL at last

That nice Mr O'Leary may be encouraging mobile use on Ryanair for his own base reasons but this week, TfL announced it's more or less given up on plans to extend mobile coverage to the Tube. Annie Mole, of the excellent Tube blog Going Underground, says she's disappointed, pointing out that you can already use mobiles in many other underground systems.

It's true enough that when a train stops for ages between stations and you have no way to warn people you're going to be late, it's dementing — it feels a bit like being kidnapped, in fact. But that occasional event seems a small price to pay for a daily break from being forced to hear other people's shouty conversations. It's strange to think of being on the Tube as any kind of rest cure or haven — but in this one respect at least, it is. And long may it stay so.