One consistent feature of human progress throughout history has been that science will come up with creative answers to current problems. When ancient people living in small tribes were running out of game to hunt, some leaders thought rationing and mitigation were the answers. They would have created a culture of despair. Domesticated livestock was the answer instead and then efficient agriculture and even terraforming.

Based on that confidence, a lot of people, me included, assume that global warming can be solved by some 'future technology' as yet undeveloped. Killing our economy by 25% now (yes, imagine it 25% worse) to stave off a .5 degree warming problem in 50 years is positively un-scientific.

But hope is not how things get done. People point to Y2K and say 'it was all hype, nothing happened' but they forget that's because we spent billions prior to that fixing problems. Likewise, acid rain was a huge concern in the 1980s and is not now because problems were addressed squarely.

Capturing and storing carbon dioxide is a solution the anti-global warming contingent (read, political pundits and bloggers using science to attack Democrats) say can keep us in an SUV Promised Land today. Then future technology can deal with it permanently.

To those people (in this case, Republicans) I say, 'Pretend a Democrat is saying Social Security will take care of itself in the future. Would you be skeptical?' Well, that's how I feel when they insist nothing needs to change and it will all be okay.

A new study of possible links between climate and geophysics on Earth and similar planets finds that prolonged heating of the atmosphere can shut down plate tectonics and cause a planet's crust to become locked in place.

"The heat required goes far beyond anything we expect from human-induced climate change, but things like volcanic activity and changes in the sun's luminosity could lead to this level of heating," said lead author Adrian Lenardic, associate professor of Earth science at Rice University. "Our goal was to establish an upper limit of naturally generated climate variation beyond which the entire solid planet would respond."

Lenardic said the research team wanted to better understand the differences between the Earth and Venus and establish the potential range of conditions that could exist on Earth-like planets beyond the solar system.

Photosynthesis is of great interest outside biology, specifically in the energy industry. Using photosynthesis, green plants are able to harvest energy from sunlight and convert it to chemical energy at an energy transfer efficiency rate of approximately 97 percent and if scientists can create artificial versions of photosynthesis, the dream of solar power as the ultimate green and renewable source of electrical energy could be realized.

However, a potential pitfall for any sunlight-harvesting system is that if the system becomes overloaded with absorbed solar energy, it most likely will suffer some form of damage. Plants solve this problem on a daily basis with a photo-protective mechanism called energy-quenching. Excess energy, detected by changes in pH levels, is safely dissipated from one molecular system to another, where it can then be routed down relatively harmless chemical reaction pathways.

In a study of the molecular mechanisms by which plants protect themselves from oxidation damage should they absorb too much sunlight during photosynthesis, a team of researchers has discovered a molecular “dimmer switch” that helps control the flow of solar energy moving through the system of light harvesting proteins. This discovery holds important implications for the future design of artificial photosynthesis systems that could provide the world with a sustainable and secure source of energy.

Distiller’s grains are a by-product of ethanol processing that can be used for animal feed. There’s been some skepticism about using distiller’s grains in Texas but one scientist says the type of grain used makes all the difference.

Dr. Jim MacDonald, AgriLife Research beef nutritionist at Amarillo, said, “I believe we can do it successfully, provided we have distiller’s grains that are equivalent in quality to those used in the North Plains states.”

Two years ago, MacDonald began investigating the dramatically different animal performance responses observed in the Northern Plains and Southern Plains, and to determine how to successfully incorporate distiller’s grains into this region’s finishing rations.

Chile’s Chaiten Volcano is shown spewing ash and smoke (centre left of image) into the air for hundreds of km over Argentina’s Patagonia Plateau in this Envisat image acquired on 5 May 2008.

The 1000 m-high volcano had been dormant for thousands of years before erupting on 2 May, causing the evacuation of thousands. Chaiten Volcano is located in southern Chile 10 km northeast of the town of Chaiten on the Gulf of Corcovado.

Envisat’s Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) instrument processed this image at a resolution of 1200 m.

You wouldn't think that clean air would be bad for the Amazon rainforest but UK and Brazilian climate scientists writing in Nature say just that.

Reduced sulphur dioxide emissions from less burning coal and increased sea surface temperatures in the tropical north Atlantic, are causing a heightened risk of drought in the Amazon rainforest.

A comparison of recorded Antarctic temperatures and snowfall accumulation to predictions by major computer models of global climate change offer both good and bad news.

The good news is that the numerical models’ predictions covering the last 50 years broadly follow the actual observed temperatures and snowfall for the southernmost continent, although the observations are very variable.

The bad news is that a similar comparison that includes the last 100 years is a poor match. Projections of temperatures and snowfall ranged from 2.5 to five times what they actually were during that period.

Fallow agricultural land and steppe-formation processes are evidently capable of having a much greater effect on global air quality than was previously assumed, according to researchers who examined a dust cloud that formed over parched fields in southern Ukraine and led to extremely high concentrations of particulate matter in Central Europe.

Over two-thirds of the land area in the Ukraine consists of fields and meadows. The soil on 220,000 square kilometres is regarded as being under threat. Since the 1930s wind erosion in what was then the Soviet Union has increased considerably as a result of collectivisation in agriculture and the resultant large field areas.

In particular, this has affected the regions north of the Caucasus, the lower reaches of the Don river and eastern and southern Ukraine. It is possible that the process is also accelerated by climate change. In particular, previously unaffected semi-arid regions are continuing to dry out.

Beads known to geologists as carbon cenospheres were formed from liquefied carbon deep in the earth when an asteroid struck some 65 million years ago, according to a new theory.

The carbon cenospheres were deposited next to a thin layer of the element iridium -- an element more likely to be found in Solar System asteroids than in the Earth's crust. The iridium-laden dust is believed to be the shattered remains of the 200-km-wide asteroid's impact. Like the iridium layer, the carbon cenospheres are apparently common. They've been found in Canada, Spain, Denmark and New Zealand.

But the cenospheres' origin presented a double mystery. Cenospheres had been known to geologists only as a sign of modern times -- they form during the intense combustion of coal and crude oil. Equally baffling, there were no power plants burning coal or crude oil 65 million years ago, and natural burial processes affecting organic matter from even older ages -- such as coals from the 300-million-year-old Carboniferous Period -- had simply not been cooked long or hot enough.

Over the past decades competition for fossil fuels and the concern that they are generating large quantities of contaminating gases have given rise to a growing scientific interest in the development of alternative energies.

Most current research is focused on hydrogen cells, the biggest advantages being that they do not generate contaminant gases and have water vapor as the only waste product. However, hydrogen is very expensive, both in production and distribution. It has to be kept and stored under conditions of very high pressure (more than 800 bars).

This is why hydrogen is dangerous and even more so when stored in vehicles travelling at high speed – a small crack in the storage container could have fatal consequences.