Mr. Pielke and his colleagues argue that the best hope for salvation will be investment in new technologies  and that’s why I asked the climate deniers not to read this column, for it can sound a bit like President Bush’s “solution.”

The difference is that Mr. Bush has used modest investments in hydrogen as a substitute for immediate action, while what we need is vast investments on top of a drive to curb emissions through a carbon tax and a cap-and-trade system. In the best of worlds, it will be enormously difficult to persuade China and India to rely less on coal-fired power plants, and it will be utterly impossible unless we take serious steps ourselves.

“The message is, let’s change light bulbs and let’s be more efficient,” Mr. Pielke said. “But let’s do more than that. The solution lies in transformational technologies.”

Solar power is one of the most hopeful technologies but still produces about 0.01 percent of U.S. electricity. The U.S. allocates just $159 million for solar research per year  about what we spend in Iraq every nine hours.

Other renewable technologies, including wind power, also merit far more investment; it’s appalling that subsidies continue to support oil and coal, and that money should be diverted to renewables. Since 1979, U.S. spending on energy research has shrunk by approximately half, taking inflation into account. Spending on military research, meanwhile, has more than doubled and now amounts to roughly 20 times what is spent on energy research.

Then there is geo-engineering, or tinkering with our planet to overcome our past tinkering. One proposal is to inject sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to mimic the effects of volcanic eruptions in cooling the planet. Another is to fertilize the sea with iron particles to encourage the growth of plants that would suck in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Then there are more bizarre proposals for giant sunshades to orbit the earth, or for space-based solar panels.