The prospect of geoengineering, the intentional large-scale manipulation of the climate to offset the effects of global warming, continues to draw the attention of top scientists and policymakers. The prestigious journal Science is publishing two papers on the subject in its next issue, and next week the Science Committee of the House of Representatives will hold its second hearing on the subject.

According to some climate models, climates could change very quickly as greenhouse gas emissions rise, such as when thawing permafrost releases methane (a powerful heat-trapping gas), or loss of ice causes the earth to absorb more heat. Such outcomes might not be very likely, but even the chance that they could happen has scientists worried, as they could lead to widespread severe drought and famine and rapid sea level rise, among other things. Even the most ambitious efforts to curb greenhouse emissions might not be enough to prevent disastrous climate change, some say. And ambitious efforts to cut emissions seem ever more unlikely, after the limited success of the recent summit in Copenhagen, and opposition to a climate change bill in the Senate.

In one of the Science articles, researchers say testing of geoengineering strategies may prove necessary, but before testing can occur, they say an international agreement should be reached. Such testing could cause changes in weather patterns that could hurt some countries, for example, and an agreement needs to be in place to establish standard testing procedures and methods for dealing with international disputes arising from such testing.

Such an agreement might be even more important if the argument of another Science paper proves to be correct. In that paper the researchers argue that the only way to effectively test geoengineering is through full scale implementation of a particular geoengineering scheme--and such a large deployment could have big, unforeseen consequences.

A key part of Energy Secretary Steven Chu's plan to revamp the U.S. Department of Energy and push forward new clean energy technologies is the "Energy Innovation Hub," a research center modeled on the legendary Bell Labs, which generated many key advances for computers and the Internet. But his plans ran into trouble earlier this year, as Congress proved reluctant to fund the eight hubs he had in mind. At one point it looked as if none would be funded, but in the end, three were, at $22 million each. On Tuesday the DOE announced details about the three hubs.

The first three hubs will focus on these problems: making fuels from sunlight, designing energy efficient buildings, and using computer modeling and simulation to develop better materials for nuclear reactors. More details are available for the sunlight to fuels program than the others--the department has issued a formal funding opportunity announcement to get proposals. The nuclear hub seems to be the next in line--DOE already had a workshop on the subject in early December. Details about all three can be found here.

In their announcement this week, the department put the hubs in context. One of the main congressional objections was that the hubs seemed to duplicate other new programs at DOE. A new set of Energy Frontier Research Centers and a new agency called the Advanced Research Projects Agency -Energy (ARPA-E) both fund research that could transform energy technologies. The frontier research centers are meant to tackle specific, basic science questions--the kind of basic research that most economists say the government should be funding, because industry won't. ARPA-E is also for funding risky research, but the focus here isn't on basic science. Rather it's on research that could lead to very big changes in energy, but that involves technology so different from existing technology that industry isn't likely to fund it, even if it doesn't require fundamental science breakthroughs. Early projects being funded here include a liquid battery that's quite different from today's batteries, which use either solid electrodes or electrolytes.

The key idea behind the innovation hubs is to bring together a larger group of researchers, "ideally under one roof," according to the announcement. The idea is that if you get enough brilliant people together from different disciplines, they're going to generate a lot of ideas really quickly, and just as quickly weed through them to keep from working on dead ends. The idea is to eliminate the problem, sometimes seen today in battery research for example, where isolated researchers work diligently to solve problems that other researchers have already solved, or perhaps more importantly, that other researchers have shown face insurmountable obstacles and so should be abandoned in favor of other approaches. As Chu has put it when describing Bell Labs, if you have an idea , chances are you'll find world experts in the relevant subjects down the hall, who you can run it by. This is key because energy-related problems tend to transcend scientific and engineering disciplines, requiring, for example, the collaboration often of physicists, materials scientists, mechanical engineers and microbiologists.

Of course a lot will depend on attracting the right people, which can be difficult these days with venture capitalists waiting to lure the best researchers to lucrative jobs in the private sector. That challenge will be made more difficult by the fact that each of the hubs was funded at $22 million for the first year, not the $35 million requested.

Today President Obama said that climate change skeptics are being pushed to the margins, but that may have been wishful thinking.

Poll results from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released yesterday say that the number of people who believe "there is solid evidence that the earth is warming" dropped from 71 percent in April of 2008 to 57 percent now. Only 36 percent said there was good evidence warming is due to human activity, down from 47 percent in April of 2008. Only 35 percent say climate change is a serious problem.

The numbers of climate change believers have been declining for the last few years among Democrats, Independents and Republicans. For independents, for example, 79 percent believed there was solid evidence in 2006, compared to 53 percent now. It might not be a coincidence that Al Gore's film, "An Inconvenient Truth," came out in 2006.

Now here's the really odd thing. In spite of these low numbers, 50 percent of Americans believe there should be limits on carbon emissions, even if this causes energy prices to rise. Only 39 percent oppose it.

There's an uncharitable interpretation--that Americans are being inconsistent. But there's also a more hopeful interpretation. Climate change models are full of uncertainties. No one really knows just how much the Earth will warm, or what impact this will have, particularly on regional weather patterns. Maybe Americans are learning about these uncertainties, hence the lower numbers siting "solid evidence," yet concluding that the risk is high enough that we should do something to avoid the worst possible scenarios.