A leading British academic has called for accelerated research into futuristic geo-engineering and a worldwide nuclear power station "binge" to avoid runaway global warming.

Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at Cambridge University, said both potential solutions had inherent dangers but were now vital as time was running out.

"It is very, very depressing that politicians and the public are attuned to the threat of climate change even less than they were 20 years ago when Margaret Thatcher sounded the alarm. Co2 levels are rising at a faster than exponential rate, and yet politicians only want to take utterly trivial steps such as banning plastic bags and building a few windfarms," he said.

"I am very suspicious of using technology to solve problems created by technology, given that we have messed up so much in the past but having done almost nothing for two decades we need to adopt more desperate measures such as considering geo-engineering techniques as well as conducting a major nuclear programme."

Geo-engineering techniques such as whitening clouds by adding fine sprays of water vapour, or adding aerosols to the upper atmosphere have been ridiculed in some quarters but welcomed elsewhere. Wadhams proposes the use of thorium-fuelled reactors, being tested in India, which are said to be safer because they do not result in a proliferation of weapons-grade plutonium, experts say. Also, under certain circumstances, the waste from thorium reactors is less dangerous and remains radioactive for hundreds rather than thousands of years.

Wadhams, who is also head of the polar ocean physics group at Cambridge and has just returned from a field trip to Greenland, was reacting to evidence that Arctic sea ice cover had reached a record low this summer.

This latest rate of loss is 50% higher than most scenarios outlined by other polar scientists and coincide with alarming new reports about a "vast reservoir" of the potent greenhouse gas, methane, that could be released in Antarctica if the ice melts equally quickly there. Greenpeace said last night that it agreed with the academic's concerns but not with his solutions.

"Professor Wadhams is right that we're in a big hole and the recent record sea ice low in the Arctic is a clear warning that we need to act. But it would be cheaper, safer and easier to stop digging and drilling for more fossil fuels," said Ben Ayliffe, the group's senior polar campaigner.

"We already have the technologies, from ultra-efficient vehicles to state-of-the-art clean energy generation, to make the deep cuts in greenhouse gases that are needed to stave off the worst effects of climate change. Unfortunately, we're still lacking the political and business will to implement them," he added.

Wadhams, who has done pioneering work on polar ice thinning using British naval submarines from 1976 onwards, said these latest satellite findings confirmed his own dire predictions.

And they feed into the alarming scenarios that the Arctic Methane Emergency Group have been warning about.

As government negotiators from the world's poorest countries ended a round of United Nations climate change talks in the Thai capital, they sounded a grave note about what appears imminent when they assemble in November in Doha - the reading of the last rites of the Kyoto Protocol.

"We are concerned that the environmental integrity of the Kyoto Protocol, which is the only international treaty that binds developed nations to lower (greenhouse gas) emissions, and thus our lone assurance that action will be taken, is eroding before our eyes," declared a statement released by the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and the Africa Group, which represent over a billion people vulnerable to the ravages of extreme weather.

Such concern about the fate of the Kyoto Protocol in the capital of Qatar, where negotiators from over 190 countries will gather for a U.N. climate summit, is with reason. The upcoming 18^th conference of the parties (CoP 18) will be the last meeting before the clock runs out on Dec. 31for the world's industrialised countries to meet their initial, legally-binding greenhouse gas emission reduction targets and to announce new legally binding cuts for the second period as 2013 dawns.

But as analysts who followed the week-long talks in Bangkok noted, the world's richer nations appear determined to walk away from the leadership they have been expected to demonstrate under the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 treaty, which entered into force in 2005 after nearly a decade of negotiations.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, a cornerstone of the U.N.'s international climate change architecture - the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFFC) - the world's 37 industrialised nations and the European Union (EU) pledged to reduce their greenhouse gases by five percent, measured against 1990 levels by the end of 2012, when the first phase of the protocol ends.

During the climate talks here, which ran from Aug. 30 to Sept. 5, the "Annex 1 countries" as the bloc of industrialised countries are dubbed under the Kyoto Protocol, offered little hope to the developing world that the talks will produce new, legally binding emission cuts that are higher than the prevailing five percent to cover a period from 2013-2020.

"The negotiations for the Kyoto Protocol need to be concluded successfully, and that means having the second commitment period in place by the Doha CoP," says Martin Khor, executive director of the South Centre, a Geneva-based intergovernmental policy think tank of developing countries. "It was meant to be revealed at the last Cop in Durban, but it was postponed by a year.

The world's only global system of carbon trading, designed to give poor countries access to new green technologies, has "essentially collapsed", jeopardising future flows of finance to the developing world.

Billions of dollars have been raised in the past seven years through the United Nations' system to set up greenhouse gas-cutting projects, such as windfarms and solar panels, in poor nations. But the failure of governments to provide firm guarantees to continue with the system beyond this year has raised serious concerns over whether it can survive.

A panel convened by the UN reported on Monday at a meeting in Bangkok that the system, known as the clean development mechanism (CDM), was in dire need of rescue. The panel warned that allowing the CDM to collapse would make it harder in future to raise finance to help developing countries cut carbon.

Joan MacNaughton, a former top UK civil servant and vice chair of the high level panel, told the Guardian: "The carbon market is profoundly weak, and the CDM has essentially collapsed. It's extremely worrying that governments are not taking this seriously."

The panel said that governments needed to reassure investors, who have poured tens of billions into the market, by pledging a continuation of the system, and propping up the market by toughening their targets on cutting emissions, and perhaps buying carbon credits themselves.

Governments have a last chance to restore confidence in the system when they meet in Qatar this December to discuss climate change. But few participants hold out any hope that they will agree to toughen their 2020 emissions targets, which are scarcely even on the agenda. Instead, governments are focusing on drawing up a new climate change treaty by the end of 2015, which would stipulate emissions cuts for the period after 2020.

New computer models suggest there could be many more habitable planets out there than previously thought.

Scientists have developed models to help them identify planets in far-away solar systems that are capable of supporting life.

Estimates of habitable planet numbers have been based on the likelihood of them having surface water.

But a new model allows scientists to identify planets with underground water kept liquid by planetary heat.

The research was presented at the British Science Festival in Aberdeen.

Water is fundamental for life as we know it.

Planets too close to their sun lose surface water to the atmosphere through evaporation.

Surface water on planets located in the more frigid distant reaches from their sun is locked away as ice.

The dogma was, for water to exist in its life-giving liquid form, a planet had to be the right distance from its sun - in the habitable zone.

As Sean McMahon, the PhD student from Aberdeen University who is carrying out the work explained: "It's the idea of a range of distances from a star within which the surface of an Earth-like planet is not too hot or too cold for water to be liquid.

The Russian Federation's state nuclear energy corporation Rosatom hopes to win a contract to help realise a prospective nuclear plant in Poland.

"Rosatom wants to participate in the tender for the construction of a nuclear power plant in Poland," Sergei Boyarkin, engineering projects manager at Rosatom, told the Polish Press Agency.

Boyarkin revealed his hopes at the XX Economic Forum in Krynica, southern Poland.

"If Poland launches a tender, we are ready to present our offer, but we are waiting for the conditions of the tender," Boyarkin said.

The current Polish government is aiming for a nuclear plant to be built by 2023.

Four Polish state-controlled companies signed a preliminary deal on Wednesday, agreeing to share the brunt of the costs of construction of the plant (PGE, Tauron, KGHM and Enea).

However, it is unlikely that the general contractor for the construction will be appointed before 2014. French and American companies have also voiced an interest.

Meanwhile, although a short-list of potential sites for a nuclear power plant was presented in November 2011, the ultimate location has not been confirmed.

The three prospective locations are all near the Baltic Sea - in Mielno, Zarnowiec and Choczewo, although the government faces potential stumbling blocks in winning over public opinion.

Like former Barclays chief executive Bob Diamond, the bosses of Glencore and Xstrata are a breed apart. These mining and commodities trading giants, which are in the midst of a £37bn merger, have ridden an extraordinary boom in demand over the last 10 years and creamed off much of the profits for themselves and their shareholders.

Based offshore and paying little tax, Glencore orchestrates a business that few people would understand, least of all politicians who must judge whether the merger creates a monopolistic industry. Exotic derivatives and super-fast computer systems are deployed to maximise profits. Like the bankers, commodities traders argue their sophisticated systems enhance the smooth working of market capitalism. For those not in the habit of reading business pages, here are five reasons why you should care about this merger.

1. Pay and wealth

Bankers once enjoyed the salaries and bonuses commanded by mining company bosses. Mick Davis, the Xstrata chief executive, is already the best paid boss in FTSE 100, taking home £18.5m last year. Until last week, when the merger was still friendly, he was due to receive a £30m golden handcuff to keep him at his desk. Now Glencore boss Ivan Glasenberg, who owns a £5bn stake in his company, has performed an extraordinary U-turn. He has upped his offer for Xstrata and made Davis's exit a condition of the deal, though Davis will likely leave with £8m in cash and £38m in shares.

The two men are well known to each other. Davis and Glasenberg met at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa and decided to cement their already strong business relationship into a merger of the two companies over a dinner in London last December.

2. Food

Droughts and floods have damaged this year's food harvest, though conflicting reports of the overall effect on global stocks often make it difficult to fathom the shortfall.

Nevertheless, foodstuff prices are already up more than 20% since the spring and trading is frantic as a glut of panicky stories flood the media. Soybean prices are above the peak reached in the last food crisis in 2008.

Glencore has grown over 20 years to be one the biggest food traders in the world, dominating the trade in wheat, maize and barley, edible oils and sugar. The head of Glencore's food trading business created a storm when he said last month that the chronic drought affecting the US midwest would be "good for Glencore" because it would be able to exploit soaring prices.

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