NEW YORK — A very important trend involving global warming is sweeping the planet.

Until now, experts the world over have angrily divided over whether or not the globe is really becoming warmer in any long term or permanent way. And, if it is, how quickly and by how much?

Beginning about two or three years ago, and picking up speed and force as time went on, a new body of belief began to take hold. The evidence indicting global warming — and the cause of it — became so irrefutable that even the skeptics dropped their agnosticism. They had just read too many documented reports, and saw too many pictures, of climbing shorelines, retreating icebergs and beleaguered polar bears, among countless other stark images.

As the Indian American venture capitalist Vinod Khosla says: "Ninety-eight percent of scientists, maybe more, believe we have a serious climate problem."

Mark Turcek, managing director at Goldman Sachs, sums up the mood among top U.S. bankers: "Science has largely resolved that man-made greenhouse gases are responsible for climate change and global warming."

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Typical of those who embrace the new realism, British Secretary of Foreign Affairs Margaret Beckett said in New York in September: "It is now literally only one or two fringe scientists — and a rather large number of paid propagandists — who still try to deny that climate is changing as a result of human behavior."

Even President Bush, long less than an enthusiast, last week called for greater use of — and more federal support for — alternative fuels like ethanol.

Simultaneously, the belief is becoming pervasive that global warming is triggered by the infamous "greenhouse effect," when atmospheric gases trap energy from the sun, causing the earth's temperature to rise. This occurs, in part, when carbon fuels (such as gasoline and jet fuel) are burned to power planes, trains and automobiles.

In that case, humanity will be obliged to create more benign aircraft and autos, and cleaner fuels to feed them. We will be forced to this kind of creativity and inventiveness so long as we wish to drive or fly, or, for that matter, to manufacture just about anything.

And if all that is true, there comes still another key realization: The battle against global warming and the transition from fossil fuels is destined to lead to unprecedented opportunities for capital investment and technical advance. Already, bankers, scientists and politicians are beginning to seize them.

Swiss Re, the big international reinsurer, estimates that the effects of climate change could cost $150 billion a year over the next decade.

Last year, says British Foreign Secretary Beckett, there was a record worldwide investment in new renewable energy capacity of some $38 billion.

Not to mention all the other bursts of human activity: farmers growing the ingredients for ethanol in the Dakotas, miners clawing out tar sands for fuel from Alberta to the Orinoco, engineers creating hydrogen from water, methane and much else the world over.

Here are a few of the noteworthy developments:

-- China has rather suddenly become the world's biggest investor in renewable energy — $7 billion dollars in 2005. Include hydroelectric power and the figure leaps to $17 billion.

-- General Electric has started its eco-imagination campaign — a plan to double investment in climate-friendly technologies and reach $20 billion in annual sales by 2010.

-- BP has launched BP Alternative Energy, which brings together the oil giant's alternative and renewable energy interests. The company plans over the next decade to invest $8 billion in renewable energy sources — wind, solar, and, most fascinating, hydrogen. The object is to convert fossil fuels like oil, coal and natural gas to hydrogen gas, then burning it to make "clean" electricity.

In sum, all kinds of companies are reaching out and investing in ways to take advantage of the fast-moving events that are unfolding as a consequence of the greenhouse effect and global warming.

Says Eugene Linden, author of the recent book Winds of Change: Climate, Weather and the Destruction of Civilizations, "Reconfiguring the energy infrastructure of the world away from fossil fuels will be probably the granddaddy of all capital spending projects."

Marshall Loeb, former editor of Fortune, Money, and The Columbia Journalism Review, writes "Your Dollars" exclusively for MarketWatch.