Tackling carbon emissions

SCIENCE:We don't want solar panels cluttering up our Costa holiday destinations or our green mountainsides

Is the world ever going to get on top of its carbon emissions? Frankly I don't think so: it's a realisation that had led to an investment in a stout set of water wings.

The haves of this world will never want to give up what they hold: SUVs, flat screen TVs, two international holidays a year (if not more) and the convenience of on-demand electricity. The current have-nots aspire to these things and rightly take the view that they too deserve a share of the good life.

The Earth's atmosphere is therefore under pressure on two fronts with rich countries emitting carbon to maintain a lifestyle and developing countries emitting increasing amounts of carbon to improve a lifestyle. Is either camp going to back off? Those water wings look like a safe bet at the moment.

Both sides are belching out rising volumes of carbon, but there are differences in the way citizens in the two camps respond. We in the developed world emit the carbon but then wring our hands in dismay and suffer pangs of guilt as we drive the 100 metres to the shops. Our excuse: it might rain (no really, it looks like rain).

Guilt probably doesn't feature for the guy in the developing world who wants to swap his push bike for a scooter and his open fire for an electric heater. Who has the right to tell him he can't have a television in the corner if he can afford it and has somewhere to plug it in?

For this and other reasons China opens a new coal-fired power plant every week. And in Ireland, the US and the other OECD countries we buy low energy bulbs and unplug the flat screen at night before driving to the airport for that quick pre-Christmas shopping expedition to New York, Copenhagen or Prague.

What is going to make either camp change their ways? Nothing that I can think of short of a crisis.

The melting ice will have the waves creeping ever higher up the beaches of the Seychelles or the coasts of Bangladesh but that will be someone else's problem. We will have to contend with the rising cost of heating oil or petrol at one-fifty a litre.

The big international climate change convention last month in Bali didn't get us very far either despite days of negotiations. These led to the "Bali Roadmap" which the US quickly shredded while continuing to claim that it still remained committed to tackling carbon emissions.

More negotiations are promised but they too will run into the sand as the developed world demands carbon cuts from the developing world and the developing world asks for carbon cuts from the developed world.

Meanwhile the ice keeps melting. Scientists used to warn that the Arctic ice cover will be gone during the summers by 2050. Now they are saying 2030.

The great irony of this is that even as the ice disappears, countries surrounding the Arctic Ocean have begun rowing about drilling rights and who owns what part of the seabed given the belief there are oil deposits there. Talk about adding fuel to the fire.

Sea ice floating on the ocean doesn't do anything to sea level, just as a melting ice cube in a gin and tonic doesn't make the glass over flow. It is a different matter in both cases if you try to add extra ice to the gin or the ocean.

Global warming makes land-based ice melt and it is melting as never before in Greenland and the Antarctic Peninsula. Each bucket full - or in the case of these two locations, each cubic kilometre - of melt water will add to sea level.

The lack of real progress on the carbon issue has many scrambling for a deus ex machina to rescue us from all this with hydrogen and solar the most talked about options.

Hydrogen is the most plentiful substance in the universe and it burns vigorously to produce nothing more polluting than water. By the same token you can get all the hydrogen you could ever need as a fuel by splitting water back into hydrogen and oxygen.

Before you start viewing the Atlantic Ocean as one huge fuel supply, there is the small matter of requiring energy to split the water and this negates the energy benefit it contains.

Enter, stage right, solar power. Some suggest that we could use solar energy as an electricity source to split water and produce hydrogen fuel.

Better still, we could build huge arrays of solar panels to capture sunlight, knowing that the sun pours down more energy on the earth in a few hours than the entire world would use in a year. Simple. Problem solved. Only we don't want solar panels cluttering up our Costa holiday destinations or our green mountainsides. Nor do we have hydrogen stations where we can fill up the SUV or power aircraft or heat our homes.

Hydrogen-solar can't help us in the short term, even as the polar bears go paddling on the Arctic shorelines. And as the rows continue over what to do about carbon and who is to blame, I have my water wings ready, I suggest you do likewise.