This short-lived series was a classic example of the right product at the wrong time. It came possibly a year too early for public interest in helping the environment and conserving resources.  

Even writing that sentence sounds worthy and dull but it isn’t, it’s vital. And the UK has actually doubled it’s recycling in the interim from 12% to 24%. We’re still lagging miles behind Japan and Canada but it’s improving.  

This series attempted to make recycling in the home fun and explain why it’s worth the effort as well as showing how we can save energy. Emissions from central heating dwarf car pollution as a source of greenhouse gases, yet the anti-car lobby bash motorists as if they were a modern pariah.  

What they should do is turn their attention to that little dial which controls everyone’s central heating thermostats and hot water temperatures.  

Central heating produces 30% of the CO2 in this country, cars 6%.  

I was tasked with tackling the bad habits and wasteful ways of an unsuspecting family in Slough. Their thermostat was broken but stuck on max, they had no insulation and had a 100% record of no recycling whatsoever.  

We got the boys in and cleared out the house full of rubbish in the roof, chucked out the asbestos scraps of insulation we found under the pile, and installed a brand new condenser boiler.  

Personally, the most worrying aspect of their environment were the electric smello gadgets they had plugged in. They electrically reduce the pong in your room but we discovered they had several known carcinogenic chemicals like Benzene and Toluene wafting out into the air they were breathing.  

We had them tested for a buildup in the chemicals in their bodies and they were all present and correct. It’s a common thing these days but at least it might discourage cannibals from making a meal of Europeans – it could make them ill!  

I learnt a ton about waste and the environment – and the environment is something which worries me increasingly.  

Over the last three years or so I’ve witnessed the spiralling effect of global warming and I feel increasingly that there is something happening to our environment akin to a wall starting to topple over- hard to see at first but just try stopping it.  

However, we need to understand that we are not the sole reason. It seems as if a cyclical process of warming and change is underway but our contribution is hastening and distorting the effect.  

And governments charging the individual more duty is not the answer. A total halt on all CO2 emissions today worldwide might arrest the slide into acidification of the seas which will eventually kill all the fish in the ocean. The ocean absorbs the CO2 but it makes the water more acidic. Acidic water prevents crustaceans from forming shells and destroys coral feeding grounds and the food chain is mortally wounded in the process.  

The Larsen B glacier in Northern Antarctica melted in just six weeks in February 2002. It was an Antarctic ice shelf that was 200 metres thick with a surface area of 3,250 square kilometres.  500 billion tonnes of ice the size of Rhode Island just melted.  

As a result, ice flow into the South Atlantic has increased in speed from 300 meters a year to 2.5 kilometres as the glacial “plug” has been removed. Antarctica will unwind like a melting ice cream into the sea. This will increase sea levels, divert warm currents, decrease sea temperatures, salinity and density.  All bad.

It was caused by "moulins" - under ice rivers of meltwater which dislodge gigantic areas from the bedrock and cause intact ice to slide off the continental shelf and melt in the open sea. Other surface lakes feeding into moulins can now be seen from space further inland in Antarctica and guess what is going to happen again? - further massive breakup of the ice shelf. Its rate of disintegration is exponential as rock and water absorb heat, whereas white ice reflects it. The more dark areas, the more heat is retained, the more the ice melts and so on in a dangerous, uncontrollable spiral.

Forget scrapping over who predicted what weather and were they right this year, this is a creeping problem which will profoundly and permanently affect the planet.  Although CO2 levels are not necessarily the sole trigger, the media have latched on to with mind-numbing repetition. It's thought that year on year temperature fluctuations are much more allied to solar flare activity versus cosmic rays which increase cloud cover. C02 levels follow temperature change triggered by solar flares, they don't cause it but everyone is obsessed with carbon levels. 

But it's all semantics really - whatever the cause, the planet is getting hotter.  Read Mark Lynas's book "Six Degrees" to understand the predicted result of incremental one degree c increases in temperature. In the book he reflects scientific predictions from NOAA and USGS that a one degree c increase will cause a one metre rise in sea levels every 20 years from ice melt. That's a conservative estimate15 feet in 100 years with no further increases in temperature which will inevitably come. London, Holland, Shanghai, Bangladesh and so on would be under water.

But as we will need the equivalent of two planets to feed the population by 2050, it’s probably academic. Maybe the effect of global warming will mean Russia , Asia and America will be able to produce enough grain for bio-ethanol fuel in a sustainable way.  Funding for research in the US on global warming has increased from 175 million dollars to 2 billion dollars per year over the last 20 years, so now everyone has an opinion.

But if the US had spent the three trillion dollars it’s blown fighting two wars in the Middle East over the oil on developing a new energy source instead, greenhouse gases could be a thing of the past and the power balance amongst the world’s energy producers would have a totally different complexion.  But don't forget the President is a Texan.

China has 2000 coal-fired power stations and is building 500 more. China will sail past the US’s 2.5 billion tons per year of CO2 within 10 years. Currently there are 400 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. There were only 200 ppm in the atmosphere 11,000 years ago which was enough to trigger the end of the Pleistocene ice age. And we've managed to double that to 400 ppm in 30 years - double the level it has ever been recorded at using ice samples spanning 2.5 million years.

There's no real hope of a conclusive, global move to nuclear which I favour as an admittedly desperate measure after it was rubbished following nuclear plant disasters at Three Mile Island in Long Island, Chernobyl in Russia and a leak at Sellafield in the UK, and it costs 7 billion dollars to build one nuclear PWR and only 1.5 billion dollars to build a conventional plant.

But at least carbon buzz words like credits, footprints and trading all seem to be in the headlines at last - but governments seem to be only pondering how much more they can tax the mug punters and airlines, not how they can radically stop temperature increases now, and not in 20 years time when some other administration will be in power and picking up the politically unacceptable cost. 

We’ve only got one planet and one human race. Although I’m increasingly comfortable about the prospect of losing the latter for a while to let the earth heal itself. Neanderthal Man was wiped out remember because of a reluctance to embrace change and was followed by Cro-Magnon Man. But the Cro-Magnons liked to chase whole herds of animals over cliffs and kill them so they could eat one or two of the thousands slaughtered.  

Hundreds of species were wiped out because of this and spelled the end for Cro-Magnon man as food supplies ran out as a result of such casual profligacy. Maybe it’s not too late to learn a lesson or two and act, before it’s over for us as well.