Al fresco dinners with friends on Friday, B-B-Q with the neighbours on Saturday, oh, and don't forget the chap is coming to begin work on the new pool and spar on Sunday. Sounds great, but as the recent chaos our new freak weather showed, climate change may not be all Pimms & Lemonade followed by strawberries and cream while basking in the midday sun.

This week has seen the much heralded Hague Climate Conference come and go. No agreements were reached and it seemed that it wasn't just the environment heating up. The Americans baulked at saving the world, in what seems a bid to win votes from the powerful US conglomerates and industries. They're usually quite partial to a bit of world-svaing, crossing borders and saving underprivileged and unstable countries at the drop of a hat. But not this time.

John Prescott would not blame our American friends but instead chose to have a pop across the channel at the French cousins with whom we usually have so much in common. Unfortunately while their representative may have been too tired to understand the complex issues at hand, she was certainly alert enough to know when she was being made scapegoat for a more collective failure. There was certainly enough time before bed to fire off a broadside to the Deputy Prime Minister, accusing him of male chauvinism.

Mr Prescott, a chauvinist, surely not? Perhaps it was a simple case of a little too much French beef on the menu for delegates.

With talk and political rhetoric apparently the only common ground between delegates, the more serious issues of climate change seem to have been overlooked by many commentators. In this article we take a look at what could and perhaps should have been achieved at The Hague. More importantly we examine what the effects of such continued failures will be on the UK environment as well as the UK homeowner.

It had been hoped the recent Hague conference would signal detailed agreement and begin the ratification process to implement the Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto Protocol is a global agreement regarding a strategy to tackle the threat of global warming and climate change. The Hague conference was to be where world's governments united to prove that talk was no longer cheap. Unfortunately, it appears many of the world's richest countries must be temporarily out of pocket and it will now be a considerable time longer before Kyoto is ratified.

The reasons for the disagreements came over the curiously named 'carbon sinks'. They are believed to soak up toxic emissions and the US hoped to utilise their properties to decrease the level by which greenhouses gasses must be reduced in order to comply with the Kyoto agreement.

Many observers believe the recent failures will mean nothing, suggesting the cuts in emissions proposed under Kyoto fell between 10 and 15 short of meaningful action and Kyoto will soon be obsolete. The one issue on which there seemed little debate was over evidence for the science of climate change. And as we all recently discovered, that evidence is hardening all the time.

The failures at The Hague will compound the issues confronting the UK. Britain looks sets to feel increases in temperature of up to 3 degrees by 2050. Coupled with even greater rises in Southern Europe and the rest of the world, this will mean serious changes to our way of life.

Scientists predict summers to become warmer while winters become far wetter. The extremes of weather recently experienced look likely to become common feature as climate change takes hold.

The UK environment agency has warned that Britain could become a flooding hotspot. The problem is not just due to climate change but also changes in land use. The spread of human settlement and accompanying roads, concrete, steel and railways all contribute to limiting where floodwater can soak away. Houses are now built on land which would previously allowed water drainage.

The Association Of British Insurers is increasingly worried about such change, especially with Government plans for a further 3 million homes to be added to the housing stock.

And not only is flooding likely to happen more frequently, but the effects could be worse. For the homeowner this may have serious effects. If your home is built on a floodplain, the cost of insuring the bricks and mortar could become astronomical.

Increased water has many immediate effects in the event of flooding. Carpets, walls and belongings become saturated and useless and serious damage can be inflicted onto the foundations of a property. Floodwater is dirty and can be dangerous to the health if not dealt with properly. It is quite likely that temporary flood defence may become a common feature in garden shed. Companies in the US specialising in home flood prevention may become commonplace in the UK.

The type of protection available includes installing watertight door and window guards. These are made of a very strong polycarbonate material (the same as bullet proof glass) that can take an immense weight of water without leakage. These are temporary measures that can be fitted within seconds of a flood warning. Other features available include coating the cricks of your home with an environmentally friendly water sealant up to the desired height.

But an increase in water levels and the water table can also have more long-term effects through the threat of subsidence with potentially millions of homes at risk.

While winter rainfall increases but up to 20% the threat of rising sea levels will be of far more concern to many living in low lying and coastal areas. Rising sea levels and melting polar ice caps mean sea levels could rise by up to 67cm by 2050 according to the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

Many areas of the country are already falling away into the sea as storms continually hammer the coastlines. As seas rise, the general level or erosion will compound the misery for homeowners as they watch their backyard disappear into the deep blue.

Unless drastic action is taken Anglia as well as the southeast could be completely submerged. This would make a mockery of the drastic price rises seen in the area in recent months. The government's present policy is to allow agricultural land to flood and return to salt marsh. It's a policy of managed retreat and means the UK map will have to be redrawn.

It seems the government may finally becoming around to the thinking that preventative measures are not likely to make any impact and adaptation to our new climate is now the key. After all, we can't stop winter coming every year (although we may be tempted to try).

This may seem like a defeatist policy but it is unlikely that any changes in the production of greenhouse gases will make much notable difference for between 30 and 50 years, so we had best get used to it. But this doesn't mean that we shouldn't begin to change the way we think about our consumption patterns in today's throwaway society. After all the future of the planet may well be at stake.

And where better to start than at home. The are a number of measures that can be adopted in the home which will make efficiency gains and reduce the pressure on production of the fuels responsible for greenhouse gases. Every household in the UK produces around 6 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. For instance if everyone in the UK installed cavity wall insulation CO2 emissions would be reduced by by 6.7 million tonnes. Plus these simple measures save money, and in the modern world it may be this and not any wild hippy thoughts of saving the environment which spurs change. Uniform insulation of loft insulation would save around £460 million worth of energy for the UK alone.

Here's a list of what you could do in your home to make a difference:

• Install energy saving light bulbs, they use about four times less energy.
  
  
• Put a jacket around your hot water tank and contribute towards saving enough energy to power 60,000 homes for a year worth around £21 million.
  
  
• Makes sure all doors and windows are tight fitting, around 20% of heat is lost this way.
  
  
• Install cavity wall isulation. If this was adopted by every UK household it would save enough energy to power 1.4million households for a year. Walls are where most energy is lost.
  
  
• When you replace your fridge freezer make sure it is energy efficient, it could up to 50% on electricity consumption.
  
  
• Run your washing machine at 40 degrees instead of 60 and save around a third on energy.
  
  
• Take a shower instead of a bath. It uses around two-fifths of the water and so takes less energy to heat.
  
  
• Try and recycle as much as possible, it cuts down on the production of green house gases.
  

It has been suggested that the US could meet up to 20% of its Kyoto protocol targets by simply improving efficiency. The swift kick up the backside the world seems to have received will surely see more effort to utilise renewable power sources such as the wind, water and sun. It may eventually become commonplace in the southeast to rely on solar power during the summer months and storing energy to supplement tradition fuels in the winter.

We must all make an effort to ensure these clean energy sources are utilised today, rather than waiting for coal, oil and gas reserves to disappear. But all this doom and gloom may have a silver lining; we may see healthier living, financial savings and cleaner air. But we have a long way to go. Home is the place to begin and make the alterations that can make for sustainable change.