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Councillors in North Ayrshire are due to decide later whether to support controversial proposals for a new coal-fired power station at Hunterston.

Not a tonne of coal or a barrel of oil will be left in the ground if money can be made from extracting and burning it Build a bunker with a vegetable plot on some high but sheltered ground and leave it to your grandchildren: dangerous levels of climate change now look all but inevitable.

The huge increase in coal-fired power stations in China has masked the impact of global warming in the last decade because of the cooling effect of their sulphur emissions, new research has revealed.

What is carbon capture and storage? The technology is designed to prevent the carbon dioxide exhaust from the burning of coal and gas from entering the atmosphere and driving further climate change. It does this by either stripping the CO2 from the smokestacks of conventional power stations, or by burning the fuel in special ways to produce exhausts of pure CO2.

Australia is often cited as being particularly vulnerable to climate change, with projections of longer droughts punctuated by increasingly horrendous floods. In Western Australia, rainfall has already declined by 20%, and the tragic "Black Saturday" bush fires that claimed 173 lives in 2009 were amplified by an unprecedented heatwave. It is less well known that Australia is also a coal "superpower," being the world's largest exporter of this dirtiest of all fossil fuels.