Time to dash into the past?

There never is dearth for exciting news on the planet. A NASA satellite may come crashing down tonight. If you are lucky you may be hit! But then maybe you can go back to the past and become your parent if what scientists at CERN think they see is true – a neutrino traveling faster than light! And then there is the Arctic sea route opening up thanks to shrinking ice (!) and bringing trade prospects to a world still caught up in consuming!

In a world struggling to lay hands on rare earth, so far confined to China mostly, it turns out Afghanistan may be loaded with the stuff. And the UK has discovered huge shale gas deposits in its northwest in Lancashire. Fracking concerns are not an issue when you are sitting on fuel, right?

Forget that global carbon dioxide emissions increased by 45 percent between 1990 and 2010, reaching a record high 33 billion tons last year, according to a report by the European Commission’s Joint Research Center.

The report said that increased energy efficiency, renewable energy, and nuclear power are not compensating for a surge in emissions from developing countries, most notably China — with a 257 percent increase in CO2 emissions from 1990 to 210 — and India, whose emissions increased by 180 percent.

By contrast, the European Union’s emissions declined by 7 percent from 1990 to 2010, and Russia’s dropped 27 percent. U.S. emissions increased by 5 percent from 1990 to 2010. After a slowdown in CO2 emissions at the height of the recession in 2008 and 2009, global emissions saw a record-breaking increase of 5.8 percent from 2009 to 2010, the report said.

Maybe it's time for a mass exodus to the past, on the wings of some superfast neutrino. The present seems to be getting unlivable.