CRUTEM and HadCRU October 2008 « Climate Audit

First a small point. Living in Toronto, I often look first at how the maps represent Toronto since I know what the weather's been like here. For the most part the land portion of the HadCRUT3 map is identical to the CRUTEM3 map, but not where I live. In CRUTEM world, we experienced a colder than average October (which is how it felt on the ground here), while in HadCRU world we experienced a warmer than average October. One possible and even likely explanation is that HadCRU includes temperatures from the Great Lakes (which weren't warm for swimming this year.) I didn't go swimming at our place on Lake Ontario once this year. But maybe October water was less chilly than usual.

Europe, Japan Face $46 Billion Global-Warming Penalty

Nov. 14 (Bloomberg) -- Twenty nations including Japan, Italy and Australia may be releasing more greenhouse-gas pollution than they agreed to under the Kyoto treaty to curb global warming.

They're failing to rein in carbon-dioxide output enough to meet their pledges signed in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, according to reports by individual countries. As a penalty for missing their goals under the treaty, the nations are required to buy permits for every excess ton of the heat-trapping gas released through 2012. That will total 2.3 billion permits for 20 nations, New Carbon Finance, a research firm in London, has estimated.

The potential penalty, 36 billion euros ($46 billion) for the group based on current permit prices, and the fact that only a minority of 37 Kyoto signatory nations may meet their pledges bodes poorly for international efforts to limit global warming.

``This shows there's a lot more interest in promising stuff than actually keeping those promises,'' Bjorn Lomborg, author of the book ``The Skeptical Environmentalist,'' said in a telephone interview from Copenhagen. ``What you should be doing is investing in research and development to make much more dramatic emissions cuts much cheaper in the future.''