Links via Benny Peiser

EXORCISING KYOTO, JAPANESE NOW WANT EMISSIONS TO RISE

TOKYO, May 29 (Reuters) - The high costs Japan would incur if Tokyo promises to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent from 1990 levels by 2020 would be hard for the public to accept during the recession, Prime Minister Taro Aso said on Friday.
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Aso also told the same committee that he would take into account that the plus 4 percent option attracted the largest number of comments from the public in the past month.

CHINESE REALISM: COPENHAGEN UNLIKELY TO AGREE NEW CLIMATE TREATY

BEIJING (Reuters) - Global negotiations late this year need not specify greenhouse gas cuts for the United States and other rich countries, as long as they set the right note for later talks, a Chinese climate policy official said on Tuesday.

Gao Guangsheng, a leading official in China's National Coordination Committee for Climate Change, told Reuters the negotiators in Copenhagen in December may not be able to agree on a full-fledged climate change pact, and may instead open the way for more specific negotiations as policy options mature.
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Experts widely agree that China has passed the United States as the world's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas produced by burning fossil fuels that is trapping dangerous levels of solar heat in the atmosphere.
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But Beijing says developing nations should not accept mandatory emissions caps to solve a global warming problem caused over centuries by wealthy countries, which still have much higher per capita emissions than poorer nations like China.

LOWERING EXPECTATIONS FOR COPENHAGEN - Times Online

Achieving a workable international deal to tackle climate change successfully is being threatened by overambitious targets set for the world conference on global warming this year, experts said yesterday.

Anxieties over whether a viable and effective agreement to combat global warming can be secured in Copenhagen in December will be fuelled by the concerns voiced yesterday at the annual Munich Economic Summit, supported by The Times.

Carlo Carraro, Professor of Environmental Economics at the University of Venice, led warnings that overly demanding goals set by governments worldwide for the Copenhagen gathering could doom to failure any deal struck there.

GERMANY QUIETLY KILLS EU EMISSIONS TRADING PLANS FOR AIRLINES

According to Germany's Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee (SPD), there is no chance of the emissions trading scheme being introduced for the EU airlines industry anytime soon. [Transl BJP]

NASA: SUN IS BEHAVING IN AN UNEXPECTED WAY

The latest forecast revises an earlier prediction issued in 2007. At that time, a sharply divided panel believed solar minimum would come in March 2008 followed by either a strong solar maximum in 2011 or a weak solar maximum in 2012. Competing models gave different answers, and researchers were eager for the sun to reveal which was correct.

"It turns out that none of our models were totally correct," says Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA's lead representative on the panel. "The sun is behaving in an unexpected and very interesting way."

HERE'S A GOOD QUESTION: HOW MANY IPCC SCIENTISTS FABRICATE AND FALSIFY RESEARCH?

It's a long-standing and crucial question that, as yet, remains unanswered: just how common is scientific misconduct? In the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE, Daniele Fanelli of the University of Edinburgh reports the first meta-analysis of surveys questioning scientists about their misbehaviours. The results suggest that altering or making up data is more frequent than previously estimated and might be particularly high in medical research.

JIM MANZI: WAXMAN-MARKEY CLIMATE BILL CANNOT SURVIVE COST-BENFIT ANALYSIS

I’ve had to rely on informal studies and back-of-envelope calculations to do this cost/benefit analysis. Why haven’t advocates and sponsors of the proposal done their own? Why are they urging Congress to make an incredible commitment of resources without even cursory analysis of the economic consequences? The answer should be obvious: This is a terrible deal for American taxpayers.

Lawrence Solomon: Enron's other secret - FP Comment

In the climate-change debate, the companies on the ‘environmental’ side have the most to gain.
First in a series.
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The climate-change industry — the scientists, lawyers, consultants, lobbyists and, most importantly, the multinationals that work behind the scenes to cash in on the riches at stake — has emerged as the world’s largest industry.
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Most of all, the skeptics are treated with suspicion, and accused of having been in the pay of the energy industry. The public in good part has accepted these accusations, its underlying assumption being that the fossil-fuel industry has the most at stake in climate-change policy. But if the public is to be skeptical of the influence that big money has over global-warming science, it should take the temperature anew, and recognize that the biggest money interest of all in the climate change debate lies with those poised to cash in on the climate-change policies of Kyoto and its successors.