The Associated Press: Climate talks appear to slip backward

BONN, Germany — Global climate talks appeared to have slipped backward after five days of negotiations in Bonn, with rich and poor countries exchanging charges of reneging on agreements they made last year to contain greenhouse gases.

Delegates complained that reversals in the talks put negotiations back by a year, even before minimal gains were scored at the Copenhagen summit last December.
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Pershing declined to give details of disputes raised in closed-door negotiations, but he said major developing countries were backing away from commitments to slow the growth of their greenhouse gas emissions, and now say emission controls should apply only to industrial countries.

China, India, Brazil and South Africa were among the major developing nations at the Copenhagen summit. Since then, China has become the world's largest consumer of energy, to add to its earlier position of being the world's biggest greenhouse gas polluter.

U.N. climate deal retreats as Bonn talks end

Pershing said some countries were seeking "staggering sums out of line with reality."

A ‘Small’ Spill: China’s Environmental Tango - Green Blog - NYTimes.com

Not long after taking up work in Beijing, I ran across an interesting chart that, reduced to a nutshell, says this: when Beijing’s air is bad, the government tweaks things to make its pollution reports look better than they really are.

Pig-lipsticking, of course, is anything but a Chinese invention, but on Chinese environmental matters, it has long been something of an art.

Weather extremes, not climate change | The SPPI Blog

The Alaska Science Forum is a very sensible and informative site that tends to look at the real facts behind climate and weather. Science writer Ned Rozell at the Geophysical Institute explains the effect of the jet stream on extreme weather events:

“In 1967 the Chena River spilled over its banks and flooded Fairbanks. For more than a week, the city core was underwater, and the town became a lake more than five miles wide. The flood forced thousands of people to leave the city and caused more than $180 million in damage to homes and businesses.”

The jet stream is to blame