Gruenhagen quoted the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which has been funded by the American Petroleum Institute, noting that it’s “the only national trade association that represents all aspects of America’s oil and natural gas industry.”

“The latest facts from CPAC show that in the last sixteen years there’s been no global warming,” said Gruenhagen, while not revealing CPAC’s financial ties to big oil companies.

According to ThinkProgress.org, Gruenhagen also claimed that green energy had created high unemployment rates in Spain and that German tax dollars had been wasted on it.

However, according to Reuters, the real cause of unemployment in Spain is the collapse of the housing bubble: “The collapse of a property boom driven by cheap credit has seen millions in the construction sector laid off since 2009 and private service sector, worth almost half gross domestic product, has followed as Spaniards tightened purse strings and investment plummeted.”

While Germany’s conversion to green energy has been costly, many observers say the country is leading the world down the path to renewable energy, reported The Guardian.

Ironically, Gruenhagen made his claim on the same day that more than 12,000 climate science papers were found to have a 97 percent consensus that global warming was caused by humans (video below).

Sources: Reuters, ThinkProgress.org, API.org, IOP.org, The Guardian.

Read More: http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/environment/energy/minnesota-state-rep-glenn-gruenhagen-claims-global-warming-united

The claim: The commonly cited statistic that there’s near 100 percent consensus among climate scientists has only weak evidence to back it up.

The background:

Arvid Pasto of Sparks wrote a letter to the editor criticizing Reno Gazette-Journal columnist Cory Farley. Pasto wrote:

“The part that I take issue with is his repetition of the bogus statement that ‘the rate of belief among “scientists who write about the climate in peer-reviewed literature� is about 97 percent.’ That is totally misleading: the 97 percent figure is based on 79 people’s responses!�

This caught Fact Checker’s eye because that statistic was cited in a previous column. Was Fact Checker’s citation misleading because it was based on only 79 responses?

The question came up again last month when U.S. Rep. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, wrote an opinion piece for the Salt Lake Tribune where he made a similar claim:

“There is also uncertainty regarding to what degree man is to blame for global warming. However, the claim that 98 percent of scientists agree that humans are the singular driver of climate change has been repeatedly discounted. This oft-cited statistic is based on an online survey with a sample size of only 77 people, and the survey didn’t even ask to what degree humans contribute to climate change.�

The statistic came from an online survey? Fact Checker previously wrote in a column doctors considering quitting over Obamacare that online opt-in surveys aren’t trustworthy — they aren’t random and they often self-select for people with strong feelings for or against.

Clearly, more digging was needed. (It seems Stewart made a mistake when he wrote “scientists,� rather than “climate scientists,� which is the common claim.)

The first step was to go back to the original survey. It was done by Peter Doran and Maggie Kendall Zimmerman and published in a 2009 issue of Climate Change.

It wasn’t an online survey where you go to a website and take a poll. Those are meaningless scientifically — but fun!

It was based on invitations sent to more than 10,000 Earth scientists in a database culled from academic institutions and researchers at national laboratories. More than 3,100 responded.

They were asked two primary questions:

1. When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen or remained relatively constant?

2. Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?

About 90 percent of the Earth scientists who responded answered “risen� to the first question, and 82 percent answered “yes� to the second.

Such results would be considered wild consensus on many topics.

But Doran and Zimmerman also wanted to learn what just climate experts thought, so they looked at the respondents who listed their area of expertise as climate science and who had published more than half of their recent peer-reviewed papers on climate change. This amounted to 79 individuals.

Of those, 76 answered “risen� to question 1 — 96.2 percent. Seventy-seven answered question 2; of those, 75 answered yes — 97.4 percent.

It’s not the sham survey critics imply, but Pasto is right that if this survey were the entire basis for the consensus claim, then it doesn’t rise to the level of case-closed evidence.

With the help of the Climate Science Rapid Response Team, Fact Checker corresponded with Spencer Weart to see what he thought of the survey. He’s a physicist who was director of the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics in Maryland.

Weart’s book “The Discovery of Global Warming,� a history of climate change research, has been translated into five languages.

He said the survey in question is “a little thin.� But he pointed out that the results have been confirmed in two more rigorous surveys, including one published this week.

First up is a 2010 paper by William Anderegg and others published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It says:

“We use an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that 97-98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC (anthropogenic climate change) outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.�

Next is a survey published Thursday at Skeptical Science. It examined more than 12,000 peer-reviewed climate science papers.

Survey co-author and environmental scientist Dana Nuccitelli, based over the hill in Sacramento, told Fact Checker: “In our study, of the over 4,000 papers that expressed a position on the cause of global warming, 97.1 percent endorsed human-caused global warming.�

To confirm whether the interpretions of the papers’ positions were correct, the papers’ original authors were asked to rate what they themselves viewed as the positions taken — and 97.2 percent backed human-caused global warming, Nuccitelli reported.

The verdict:

At least three surveys — two of which involved hundreds of climate scientists who have published thousands of peer-reviewed papers on climate research — confirm that about 97 percent of climate experts agree that the Earth is warming and humans are behind it.

Truthmeter: 1 (out of 10)

More claims against climate consensus

Arvid Pasto of Sparks wrote regarding doubts about human-caused global warming:

“Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. Nearly two-thirds of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem. Additionally, two recent surveys of meteorologists revealed similar skepticism of alarmist global warming claims.�

Pasto mischaracterizes the 2012 Organization Studies survey. It was not an attempt to gauge scientific belief in human-caused global warming but rather an attempt to understand why “deniers� think the way they do.

Researchers polled engineers and geoscientists in Alberta, Canada, where many are employed by the fossil fuel industry. (Tangent: Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!�)

They found emotion and an “us-vs.-them� mentality were behind many respondents’ beliefs. And to be clear: These were not climate scientists.

In a reply to a Forbes.com blog that made the same claim as Pasto, the paper’s authors responded, “our study is not a representative survey … it cannot be used for generalizations such as ‘respondents believe …’ or ‘scientists don’t believe ….’�

As for Pasto’s claim about meteorologists, they study weather, not climate. Weather is how the atmosphere changes over short periods of time (“tomorrow’s forecast: sunny�); climate is how the atmosphere behaves over long periods of time (“the 20th century is the warmest in the last 1,000 years�).

That said, here’s the official position of the American Meteorological Society:

“There is unequivocal evidence that Earth’s lower atmosphere, ocean and land surface are warming; sea level is rising; and snow cover, mountain glaciers, and Arctic sea ice are shrinking. The dominant cause of the warming since the 1950s is human activities.�

Photo above: Earlier this year, record high temperatures triggered scores of wildfires across Australia. Extreme weather events are expected to increase with global warming. In this Jan. 4, photo provided by the Holmes family, Tammy Holmes and her grandchildren take refuge from a wildfire under a jetty east of Hobart.

Read More: http://blogs.rgj.com/factchecker/2013/05/18/global-warming-consensus-based-on-weak-survey/

Extreme global warming is less likely in coming decades after a slowdown in the pace of temperature rises so far this century, an international team of scientists said on Sunday.

Warming is still on track, however, to breach a goal set by governments around the world of limiting the increase in temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times, unless tough action is taken to limit rising greenhouse gas emissions.

“The most extreme rates of warming simulated by the current generation of climate models over 50- to 100-year timescales are looking less likely,” the University of Oxford wrote about the findings in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The rate of global warming has slowed after strong rises in the 1980s and 1990s, even though all the 10 warmest years since reliable records began in the 1850s have been since 1998.

The slowdown has been a puzzle because emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases have continued to rise, led by strong industrial growth in China.

Examining recent temperatures, the experts said that a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere above pre-industrial times – possible by mid-century on current trends – would push up temperatures by between 0.9 and 2.0 degrees Celsius (1.6 and 3.6F).

That is below estimates made by the U.N. panel of climate scientists in 2007, of a rise of between 1 and 3 degrees Celsius (1.8-5.4F) as the immediate response to a doubling of carbon concentrations, known as the transient climate response.

OCEANS

The U.N. panel also estimated that a doubling of carbon dioxide, after accounting for melting of ice and absorption by the oceans that it would cause over hundreds of years, would eventually lead to a temperature rise of between 2 and 4.5 C (3.6-8.1F).

Findings in the new study, by experts in Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Switzerland and Norway, broadly matched that range for the long-term response.

But for government policy makers “the transient response over the next 50-100 years is what matters,” lead author Alexander Otto of Oxford University said in a statement.

The oceans appear to be taking up more heat in recent years, masking a build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that passed 400 parts per million this month for the first time in human history, up 40 percent from pre-industrial levels.

Professor Reto Knutti of ETH Zurich, one of the authors, said that the lower numbers for coming decades were welcome.

But “we are still looking at warming well over the two degree goal that countries have agreed upon if current emission trends continue,” he said.

Temperatures have already risen by about 0.8 Celsius (1.4F) since the Industrial Revolution and two degrees C is widely viewed as a threshold to dangerous changes such as more floods, heatwaves and rising sea levels.

“The oceans are sequestering heat more rapidly than expected over the last decade,” said Professor Steven Sherwood of the University of New South Wales in Australia, who was not involved in the study.

“By assuming that this behaviour will continue, (the scientists) calculate that the climate will warm about 20 percent more slowly than previously expected, although over the long term it may be just as bad, since eventually the ocean will stop taking up heat.”

He said findings “need to be taken with a large grain of salt” because of uncertainties about the oceans.

© 2013 Thomson/Reuters. All rights reserved.

Read More: http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/extreme-global-warming/2013/05/19/id/505254

Read More: http://news.yahoo.com/whos-paying-price-global-warming-040008986.html

Industry leaders quickly jumped in to do damage control. Vail Resorts ran an ad in The New York Times under the banner, “The Climate HAS CHANGED,” with photos of skiers and snowboarders wallowing in fresh powder at the company’s playgrounds, which include Vail, Beaver Creek, Keystone and Breckenridge in Colorado, as well as three resorts around Lake Tahoe.

The company’s CEO, Rob Katz, wrote a letter to the editor of the Denver Post berating those who “alarm people with images of melting snow.” “Count me in the category of someone who is very worried about climate change,” Katz wrote, and then added, “You can count me out of the group that says we need to address climate change to save skiing.”

Save wildlife habitat and prevent natural disasters, sure, Katz intoned, but let’s keep skiing out of this.

The reaction revealed an industry deeply torn between protecting its long-term survival and ensuring its short-term profitability. “Ski area owners and operators are aware of the scientific studies and projections regarding the long-term potential impacts of climate change,” the National Ski Areas Association said in a position statement, “but we remain optimistic as an industry.”

The forecast does not inspire confidence, however. The report that made headlines in December, Climate Impacts on the Winter Tourism Economy in the United States, provided a long list of alarming reminders: By the end of the century, winter temperatures are projected to warm an additional four to 10 degrees Fahrenheit in North America. In high-emissions scenarios, the winter snowpack in the Cascades and the Sierra is projected to decrease between 40 and 70 per cent by 2050. If we continue to pollute the way we do now, skiing will be confined to the top quarter of Aspen Mountain in average years by the end of the century. Utah’s Park City Mountain Resort will have no snowpack whatsoever.

The report then attempted to put a price tag on all this, calculating that, over the course of the last decade, ski areas lost more than $1 billion in potential revenue to bad snow years. Failure to respond quickly to climate change, the authors wrote, “spells economic devastation for a winter sports industry deeply dependent upon predictable, heavy snowfall.”

Commissioned by the nonprofit Protect Our Winters (POW for short) and the Natural Resources Defense Council, the report was part of a broader effort to highlight the economic significance of outdoor recreation, and to use that as a lever to promote conservation. But the ski industry has been reluctant to talk about this looming catastrophe, even for the sake of prolonging its own life.

“It’s a tough reality to swallow,” says Elizabeth Burakowski, a Ph.D. candidate in snow science at the University of New Hampshire and one of the report’s co-authors. “It’s bad for business.”

The National Ski Areas Association does have a program called the Climate Challenge that encourages resorts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — though it says nothing about all the emissions spewed when skiers travel to the resorts — and it has advocated for clean energy programs on the national level. And many individual resorts, including Vail, have cleaned up their operations by shifting to renewables like wind power. But when it comes to the larger fight against climate change, most industry leaders say they have enough to worry about already.

Nationally, the number of visits to ski resorts has remained essentially flat since the industry started keeping track in 1979. Analysts blame younger people, who aren’t replacing aging Baby Boomers, the ski industry’s main market. And now comes the news that snowboarding, a sport largely credited for saving the industry in the 1990s, is on a steep downhill slide. A report released this winter by RRC Associates, a company that tracks winter recreation, found that the percentage of snowboarding visits to ski areas has declined over the past two years, while the number of days boarders head to the mountain has dropped sharply in the past decade.

At Mammoth Mountain, environmental affairs director Ron Cohen says he’s got his hands full just keeping up with Forest Service and state regulations. The ski area, he says, simply lacks the resources to be more active on climate change. “Everybody knows — people who work here and think about strategy — we’re not ignorant of the issue,” Cohen says. “We know that there are these discussions, these issues, scientific theories, facts — all of the above — but we’re focused on business strategy a lot more than we are on something we have a lot less control over.”

Read More: http://www.piquenewsmagazine.com/whistler/global-warmings-reluctant-poster-child/Content?oid=2459417

Warming oceans are changing the mix of species in the world’s fisheries as fish try to remain in waters in their preferred temperature range, according to a new study.

The movement to keep pace with preferred temperatures shows up most starkly in the North Pacific Ocean and the northeastern Atlantic Ocean, as fish migrate out of the subtropics to beat the heat.

The changes have particular implication for people living in the coastal tropics who either subsist on fishing or fish commercially, the research team says. If ocean temperatures continue to warm there, the heat could top a level that even tropical species find intolerable, reducing their abundance, the researchers say.

This raises the urgency of adopting approaches that minimize other stresses on fisheries, such as pollution and overfishing, the team says.

Marine-ecosystem models have indicated that global warming’s impact on ocean temperatures would trigger such a migration. And studies of individual regions have documented the arrival of species from warmer aquatic climes.

This latest effort represents the first attempt at documenting the changes for the planet as a whole, says William Cheung, a scientist with the Fisheries Centre at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who led the team. The techniques that the team used, along with the results, appear in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

The general pattern reported in the study is “very similar” to results from studies that have focused on the US Northeast’s fisheries, says Michael Fogarty, who heads the ecosystem assessment program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Woods Hole., Mass.

Off the New England coast, for instance, marine scientists tracked migration trends for 36 fish species and found that 75 percent had moved north or into deeper water or both to keep their cool, Dr. Fogarty says.

At the same time, “the Atlantic croaker, a subtropical species, is moving north and is having higher reproductive success as well” in northern waters, he says.

Meanwhile, fishermen in the Gulf of Maine are reporting highly unusual species for the area: black sea bass, which could earn them a tidy sum; new species of squid; and blue crabs, Fogarty adds.

The work by Dr. Cheung and colleagues “is a very interesting study, and its global reach makes it quite important,” he says.

The study covers a period spanning 1970 to 2006. The team examined catch records compiled by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, as well as from regional and national fisheries groups. The researchers divvied the catch data among 52 large marine ecosystems – for example, the US Northeast’s continental shelf, the North Sea, or ecosystems defined by currents such as the Canary Current (a segment of a much larger North Atlantic surface current that skirts the Canary Islands).

The researchers used the catch information, which collectively covered 990 fish species, to determine the relative abundance of species in each of these regions for each year the study covered. They also determined each species’ preferred temperature range.

From these data, they calculated a “catch temperature” – the average of the preferred temperature ranges of all the species in each of the large marine ecosystems they identified. Changes in the average catch temperature became a stand-in for changes in the mix of species.

The team then compared changes in catch temperature with changes in sea-surface temperature. When the researchers did that, they found a strong correlation between rising catch temperatures and rising sea-surface temperatures in the same region.

Between 1970 and 2006, the global-average catch temperature increased by 0.19 degrees C per decade. As global averages do, the figure masks significant regional differences. For the North Pacific and the northeastern Atlantic, the catch temperature increased by a whisker under 0.5 degrees C per decade. The increases coincided with sea-surface temperatures that were increasing by 0.2 degrees C per decade in the North Pacific and 0.26 degrees C per decade in the northeastern Atlantic.

Ocean temperatures in the 14 ecosystems in the tropics increased at a pace of about 0.14 degrees per decade. The catch temperature in the tropics, the researchers note, rose by 0.6 degrees between 1970 and 1980 to 26 degrees C, then leveled off. This suggested to the team that things had gotten too hot for the subtropical species that once shared these waters with the tropical fish. The subtropical species voted with their fins and headed for cooler aquatic climes.

The use of catch data for studies like this has its limits, Fogarty notes. The quality of catch records can vary widely in different parts of the world. Apart from the rigor people bring to recording their catches, catch records can change just because of different levels of effort people exert to catch fish, he says.

The researchers appear to have been aware of these and other shortcomings of catch data, he adds. But for the kind of global question the team was asking, catch data represent the most comprehensive source of information available.

Indeed, the approach could lend itself to regular updates – tracking changes in fisheries as they happen, in much the same way systematic temperature records track temperature trends, some researchers say.

The evidence of climate change’s global impact on fisheries is “startling,” notes Mark Payne, a researcher with the National Institute of Aquatic Resources at the Technical University of Denmark in Lyngby, outside Copenhagen.

The changes present adaptation challenges for local fishing interests in the developed and developing world, he notes in an e-mail.

For some regions, especially in the developed world, the changes may not portend effects as dramatic as California’s loss of “Cannery Row” in the 1950s or the collapse of the Northeast’s cod fisheries in the 1990s, which shuttered fishing villages in Newfoundland. But fishermen will have to retrace a learning curve to get to know the habits of new species that move into a fishery.

Pursuit of the traditional species into new waters could set the stage for international disputes over fishing.

The largest adjustment may be required in the tropics, the research team posits, because as subtropical fish leave for cooler waters, they aren’t being replaced by fish seeking relief from still-warmer water elsewhere.

Adaptation measures could include adding other sources of income “or changing their fishing practices,” Cheung says.

Read More: http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/20130516/blue-crabs-maine-something-fishy-about-global-warming

Climatologists are now coming to terms with the fact that catastrophic man-made global warming appears highly unlikely, and that in fact, the earth has not warmed at all in more than a decade.

Palin agrees. On Saturday afternoon, she posted the photo on the upper-left to her Facebook page, together with the following entry:

“One last blast of Alaska winter today, hopefully? This is what “Grad Blast” means in Alaska! We’ll move our graduation b-b-q indoors and watch the mini-blizzard from ’round the fireplace. (Global warming my gluteus maximus.) Congratulations to this year’s graduates all across America. Job well done. Now the real job begins.”

Gore, climate-denier that he is, continues to cling to the past. Sad, very sad.

Read More: http://www.bizpacreview.com/2013/05/19/sarah-palin-global-warming-my-gluteus-maximus-70347

Momma, don’t let your babies grow up to be environmentalists

Momma, don’t let your babies grow up to be environmentalists. I know, I did. In the past, I’d read articles about the recently published article “Survey finds 97% of climate science papers agree warming is man-made,” but the importance of it all didn’t click. I was raised like the typical city dweller. My home lacked a true hearth. Instead we had a thermostat complete with central air. Over the years, I’ve learned from my children, both environmentalists, and I’ve grown in my perspective about the need to reduce my carbon footprint. Although I haven’t reached the level of proficiency for which my son is striving, my husband and I have adapted our lifestyle recently. We’re not cowboys—or environmentalists—like my children, but we’re not the typical city dwellers any longer, either.

I raised my children in a house on the corner in a busy neighborhood of cozy homes, and ours boasted seven bedrooms. As a completely remodeled and “updated” Victorian home, the fireplace had been removed. Built from wood, and fashioned with middle-grade windows, the heat we pumped into the excessive square footage leaked in the winter. In the spring, summer, and fall, we often ran the air-conditioning even when we could have cooled the home by opening windows. The traffic noise was bothersome otherwise. After the children left home, and my son began to preach the importance of taking care of our larger home, planet earth, my husband and I considered our carbon footprint in the move. We reduced the size of the house, and we chose one with a wood burning stove and a fireplace. After adding insulation, we updated the windows. With less housework needed, I’ve found the time to increase the size of my garden. I’ve learned to process food with home canning. My son is proud of my accomplishments, but next year he intends to go further.

I tease him this is coming year will be his “Thoreau Experience.” He’s found a cabin outside of town in Athens, Ohio, the town in which he works as a facilities manager for an organic foods processing plant, Shagbark Mills. He’s added a wood stove to the corner, and he intends for it to be his only source of heat. (Yes, as a mother, I’m worried he has no furnace.) At present, he lacks running water, and he showers at a friend’s cabin that boasts more amenities. In the meantime, he is acquiring a cistern and hopes to use rain water in the future. He may run electricity or a solar panel, depending on whether or not the land owner will allow him to remove a few trees to create a break in the tree canopy. With only the summer to prepare before the winter hits, I feel as if he’s gone off homesteading into the Wild West. He’s minutes from Athens, my husband keeps reminding me. He has a car and a cell phone. He has friends and a workplace.

Still, I worry. It’s my city roots telling me everything should always be push-button and accessible without my prior planning. The food should appear in the grocery store, and all I have to do is go to work and pay my bills. I remind myself, reducing a carbon footprint calls for more planning and bit on inconvenience. I do it for my children and their children. I do it because my son, along with my daughter, who is studying Environmental Geography, have educated me. My children have caused me to grow up a bit. I hope to take very little from this world, and as for my son and daughter, I’m proud to leave them behind.

Written By: Tami Absi

Read More: http://guardianlv.com/2013/05/global-warming-is-man-made/

The attack on the notion of global warming takes many forms, but a particularly pernicious one argues that scientific consensus on the subject is a myth. That charge has been made so many times by so many global warming deniers that 60 percent of Americans have accepted that scientists are divided on the issue.

They simply aren’t, and a new study shows just how far the fable diverges from reality.

The study, published in Environmental Research Letters last week, examined the conclusions of 11,944 peer-reviewed climate studies in 1,980 journals over 21 years, ending in 2012.

Only about a third of the studies expressed an opinion on “anthropogenic global warming” – the term of scientific art for climate change caused by humans burning stuff.

Of those that did have an opinion, 97.1 percent endorsed the idea that humans are causing global warming.

When the researchers went back to the authors of some of those studies to ask them what their own papers said about anthropogenic global warming, the number endorsing the consensus was 97.2 percent.

Four of the nine researchers of the new study are affiliated with Skeptical Science, an organization that takes on denial myths and advocates for “what peer reviewed science has to say about global warming.” That, by the way, is a great deal more transparency of purpose and affiliation than many global warming skeptics ever provide.

As the authors note, the initial analyses of the studies’ conclusions was done by means of crowd-sourcing, which lends itself to self-selection and subjectivity. Asking multiple people to read each abstract was done to mitigate some of that, but the authors admit in the study that it presents some uncertainty, as does the extent to which any abstract accurately represents a study’s full conclusions.

In any case, scientific consensus is not proof of a theory, any more than the widespread beliefs that the Earth was flat or that the sun revolved around it somehow affected geography or cosmology. The researchers admit that their study included only a fraction of the total universe of published studies on global warming.

Such scholarly qualifications and uncertainty are what science – the honest pursuit of knowledge – looks like. Not surprisingly, that’s something rarely seen in the literature from global warming’s harshest critics.

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The European Union, which has spearheaded efforts to curb global warming, is set to adopt a change of focus in response to concerns over costs and the impact on companies in economically depressed Europe.

Under the change, the European Uniln will prioritize the supply of energy at affordable prices over cutting greenhouse gas emissions which impose burdens on industries, in a turnaround of the region’s energy policy, an EU official said Saturday.

EU leaders will decide on the shift in energy policy at a meeting Wednesday. The change reflects requests from businesses in the 27-member zone amid the prolonged economic slump triggered by the eurozone sovereign debt crisis, the official said.

A draft conclusion of the EU leaders’ meeting obtained by Kyodo News said, “Against the backdrop of high pressure on Europe’s competitiveness and increasing energy demand from major economies, the EU’s energy policy must ensure the uninterrupted supply of households and companies at affordable and competitive prices.”

The draft said investments in new and intelligent energy infrastructure are “vital for jobs and growth and will help enhance competitiveness.” The regional body calls for “a predictable climate and energy framework post-2020,” according to the paper.

The European Union remains committed to emissions reduction targets under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, under which it pledged to trim its greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

“The European Commission is already in ‘do nothing’ mode on climate change, and it will obviously put off a decision on ambitious targets,” the official said on the European Union’s post-2020 goals.

The change in policy comes as some European companies are moving to shift operations out of the region to avoid increasing costs to meet the emissions-cut goals, and amid a decline in emission trading launched in the region in 2005.

Discussions on countermeasures against global warming have also lost momentum as the European Union focuses on steps to boost the economy ahead of the European Parliament election scheduled for May next year.

==Kyodo

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/kyodo-news-international/130518/eu-dial-back-measures-against-global-warming

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Drupal.behaviors.gigyaHeaderUserInfo = function (context) {
gigya.socialize.showAddConnectionsUI(connect_params_top);
gigya.socialize.showFollowBarUI(showSiteFollowBarUI_params);
//gigya.socialize.showLoginUI(login_params_top);

// get user info
gigya.socialize.getUserInfo({ callback: renderUI });

// register for connect status changes
gigya.socialize.addEventHandlers({onConnectionAdded: renderUI, onConnectionRemoved: renderUI });

};

//–

Read More: http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/kyodo-news-international/130518/eu-dial-back-measures-against-global-warming