India Denies It Will Ratify Paris Climate Deal This Year

Saudi Arabia Scales Back Renewable Energy Goal To Favor Natural Gas While the U.S. side insisted that Mr. Modi and the President agreed that both countries would ratify the climate treaty within the current year — 2016 — Indian officials said this was not the case. -- Varghese K George, The Hindu, 8 June 2016

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed support for the enactment of the Paris climate agreement this year in a meeting Tuesday at the White House. Support for the agreement falls short of a commitment to ratify that U.S. President Barack Obama had been hoping for. --Steve Baragona, The Voice of America, 7 June 2016

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has pledged to ratify the Paris Agreement, but called for climate justice and help from the US and other countries in green energy funding. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who held two-hour long bilateral talks with the US President Barrack Obama, the seventh since he assumed office, called for a regime of “climate justice” where India will have access to clean energy, an oblique reference asking the West to get its act together to help it in nuclear trading and to fund non-conventional energy programmes, to allow India to switch from fossil fuel to clean energy and thereby adhere to Paris Climate Change agenda. --DNA India, 7 June 2016

 A big climate announcement could come this week in Washington. Experts are watching to see if Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi commits to ratifying the Paris climate agreement before the end of the year. If India does ratify this year, Light adds, it would show that "this message that big developing countries in the world are not serious about Paris, are not serious about doing something on climate change, is just simply false." --Voice of America, 8 June 2016

Saudi Arabia is curtailing renewable-power targets as the world’s biggest oil exporter plans to use more natural gas, backing away from goals set when crude prices were about triple their current level, according to Energy Minister Khalid Al-Falih. The kingdom aims to have power generation from renewable resources like the sun make up 10 percent of the energy mix, a reduction from an earlier target of 50 percent, Al-Falih said in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. “Our energy mix has shifted more toward gas, so the need for high targets from renewable sources isn’t there any more,” Al-Falih said. “The previous target of 50 percent from renewable sources was an initial target and it was built on high oil prices” near $150 a barrel, he said. --Wael Mahdi and Vivian Nereim, Bloomberg, 7 June 2016
 
 In an article published today in the Financial Times, Mr Fatih Birol, the Executive Director of the International Energy Agency, has observed that natural gas is not expanding within the world energy mix as the IEA had predicted. Mr Birol cites two reasons: 1. Subdued global economic activity. 2. Political support for renewable energy technologies, as confirmed by the Paris climate change agreement, which makes it, in Mr Birol’s words “difficult for gas to compete”. Unsurprisingly, this is driving many countries to cheap coal. As the GWPF has repeatedly pointed out, current climate and green energy policies are not only burdening economies and lowering economic growth, they also hold back a move to an attainable cleaner energy mix, with a larger element of natural gas — despite falling gas prices. --John Constable, Global Warming Policy Forum, 8 June 2016

Global average temperature is plummeting as the naturally-occurring El Niño warming event gives way to what’s likely to be a La Niña cooling event later this year. “Cooling from the weakening El Niño is now rapidly occurring as we transition toward likely La Niña conditions by mid-summer or early fall,” according to the latest satellite data from the University of Alabama-Huntsville. --Michael Bastasch, The Daily Caller, 6 June 2016

 We applied the 2015 Lewis and Curry ECS distribution to the widely-used DICE and FUND Integrated Assessment Models. Previously the developers of these models (and others) have relied on model-simulated distribution of ECS values, especially from a 2007 paper by Roe and Baker. The Roe-Baker distribution underpins the US government’s current SCC values used for regulatory purposes. We critique this aspect of SCC computation, explaining why the Roe-Baker distribution is unsuitable. A major reason is that simulated ECS distributions have been superseded by a suite of empirically-estimated distributions. Using a recent, well-constrained empirical ECS distribution we find the estimated SCC drops substantially in both the DICE and FUND models, and in the latter there is a large probability it is no longer even positive. --Ross McKitrick et al. Empirically-Constrained Climate Sensitivity and the Social Cost of Carbon (2016)

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