There’s an article over at the ABC which the government will no doubt relish, “Australia right to reject Kyoto: British experts”.

The full 2500+ word article at Nature, is actually interesting reading. And although the government will no doubt be shouting from the rooftops “we were right about Kyoto!”, they’d do well to read one other paragraph of the article:

Put public investment in energy R&D on a wartime footing

It seems reasonable to expect the world’s leading economies and emitters to devote as much money to this challenge as they currently spend on military research — in the case of the United States, about $80 billion per year. Such investment would provide a more promising foundation for decarbonization of the global energy system than the current approach.

I can’t find figures for Australia’s military research spending, but apparently our total military spending in 2005 was $13.2 billion. That same report quotes US military spending at $420 billion, so assuming we spend a similar fraction on research as the US, that would give a figure of around $2.5 billion.

Last I heard the government was tossing around 10′s of millions, and that’s for projects, not research. That article refers to a “$500 million federal commitment to climate change projects”, which is nice, but not even in the ballpark the Nature article is talking about. And that’s on top of the governments well established track record of defunding research into solar and other alternatives.

So perhaps Howard was right to reject Kyoto, that’s debatable. What’s not debatable is that Howard has spent 11 years doing far too little on climate change, and no 11′th year epiphany will save Howard from the history books.