The power struggle between East and West...

...reached flashpoint in 1939, and involved possession and access to energy and mineral resources. Under the auspices of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Japan flexed its nationalistic muscles and went to war.

Underpinning its military boldness was immense national pride and self-confidence. It is this degree of independence that has led to a stubborn resistance within social and scientific circles to Western liberal guilt, and an insistence among many Japanese climate scientists that the IPCC science is flawed. Japanese nationalism and pride is also evident in the creation and launch of the Ibuki satellite programme, and stubborn Japanese insistence on maintaining a whaling programme.

Last month the Japanese Society of Energy and Resources (JSER) stated that IPPC forecasting was akin to astrology.... Three senior Japanese scientists separately engaged in climate-change research have strongly questioned the validity of the man-made global-warming model that underpins the drive by the UN and most developed-nation governments to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
"I believe the anthropogenic (man-made) effect for climate change is still only one of the hypotheses to explain the variability of climate," Kanya Kusano told The Weekend Australian.
It could take 10 to 20 years more research to prove or disprove the theory of anthropogenic climate change, said Dr Kusano, a research group leader with the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science's Earth Simulator project.
"Before anyone noticed, this hypothesis has been substituted for truth," writes Shunichi Akasofu, founding director of the University of Alaska's International Arctic Research Centre.
Dr Kusano, Dr Akasofu and Tokyo Institute of Technology geology professor Shigenori Maruyama are highly critical of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's acceptance that hazardous global warming results mainly from man-made gas emissions...more here...

Japan's Energy Commission dismisses the IPCC, Aussies launch an online petition...

...is it safe to say that Japanese scientists look sideways at IPCC doomcasters ? or that they have spotted a chink in the IPCC armour ? or that they regard the IPCC as a load of ah so's ?
(that last one from Obnoxio the clown.)
...Japanese scientists have made a dramatic break with the UN and Western-backed hypothesis of climate change in a new report from its Energy Commission.
Three of the five researchers disagree with the UN’s IPCC view that recent warming is primarily the consequence of man-made industrial emissions of greenhouse gases. Remarkably, the subtle and nuanced language typical in such reports has been set aside.
One of the five contributors compares computer climate modelling to ancient astrology. Others castigate the paucity of the US ground temperature data set used to support the hypothesis, and declare that the unambiguous warming trend from the mid-part of the 20th Century has ceased.
The report by Japan Society of Energy and Resources (JSER) is astonishing rebuke to international pressure, and a vote of confidence in Japan’s native marine and astronomical research. Publicly-funded science in the West uniformly backs the hypothesis that industrial influence is primarily responsible for climate change, although fissures have appeared recently. Only one of the five top Japanese scientists commissioned here concurs with the man-made global warming hypothesis.
JSER is the academic society representing scientists from the energy and resource fields, and acts as a government advisory panel. The report appeared last month but has received curiously little attention. So The Register commissioned a translation of the document - the first to appear in the West in any form...more from the 1988 Science Blog of the Year here...
and from the comments...
...the...leading Japanese party is about to loose (the) next elections. Their probable successors have declared to pursue a more Asian focused policy, and not to follow the US as uncritically as before.
I wonder if greenpeace’s extremely aggressive attacks...may have contributed to this...
...from Australia, news that The Australian Environment Foundation today launched an online petition opposing the federal government’s “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme”. The petition will eventually be presented to Parliament by Dr Dennis Jensen, MHR ...more here...