Do a web search for “Kyoto and Global Warming” and you will be pointed to a stunning 4.5 million sites. For many people in the world today, Kyoto could never be located on a map, few would know that it was once the imperial capital of Japan, and for that matter, few would even know that Kyoto is in Japan. It really wouldn’t matter, for most importantly, almost everyone knows Kyoto has something to do with global warming, “Kyoto” is something President Bust did or didn’t do, and it led to more global warming, right?

A meeting in Kyoto, Japan resulted in an agreement by the United Nations aimed at slowing down the buildup of greenhouse gases. The resulting “Kyoto Protocol” was part of the International Framework Convention on Climate Change; the Protocol was adopted on December 11, 1997 by the Third Conference of the Parties which was meeting in Kyoto (all of this can be traced back to the famous 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro). If you had been on the “Conference of the Parties” circuit ever since, you would have enjoyed wonderful visits to Berlin, Geneva, Kyoto, Buenos Aires (twice), Bonn (twice), The Hague, Marrakech, New Delhi, Milan, Montreal, Nairobi, and Bali! Nothing says “fight global warming” any more than a never-ending world tour!

As you might have heard, 182 parties have ratified the Kyoto Protocol, but the United States has not ratified the treaty, much to the chagrin of many world leaders and every environmentalist on the planet No matter what the weather calamity anywhere in the world, someone is quick to point out that global warming is the cause and the mess could have been avoided had President Bush et al. ratified the Kyoto Protocol!

With interest in Kyoto and Japan, we found information in a recent article in Weather more than interesting; the article was written by Professor Takehiko Mikami of the Department of Geography at Tokyo Metropolitan University. Mikami begins the piece noting that in Japan, there are “several kinds of documentary sources for reconstructing climatic variations in historical times: 1) Cherry-tree-flowering date records since the eleventh century; 2) Lake-freezing date records since the sixteenth century; and 3) Weather diary records since the eighteenth century.” We at World Climate Report love real-world data, and we couldn’t wait to learn about the climate history of places like Kyoto.

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