More great journalism from The Guardian:

Climate change is turning Antarctica green, say researchers

Or maybe it isn’t. Check out the brave actual prediction:

“Antarctica is not going to become entirely green, but it will become more green than it currently is,” said Matt Amesbury, co-author of the research from the University of Exeter.

Can I just say, the mean thickness of the Antarctic ice sheet is 2.16 km. I don’t know many plants that grow through one meter of ice.

Scientists studying banks of moss in Antarctica have found that the quantity of moss, and the rate of plant growth, has shot up in the past 50 years, suggesting the continent may have a verdant future.

There is more chance that Santa Claus will move in.

Maybe scientists will engineer frost resistant plants that survive at minus fifty. Right now, tonight, the centre of Antarctica is only five degrees below that.

Fifty years from now, plants that survive minus 50 will have a home…

Spot the out-of-date, old cherry picking:

In the second half of the 20th century, the Antarctic Peninsula experienced rapid temperature increases, warming by about half a degree per decade.

Nobody mention that in the last 20 years the Antarctic Peninsula cooled by almost 1 degree.

News from 20 years ago? Call the Guardian an “oldspaper”.

So some bits of moss are growing on some corners of Antarctica. Should we thank the blob of superheated magma lying underneath?

All stories on Antarctica

• CO2 hits record high: Antarctic temperatures do nothing
• The non-disaster of 150,000 missing penguins? They just went somewhere else.
• Giant blob of superheated rock under West Antarctica

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It’s all in how you spin it. Supra-zoogle-watts of new wind power capacity was added last year. Wind and solar grew faster than fossil fuels. There are now 341,000 wind turbines around the world! Thus do Meaningless Big-Numbers flow.

Instead  Matt Ridley gets down to the small numbers that tell us what is going on: Wind Turbines are neither clean nor green.

The Spectator:  Here’s a quiz; no conferring. To the nearest whole number, what percentage of the world’s energy consumption was supplied by wind power in 2014, the last year for which there are reliable figures? Was it 20 per cent, 10 per cent or 5 per cent? None of the above: it was 0 per cent. That is to say, to the nearest whole number, there is still no wind power on Earth.

Key Renewable Trends IEA 2016

The only renewables superstars are those you never hear about — wood and hydro:

Their trick is to hide behind the statement that close to 14 per cent of the world’s energy is renewable, with the implication that this is wind and solar. In fact the vast majority — three quarters — is biomass (mainly wood), and a very large part of that is ‘traditional biomass’; sticks and logs and dung burned by the poor in their homes to cook with. Those people need that energy, but they pay a big price in health problems caused by smoke inhalation.

…world energy demand has been growing at about 2 per cent a year for nearly 40 years.

If wind turbines were to supply all of that growth but no more, how many would need to be built each year? The answer is nearly 350,000, since a two-megawatt turbine can produce about 0.005 terawatt-hours per annum.

So we’d have to build 350,000 wind turbines every year just to keep up with the growth in electricity demand each year.

To be fair, apparently wind power generates nearly 5% of Australia’s total energy, which is at the same time, pretty remarkable, and also maybe why manufacturing here is dying.

Here’s a meaningless small number:

Portugal ran for four days straight once on renewable energy alone. Four whole days!

Read the whole article Wind Turbines are neither clean nor green.

UPDATE:

With millions worldwide taken in,
By the Greens through renewable spin,
While the wind-turbine yield,
Is on pie-charts revealed,
As a slice unbelievably thin.

–Ruairi

REFERENCE:

IEA Key Renewable Trends, 2016

Welcome to paleolithic politics: in this version, the witchdoctors are syndicated and with lap tops.

OSLO (Reuters) – Nations around the world have adopted more than 1,200 laws to curb climate change…

Patricia Espinosa, the U.N.’s climate change chief, … said the findings were “cause for optimism”…

Because more laws are always good.

Forty-seven laws had been added since world leaders adopted a Paris Agreement to combat climate change in late 2015, a slowdown from a previous peak of about 100 a year around 2009-13 when many developed nations passed laws.

All those new laws and global temperatures peak anyway. Must be depressing for legisladocktors.

Too many laws is never enough:

“We don’t want weaklings in the chain,” said Martin Chungong, Secretary General of the Inter-Parliamentary Union. He urged all countries to adopt laws that help limit downpours, heatwaves and rising sea levels.

I’m with him. Why not speed limits for winds?

h/t Climate Depot

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All over the US media today —  discussion over whether Trump will pull the US out of the Paris agreement. We all know the Paris agreement will not alter world temperature*, slow storms or stop floods but is potentially a trap for domestic legal action, it hurts the poor via high electricity bills, and reduces living standards (for those outside the $1.5 Trillion Green Industrial Complex). The free citizens around the world may score a big win soon. We hope.

*To put the impotence of Paris in perspective: if we use IPCC estimates, and all industrialized nations make a 100% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2100, we can only cool global temperatures by 0.35C — a third of one degree at most. That’s no oil, no gas, or coal, in a world powered by handmade nuclear reactors using mud bricks transported by horse and cart. 😉 And that assumes that the models are right despite them failing on regional, local, short term[1] [2], polar[3], major feedbacks [4] [5], humidity[6], rainfall[7], drought[8] and on clouds[9].

White House may pull out of Paris agreement due to legal implications

Timothy Cama, The Hill

Trump could announce as soon as next week his plans to pull out. The Huffington Post and New York Times reported on the developments earlier Tuesday.

Central to the administration’s debate is whether the U.S. could reduce its greenhouse gas-cutting commitment for the 2015 pact without running afoul of it.

The agreement states that a country “may at any time adjust its existing nationally determined contribution with a view to enhancing its level of ambition,” which sources say concerns the White House counsel’s office.

If Trump wanted to ratchet down former President Barack Obama’s promise of a 26 percent to 28 percent emissions cut by 2025, the agreement may prevent it.

The administration is also worried that staying in the accord would give environmentalists a legal argument to prevent Trump from repealing climate regulations like the Clean Power Plan.

Climate Deal Could Turn on a Single Phrase: 

John Swartz, NY Times

The provision at issue, Article 4.11, states that a nation “may at any time adjust its existing nationally determined contribution with a view to enhancing its level of ambition.”

Christopher C. Horner, a senior legal fellow at the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, said liberal state attorneys general and climate activists would inevitably sue over efforts to weaken the targets. “This will be most aggressive in the Ninth Circuit, which hopefully triggers some memories in the minds of administration lawyers,” he said, referring to the fight over the administration’s immigration plan, which has been stayed by the California-based federal appeals court.

“Despite the mad rush to insist that plain language means either the opposite of what it says, or else nothing at all, under any canon of construction, Article 4 does not permit revisions downward,” Mr. Horner said. “The language is deliberate and reads only one way: the way it was written and, as the context affirms, was plainly intended.”

The momentum has turned against the Paris agreement for Trump Whitehouse

Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post

Pruitt, who is spearheading the effort to rewrite several Obama-era rules aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions, has argued that exiting the agreement will make it easier to fend off the numerous legal lawsuits he will face in the months ahead.

At a rally with supporters Saturday, Trump said he would make a “big decision” on Paris within the next two weeks and vowed to end “a broken system of global plunder at American expense.”

Be very afraid — the big downside — “Pariah Status”:

“The Trump team seems oblivious to the fact that climate protection is now viewed by leading allies and nations around the world as a key measure of moral and diplomatic standing,” [Paul] Bledsoe said in an email. “The U.S. would be risking pariah status on the international stage by withdrawing from Paris, and even a fig leaf approach of technically staying in the agreement while ignoring most of its provisions would be better than pulling out altogether.”

Watch out. People might say things that are not nice about the USA.

The largest military power in the world and the second largest economy is hardly at risk of being “not included” or exiled from all the other decisions around the world that matter. As the largest contributor to the UN, if they did get excluded, the US would be freer. And if foreign aid was channeled direct instead of through a global bureaucracy, the poor may win too.

Keep reading  →

Thanks to the IPA we can see just how fast green tape multiplies. In 1971 the first environmental laws covered just 57 pages. But now there are 4669 pages of laws. The IPA estimates that costs the nation $176b a year in lost economic opportunity. That’s a lot of jobs, and a lot of trees. *Apologies $176b corrected to million.

Dennis Shanahan, The Australian

Green tape’s 80-fold explosion, costing $176b a year

That’s a curve that looks like the CO2 emissions. Does extra CO2 cause environmental laws? Could be…

…

A tale of economic destruction:

The Adani central mining project application has been running for seven years and faced more than 10 court challenges. It includes a 22,000-page environmental impact statement.

In the Pilbara in Western Australia, the Roy Hill iron ore mine had to obtain 4000 separate licences, approvals and permits just for the pre-construction phase.

The Turnbull government vowed to review environmental laws to prevent activist groups’ legal challenges to development projects ranging from dams and roads to coalmines. It said challenges under section 487 of the Environment Act, which allows anyone with a “special interest in the environment” the right to challenge, were becoming more “vexatious and frivolous” . Of 32 legal challenges under the act that went to court, developers spent a cumulative 7500 days — or 20 years — in court even though 28 of the environmental cases were defeated and three required only minor technical changes to go ahead.

A trace gas in our atmosphere hit 410ppm for the millionth day on Earth says Grist and this turned the planet in to something different. Who knew 410 was that exciting?

We just hit 410 ppm of CO2. Welcome to a whole new world.

This is not normal: We’re on track to witness a climate unseen in 50 million years by mid-century.

In pre-industrial times, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere stood at 280 parts per million. And that number has been rising ever since, warming the planet by 1.8 degrees F (1 degree C) along the way.

It’s Big Number Fear Mongering which works so well on the innumerate. It might be the first time CO2 was this high in 50 million years, but if CO2 is so important, how come temperatures  haven’t gone “to a whole new world”?

Kate Yoder on Grist has the usual calm dispassionate analysis:

As fictional carb-thief Aladdin once said: “Unbelievable sights/Indescribable feeling/Soaring, tumbling, freewheeling/Through an endless diamond sky.”

Frankly, I think Grist missed that in Base 3 this is the incredibly important 120,012 ppm.  Spooky eh?

PS: Find numbers in other bases here. How much fun can you have?