Leaked documents reveal UK fight to dilute EU green energy targets | Environment | The Guardian

Fatih Birol, chief economist for the International Energy Agency, told the Guardian that a renewed focus on gas would be bad news for renewables. "It would threaten investment in renewables, if there is an over-reliance on gas," he said.

In one leaked document, from the Council of the EU on the draft 2050 proposals on energy, the UK has attempted to excise a reference to a potential 30% target for renewables by 2030, replacing it with the much more vague wording of "a significantly increased share for renewable in the energy mix". At another point in the document, which is dated 23 April 2012, the UK has tried to remove the word "urgent".

Brad Plumer: Why we ignore low-tech fixes for the climate | JunkScience.com

What this really says, albeit buried deep in the article, is that all the world’s non-hydro “renewables” amount to less than 5% of power-starved China’s coal-fired generation. “Insignificant tokenism” springs to mind.

Man Made Global Warming In Alaska | Real Science

Hansen tells us that January temperatures in Barrow have warmed half a degree since 1930, which means that an honest reporting would be about 1.5C cooling in Alaska over the last 80 years.

The Methane Big Lie | Real Science

The world has enough natural gas to power it for many centuries. The idea of clean, abundant natural gas is terrifying to people who have invested heavily in nearly worthless technologies like solar and wind powered electricity. This has led to idiotic claims that methane is 20X worse than CO2 and will cause mankind to go extinct.

The truth is that methane has almost no effect on Earth’s radiative balance. It has only a couple of narrow absorption bands, both of which overlap with much more abundant H2O. The atmospheric mole fraction of CH4 is less than 0.000002

Warming Arctic Tundra Producing Pop-Up Forests - NYTimes.com

the tundra appears to be greening in a big way, various studies have shown...

The lead authors expound in the news release distributed by Oxford and the University of Lapland:

“The speed and magnitude of the observed change is far greater than we expected,” said Prof. Bruce Forbes of the Arctic Center, University of Lapland, corresponding author of the paper.