The Balearic islands of Ibiza, Majorca, Menorca and Formentera have announced plans to phase out greehouse gas emissions by 2050. Under the new scheme, new diesel cars will be taken off the car market by 2025 and, at this time, all street and road lighting is to be replaced by LEDs. Solar panels are to be installed on all buildings with roof spaning more than 1,000 square metres, including car parks, hospitals, supermarkets and sports stadiums. And, by 2035, all hire cars are to be electric. Francina Armengol, the president of the Balearics’ socialist-green government, said their territorial limits made them “an ideal space to promote electromobility and to expand renewable energy so that it eventually becomes our only source of power.”Joan Groizard, the islands’ director-general for climate change said the move could see the islands clash with the Spanish government, and that his government was studying the legal implications “very carefully”. “There is a live debate about what regions can and can’t do, and we are working very practically on the legal side of this,” he told the Guardian. “We can’t ratify the Paris agreement on our own but we can take a decision to adhere to it. Climate change is already having a big impact on our islands and hopefully our actions can have a knock-on effect elsewhere.” Last month, Spain’s constitutional court froze a similarly ambitious climate change act passed by the restive parliament in Catalonia. The Balearics generate less than 3% of their electricity from renewable sources at present, primarily from solar panels, The Times reports. Coal-fired power plants, diesel generators and gas plants account for more than 70% of supply.

Business lobbies in Europe and the US are seeking a distinct, direct and formalised “business channel” into UN climate talks, Climate Home News reports. In a submission to UN Climate Change’s Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI) in January, Business Europe, which represents industry confederations in 28 EU states, asked for a conduit to the top table. “We feel that there are many good business ideas to tackle climate change that might not always be reaching negotiators,” the group’s communications director, Peter Sennekamp, told Climate Home News. “It would be helpful for negotiators to have a direct contact with business representatives in a more formal matter. Therefore, to assure that information reaches them in a timely and consistent manner, we believe that having a recognised focal point is crucial.” However, campaigners oppose this move, with one describing this proposal as “giving the fox a doggy door to the hen house”. “Groups like Business Europe have long fought to insinuate themselves into climate policymaking in order to undermine it and direct it toward the financial interests of its members,” said Jesse Bragg, a spokesman for campaign group Corporate Accountability.

The world’s first floating wind farm has weathered winter storms and produced more electricity than anticipated, according to the Scottish edition of The Times. The five turbines located 16 miles off Peterhead, Aberdeenshire, are said to be capable of powering more than 20,000 homes and a spokesperson for Statoil, one of the project’s developers, said the site had operated at 65% of its maximum capacity across November, December and January. A fixed offshore wind farm would typically run at 45 per cent to 60 per cent capacity, a spokesperson said. Carbon Brief previously published a Q&A on the viability of floating offshore windfarms. Elsewhere in The Times, it is reported that research suggests opponents of wind farms are unlikely to be convinced to support them by an offer of shares. Instead, potential objectors are more likely to accept the offer of a cash payout, according to a study conducted by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) looking at how resistance to wind farms could be reduced.

Climate change could make severe flooding could more frequent in the UK, the Environment Agency (EA) has said. Over the past decade, the UK has faced more intense flooding due to an increase in extreme weather events, the EA said. The Met Office finds that there have been 17 record-breaking rainfall months or seasons since 1910 – but that nine of them have occurred since 2000. At the same time, coastal parts of the country are facing an increased risk of flooding and storm surges because of sea level rise.

Climate change is “a real problem” capable of causing “social disruption” and “threats to political stability”, the US director of national intelligence has said. Writing in US intelligence community’s Worldwide Threat Assessment, Daniel R. Coats, the director of national intelligence whose office oversees 17 intelligence agencies including the CIA and the NSA, warned of the threats associated with climate change. His assessment is analysed by Justin Gillis of the New York Times. “The biggest thing missing from this document is any explicit attribution of the cause of global climate disruption,” Gillis writes. Vox also covers the story.

US network news coverage of climate change soared in 2017, writes environmental scientist Dana Nuccitelli in The Guardian, however, much of this coverage focused around the Trump administration and its withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. Analysis by non-profit research centre Media Matters for America found that in 2017, 79% of the time that corporate broadcast networks spent covering climate change featured actions or statements by the Trump administration. “Non-Trump related events linked to climate change like the record hurricanes, droughts, heatwaves, and floods should be the subject of far more news segments,” Nuccitelli argues.

The presence of large Northern Hemisphere ice sheets and reduced greenhouse gas concentrations during the Last Glacial Maximum fundamentally altered global climate dynamics. However, little is known about changes in short-term climate variability at mid- to high latitudes. This study used a high-resolution water isotope record from West Antarctica to demonstrate that interannual to decadal climate variability at high southern latitudes was almost twice as large at the Last Glacial Maximum as during the past 11,700 years. Climate model simulations indicate that this reflects an increase in the connection between the tropical Pacific and West Antarctica, owing to a shift in the location of tropical convection. This shift can be attributed to the influence of the North American ice sheets on atmospheric circulation.