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The proposed closure date for AGL’s ancient and unreliable coal power station, is five years and probably two elections away.

Sunswift Violet solar race car experienced a mishap while undergoing race testing at the Sydney Motorsport speedway in Eastern Creek late on Tuesday, postponing the unveiling.

London's water authorities are working against the clock to dissolve a massive blob of hardened waste that's blocking a section of the city's sewer system.

Has internal division over energy policy inside the Coalition caused the Government to drift away from the Finkel recommendations?

Lake Liddell with power stations. Wikimedia commons

The proposed closure date for Liddell, AGL’s ancient and unreliable coal power station, is five years and probably two elections away. While AGL has asked for 90 days to come up with a plan to deliver equivalent power into the market, state and local governments, businesses and households will continue to drive the energy revolution.

At the same time as AGL is insisting they won’t sell Liddell or extend its working life, government debate has returned to the Clean Energy Target proposed by the Finkel Review. Now Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is suggesting a redesign of the proposal, potentially paving the way for subsidies to low-emission, high-efficiency coal power stations.

But even if subsidies for coal are built into a new “reliable energy target”, there’s no sign that the market has any appetite for building new coal. For a potential investor in a coal-fired generator, the eight years before it could produce a cash flow is a long time in a rapidly changing world. And the 30 years needed to turn a profit is a very long time indeed.

Read more: The true cost of keeping the Liddell power plant open

We also need to remember that baseload coal power stations are not much help in coping with peak demand – the issue that will determine whether people in elevators are trapped by a sudden blackout, per Barnaby Joyce. It was interesting that a Melbourne Energy Institute study of global pumped hydro storage mentioned that electricity grids with a lot of nuclear or coal baseload generation have used pumped storage capacity for decades: it’s needed to supply peak demand.

Solar power is driving down daytime prices – which used to provide much of the income that coal plants needed to make a profit. Energy storage will further reduce the scope to profit from high and volatile electricity prices, previously driven by high demand and supply shortages in hot weather, or when a large coal-fired generator failed or was shut down for maintenance at a crucial time.

Read more: Slash Australians’ power bills by beheading a duck at night

There is now plenty of evidence that the diverse mix of energy efficiency, demand response, energy storage, renewable generation and smart management can ensure reliable and affordable electricity to cope with daily and seasonal variable electricity loads. New traditional baseload generators will not be financially viable, as they simply won’t capture the profits they need during the daytime.

The government is now focused on AGL and how it will deliver 1,000 megawatts of new dispatchable supply. In practice, appropriate policy action would facilitate the provision of plenty of supply, storage, demand response and energy efficiency to ensure reliable supply. But the government is unable to deliver policy because of its internal squabbles, and AGL looks like a convenient scapegoat.

Demand response is already working

It is astounding that conservatives can continue to blame renewable energy for increasing prices. They are either ignorant or have outdated agendas to prop up coal. A smart, efficient, renewable electricity future will be cheaper than any other – albeit not necessarily cheaper than our past electricity prices.

Along with other studies, CSIRO’s recent Low Emission Technology Roadmap showed that the “ambitious energy productivity (and renewable energy)” scenario was quite reasonably priced.

While the debate continues to focus on large-scale supply, “behind the meter” action is accelerating through demand response, energy efficiency and on-site renewables. As I mentioned in a previous column, the ARENA/AEMO demand response pilot has attracted almost 700MW of flexible demand reduction to be delivered before Christmas, and another 1,000MW by December 2018. That’s nearly as much as Liddell could supply flat out. And there’s plenty more where that came from.

Spending a few hundred million dollars to prop up an old coal plant for a few years would shift it to the high-cost end of coal generators. So when prices fall, it would be one of the first coal plants to have to shut down, and among the last to come back online when prices rebound. This would add to the stress on the facility and the management challenges of operating it – unless it had preferential cheap access to a lot of pumped hydro capacity.

In the medium to long term, we do need to work out how to supply electricity for 24/7 industries but, according to AEMO, this is not urgent. We don’t know how much of that kind of industry will be here in ten years or so, given high gas prices, the age of their industrial plants, and their relatively small scale relative to their international competitors.

On the other hand, they may adapt by investing in behind-the-meter measures. Or they could relocate to sunny places and be part of what the economist Ross Garnaut has called the “low-carbon energy superpower”.

Disclosure

Alan Pears has worked for government, business, industry associations public interest groups and at universities on energy efficiency, climate response and sustainability issues since the late 1970s. He is now an honorary Senior Industry Fellow at RMIT University and a consultant, as well as an adviser to a range of industry associations and public interest groups. His investments in managed funds include firms that benefit from growth in clean energy. He has shares in Hepburn Wind.

The Australian Renewable Energy Agency says it is seeking ideas to help it explore Australia’s potential to export renewable energy in forms such as hydrogen – a goal that has attracted the interest of japanese trading giants and leading players such as economist Ross Garrnaut and ex CEFC boss Oliver Yates. ARENA said on Wednesday it […]

Federal government has trampled over several key Finkel measures it supposedly has adopted. But as experts plead with Coalition to allow AEMO and Energy Security Board to get on with job, Turnbull may deliver Abbott's wish, and kill new renewable projects.

Innovative EnergyAustralia pilot scheme allows solar customers to trade excess rooftop PV generation with MCG, in exchange for VIP stadium experiences.

South Australia has set a new record low for grid electricity demand, thanks to its increasing supply of rooftop solar.

Ministers are thought to be planning to offer £3m for initiatives such as solar panels on social housing

Green energy projects run by cities and local authorities around the UK stand to receive millions of pounds of government support, providing another fillip for renewable power just a day after the subsidised price of windfarms hit a record low.

The Guardian understands that ministers this autumn will offer more than £3m to help local leaders build low carbon initiatives, such as installing solar panels on social housing.

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You may have seen the media images of bays and coastlines along Hurricane Irma’s track, in which the ocean has eerily “disappeared”, leaving locals amazed and wildlife stranded. What exactly was happening?

These coastlines were experiencing a “negative storm surge” – one in which the storm pushes water away from the land, rather than towards it.

Read more: Irma and Harvey: very different storms, but both affected by climate change

Most people are familiar with the idea that the sea is not at the same level everywhere at the same time. It is an uneven surface, pulled around by gravity, such as the tidal effects of the Moon and Sun. This is why we see tides rise and fall at any given location.

At the same time, Earth’s atmosphere has regions where the air pressure is higher or lower than average, in ever-shifting patterns as weather systems move around. Areas of high atmospheric pressure actually push down on the ocean surface, lowering sea level, while low pressure allows the sea to rise slightly.

This is known as the “inverse barometer effect”. Roughly speaking, a 1 hectopascal change in atmospheric pressure (the global average pressure is 1,010hPa) causes the sea level to move by 1cm.

When a low-pressure system forms over warm tropical oceans under the right conditions, it can intensify to become a tropical depression, then a tropical storm, and ultimately a tropical cyclone – known as a hurricane in the North Atlantic or a typhoon in the northwest Pacific.

As this process unfolds, the atmospheric pressure drops ever lower and wind strength increases, because the pressure difference with surrounding areas causes more air to flow towards the storm.

In the northern hemisphere tropical cyclones rotate anticlockwise and officially become hurricanes once they reach a maximum sustained wind speed of around 120km per hour. If sustained wind speeds reach 178km per hour the storm is classed as a major hurricane.

Surging waters

A “normal” storm surge happens when a tropical cyclone reaches shallow coastal waters. In places where the wind is blowing onshore, water is pushed up against the land. At the same time the cyclone’s incredibly low air pressure allows the water to rise higher than normal. On top of all this, the high waves whipped up by the wind mean that even more water inundates the coast.

The anticlockwise rotation of Atlantic hurricanes means that the storm’s northern side produces winds blowing from the east, and its southern side brings westerly winds. In the case of Hurricane Irma, which tracked almost directly up the Florida panhandle, this meant that as it approached, the east coast of the Florida peninsula experienced easterly onshore winds and suffered a storm surge that caused severe inundation and flooding in areas such as Miami.

The negative surge

In contrast, these same easterly winds had the opposite effect on Florida’s west coast (the Gulf Coast), where water was pushed offshore, leading to a negative storm surge. This was most pronounced in areas such as Fort Myers and Tampa Bay, which normally has a relatively low tide range of less than 1m.

The negative surge developed over a period of about 12 hours and resulted in a water level up to 1.5m below the predicted low tide level. Combined with the fact that the sea is shallow in these areas anyway, it looked as if the sea had simply disappeared.

Read more: Predicting disaster: better hurricane forecasts buy vital time for residents.

As tropical cyclones rapidly lose energy when moving over land, the unusually low water level was expected to rapidly rise, which prompted authorities to issue a flash flood warning to alert onlookers to the potential danger. The negative surge was replaced by a storm surge of a similar magnitude within about 6 hours at Fort Myers and 12 hours later at Tampa Bay.

Rising waters are the deadliest aspect of hurricanes – even more than the ferocious winds. So while it may be tempting to explore the uncovered seabed, it’s certainly not wise to be there when the sea comes rushing back.

Darrell Strauss receives funding from an Advance Queensland Research Fellowship in partnership with Griffith University and the City of Gold Coast.

Here's the uncomfortable truth for the federal government: Keeping Liddell open will possibly make electricity prices higher and electricity less reliable. The fuel cost alone is over $60 MWh and may increase.

Wind energy has set new records in Europe, accounting for 20% of all demand, with wind, solar and hydro producing twice as much as coal and gas in afternoon.

Offshore wind auction results means that these projects are close to being subsidy-free, helping shift the conversation from renewables being expensive, towards how cheap, variable zero-carbon power can be integrated into the UK grid.

The latest climate modelling shows more Australians are at risk of being affected by natural disaster, but how resilient are we should the unthinkable occur?

Industry body warns over need for seasonal workers after Brexit as growers face 20% shortfall in supply of labour

UK apple growers are in the grip of a 20% shortfall in the supply of seasonal labour, pushing them towards “a cliff edge” as Brexit nears, the industry has warned.

At the start of the annual British apple harvesting season with more than 20 indigenous varieties going on sale in supermarkets, the main trade body for both apples and pears says worries about future labour availability are at the top of its lobbying agenda.

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Emergency crews have begun an oil spill clean-up after an oil tanker sank close to the island of Salamis.

Melting Antarctic ice can trigger effects on the other side of the globe. NASA/Jane Peterson

Melting of Antarctica’s ice can trigger rapid warming on the other side of the planet, according to our new research which details how just such an abrupt climate event happened 30,000 years ago, in which the North Atlantic region warmed dramatically.

This idea of “tipping points” in Earth’s system has had something of a bad rap ever since the 2004 blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow purportedly showed how melting polar ice can trigger all manner of global changes.

But while the movie certainly exaggerated the speed and severity of abrupt climate change, we do know that many natural systems are vulnerable to being pushed into different modes of operation. The melting of Greenland’s ice sheet, the retreat of Arctic summer sea ice, and the collapse of the global ocean circulation are all examples of potential vulnerability in a future, warmer world.

Read more: Chasing ice: how ice cores shape our understanding of ancient climate.

Of course it is notoriously hard to predict when and where elements of Earth’s system will abruptly tip into a different state. A key limitation is that historical climate records are often too short to test the skill of our computer models used to predict future environmental change, hampering our ability to plan for potential abrupt changes.

Fortunately, however, nature preserves a wealth of evidence in the landscape that allows us to understand how longer time-scale shifts can happen.

Core values

One of the most important sources of information on past climate tipping points are the kilometre-long cores of ice drilled from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which preserve exquisitely detailed information stretching back up to 800,000 years.

The Greenland ice cores record massive, millennial-scale swings in temperature that have occurred across the North Atlantic region over the past 90,000 years. The scale of these swings is staggering: in some cases temperatures rose by 16℃ in just a few decades or even years.

Twenty-five of these major so-called Dansgaard–Oeschger (D-O) warming events have been identified. These abrupt swings in temperature happened too quickly to have been caused by Earth’s slowly changing orbit around the Sun. Fascinatingly, when ice cores from Antarctica are compared with those from Greenland, we see a “seesaw” relationship: when it warms in the north, the south cools, and vice versa.

Attempts to explain the cause of this bipolar seesaw have traditionally focused on the North Atlantic region, and include melting ice sheets, changes in ocean circulation or wind patterns.

But as our new research shows, these might not be the only cause of D-O events.

Our new paper, published today in Nature Communications, suggests that another mechanism, with its origins in Antarctica, has also contributed to these rapid seesaws in global temperature.

Tree of knowledge The 30,000-year-old key to climate secrets. Chris Turney, Author provided

We know that there have been major collapses of the Antarctic ice sheet in the past, raising the possibility that these may have tipped one or more parts of the Earth system into a different state. To investigate this idea, we analysed an ancient New Zealand kauri tree that was extracted from a peat swamp near Dargaville, Northland, and which lived between 29,000 and 31,000 years ago.

Through accurate dating, we know that this tree lived through a short D-O event, during which (as explained above) temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere would have risen. Importantly, the unique pattern of atmospheric radioactive carbon (or carbon-14) found in the tree rings allowed us to identify similar changes preserved in climate records from ocean and ice cores (the latter using beryllium-10, an isotope formed by similar processes to carbon-14). This tree thus allows us to compare directly what the climate was doing during a D-O event beyond the polar regions, providing a global picture.

The extraordinary thing we discovered is that the warm D-O event coincided with a 400-year period of surface cooling in the south and a major retreat of Antarctic ice.

When we searched through other climate records for more information about what was happening at the time, we found no evidence of a change in ocean circulation. Instead we found a collapse in the rain-bearing Pacific trade winds over tropical northeast Australia that was coincident with the 400-year southern cooling.

Read more: Two centuries of continuous volcanic eruption may have triggered the end of the ice age.

To explore how melting Antarctic ice might cause such dramatic change in the global climate, we used a climate model to simulate the release of large volumes of freshwater into the Southern Ocean. The model simulations all showed the same response, in agreement with our climate reconstructions: regardless of the amount of freshwater released into the Southern Ocean, the surface waters of the tropical Pacific nevertheless warmed, causing changes to wind patterns that in turn triggered the North Atlantic to warm too.

Future work is now focusing on what caused the Antarctic ice sheets to retreat so dramatically. Regardless of how it happened, it looks like melting ice in the south can drive abrupt global change, something of which we should be aware in a future warmer world.

Chris Turney receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Jonathan Palmer receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC).

Peter Kershaw has received fundng from the Australian Research Council.

Steven Phipps receives funding from the Australian Antarctic Science Program, the Australian Research Council, the International Union for Quaternary Research, the National Computational Infrastructure Merit Allocation Scheme, the New Zealand Marsden Fund, the University of Tasmania and UNSW Australia.

Zoe Thomas receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Lawyers for two anti-fracking campaigners argue in high court that injunction obtained by Ineos curtail’s protester rights

The legality of a wide-ranging injunction obtained against anti-fracking protesters by a multinational firm is to be examined in a three-day court hearing.

Two campaigners have launched a legal challenge against the injunction obtained by Ineos, the petrochemicals giant. Joe Corré, the son of the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, and Joe Boyd, say it is draconian, oppressive and dramatically curtails protesters’ rights.

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Fertile soil is being lost at rate of 24bn tonnes a year through intensive farming as demand for food increases, says UN-backed study

A third of the planet’s land is severely degraded and fertile soil is being lost at the rate of 24bn tonnes a year, according to a new United Nations-backed study that calls for a shift away from destructively intensive agriculture.

The alarming decline, which is forecast to continue as demand for food and productive land increases, will add to the risks of conflicts such as those seen in Sudan and Chad unless remedial actions are implemented, warns the institution behind the report.

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