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Prymnesium parvum has wreaked calamitous damage on angling spots in Norfolk, making it an economic and environmental threat

Many effects of global warming appear gradually but can cause sudden and devastating changes. A rise in sea levels is one; it makes estuaries and lagoons slightly more saline, which in the case of the Norfolk Broads, suddenly threatened a big attraction, angling.

This is because tiny “golden” algae called Prymnesium parvum, which thrive in slightly saline or mineral rich water, can turn toxic, suffocating the fish by destroying their gills.

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If you’ve been following media coverage of the post-hurricane flooding in Texas during the last couple of weeks, you will have seen many images and accounts of people evacuating with their pets.

You will no doubt also have seen emergency responders and volunteers rescuing abandoned pets and stranded horses and livestock. Similar stories play out during all types of natural disasters, whether they’re floods, cyclones, or bushfires.

An estimated 63% of Australian households have at least one pet – one of the highest rates of pet ownership in the world – and including those pets in your emergency plan can be vital.

Last week a New South Wales coronial inquest into the 2015 Hunter Valley floods heard that an elderly resident who drowned refused to leave her home without her dog and bird, prompting parliamentary questions to the NSW minister for emergency services over provisions for animals in emergencies.

Read more: Dry winter primes Sydney Basin for early start of bushfire season

I have spent the past three years leading a project on animal management in emergencies, which considers the challenges for emergency responders, as well as owners of pets, horses, pet livestock, animal-related businesses, and livestock farmers.

Recently we have teamed up with a community-led group in the Blue Mountains, Blue ARC Animal Ready Community, to focus on identifying and helping to solve local challenges and barriers to emergency preparedness and planning for animals.

Research suggests people often forget to include their chooks in household emergency plans. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri

So if you have animals, what can you do to protect them? The first thing to do is check general resources on emergency plans. Unfortunately there is no Australia-wide emergency response approach, so it’s important to make plans that are suited to your own situation and the help you have available.

Here are my top tips for taking care of your animals in an emergency:

• It sounds obvious, but creating an emergency plan that includes pets is the first step. If you don’t have a household plan, the Australian Red Cross Rediplan is a good place to start. Consider a range of potential emergencies in your planning: heatwaves, prolonged loss of power, floods, cyclones and bushfires. Most importantly, think about every creature in your household: our research suggests that chooks are popular but often not considered when it comes to emergency planning.

• Plan to leave early. Evacuating with animals can take longer, especially when you have multiple types of animals or need to make multiple journeys. Don’t plan to leave animals behind, or plan to leave a household member behind to take care of the animals. Stay aware of weather conditions and emergency warnings.

• Have an emergency kit for your animals: fill a “go bag” (or box) with items you’ll need if you need to leave in a hurry. If you have essentials you can’t afford to leave in a box, make a checklist and know where they are. There are some excellent checklists available online to get you started.

• Plan where you will take your animals. Emergency services can’t help evacuate your pets or larger animals in emergency situations, and not all evacuation centres will accept them. The official position is that your animals are your responsibility, so you need to know where you’ll take your animals and how you’ll get them there. Most people rely on taking them to friends or family, but this can sometimes mean that different animals need to go to different places.

Read more: With the rise of apartment living, what’s a nation of pet owners to do?

• Plan for what will happen if you’re not at home, or can’t get back home. No one likes considering this situation, but it is often a reality. Speak to neighbours or nearby friends about what you would like them to do if you’re not home (and offer them your support if they’re away). Make sure you have contact numbers for neighbours and those who might be able to help in these situations.

• If you have horses or other large animals, find a buddy. Horses, and other large pet livestock, are special cases in emergencies: their size means that there are additional challenges in their handling, loading, transportation, and relocation. Many equine groups have guidance for horse owners, and advocate buddy systems to help owners. There are also networking systems, such as Walking Forward Disaster Relief Team, that help horse owners prearrange safer places to relocate their animals ahead of emergencies.

• Hardest of all: practice your plan. Most emergency preparedness advice suggests that you practice your plan, but it’s particularly important with pets. It’s better to find out early that your ideal plan doesn’t work in practice. Finding work-arounds, and making a plan B and C, is far easier without the threat of imminent danger.

Remember, your animals depend on you. Plan for all the human and non-human animals in your household, and stay safe.

September 16 and 17, 2017, is the NSW Rural Fire Service-led Get Ready weekend, with various bushfire awareness and preparedness activities being planned across the state. To support that event in the Blue Mountains we have co-developed, with Blue ARC and the Resilience and Preparedness Group, posters and flyers encouraging residents to make an emergency plan for all the family, including links to useful resources.

Mel Taylor receives funding from the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre

The Category 5 storm is due to make landfall on the Leeward Islands in the Caribbean later.

A supplier is working with farms in Hertfordshire, Hampshire, Suffolk, Sussex and Wiltshire.

The variables in the climate change formula are mitigation, adaptation, and suffering. Denying the problem loads up on the suffering.

Human-caused climate change amplified the damages and suffering associated with Hurricane Harvey in several different ways. First, sea level rise caused by global warming increased the storm surge and therefore the coastal inundation and flooding from the storm. Second, the warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor, which intensifies extreme precipitation events like the record-shattering rainfall associated with Harvey. Third, warmer ocean waters essentially act as hurricane fuel, which may have made Harvey more intense than it would otherwise have been.

There are other possible human factors at play about which we have less certainty. For example, it’s possible that Harvey stalled off the coast of Texas because of changes in atmospheric circulation patterns associated with human-caused global warming. As climate scientist Michael Mann notes, his research has shown that these sorts of stationary summer weather patterns tend to happen more often in a hotter world, but we can’t yet say if that happened in Harvey’s case.

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German environment group says industry has not tried to cut pollution over the past year and reneged on a promise to install soot filters

The world’s cruise ships have done virtually nothing to reduce their pollution over the past year, with some still emitting as much particulate matter as 1m cars a day, a report says.

The annual survey of 63 ships, conducted by the German environment group Nabu, refused to recommend a single one for adequately reducing its environmental impact in 2017.

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Experts says the 2017 bushfire season will start early and be more intense than usual.

Independent Senator Jacqui Lambie says Snowy Hydro 2.0 and other projects should be fast-tracked, rather than relying on coal.

Scientists from Florida International University have teamed up with Nasa to create the world's deepest coral farm in an effort to tackle the decline of coral reefs.

Energy rule-maker says it supports change to 5 minute settlement period, but wants it introduced gradually and not before July, 2021.

Coalition wants AGL to keep 46-year old Liddell coal generator open another five years, despite AEMO saying there is no threat to security standards and best way to minimise is to have more renewables.

AEMO says the biggest threat to Australia's electricity supply is hotter temperatures, failure of large fossil fuel plants, and delays in investment in new wind and solar. Smart solutions such as demand management and storage will mean no need for new coal generators.

Wind energy has supplied a constant output of 1200MW over last three days in South Australia - just like "baseload"

Abriachan, Highlands In places, the canopy of thistle, ling, scabious and soft rush was sunk in a near-weightless empire of silk

Aside from the slurry of S-sounds tipped out by a roadside burn, there was nothing at this spot but the early morning hush of the moor. Yet the silence seemed only to emphasise all the internal noise generated in me by an assault from midges. They started as a loose-meshed veil about my hands and face but soon thickened into a maddening private halo.

They particularly wanted my wrists – I have 23 bites there as I type – and I could invert my binoculars to watch the 2mm beasts, with their pin-thin heads and barred bodies, at their work. How can something so easily turned to a smudge on a notebook page puncture human skin?

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Government experts say adverse health effects are unlikely, but campaigners argue the primary school scheme should switch to organic as a precaution

The free fruit and vegetables provided by the government to millions of young schoolchildren usually contain the residues of multiple pesticides, according to official tests collated in a new report.

In the last decade, residues of of 123 pesticides were found, while apples and bananas given out recently in schools contained more residues than those sold in supermarkets.

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More than four times as many people blame Malcolm Turnbull for sky-high power prices than renewable energy companies. That power campaign went well didn't it!

Australian tech investor Mike Cannon-Brookes has tipped close to $4m into home energy loan start-up Brighte.

The Mt. Takeha volcano in west Antartica rises more than 2,000 metres above the surrounding ice sheet. Wikimedia commons

Around 25,000 years ago, during a period known as the Last Glacial Maximum, ice covered much of the world’s landmasses. Comparatively weaker sunlight, large continental ice sheets, and very low amounts of carbon dioxide in the air created the right conditions for an ice age. During the next 15,000 years the global climate shifted from glacial to warm, interglacial conditions as sunlight strengthened.

But the Southern Hemisphere’s climate changed abruptly roughly 18,000 years ago. Rather than the gradual decline you might expect as Earth’s orbit slowly drew nearer to the Sun, something triggered a widespread and simultaneous abrupt change in climate across many continents.

In research published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an international group of researchers and I discovered that a unique, 192-year series of massive volcanic eruptions coincided exactly with the onset of this period of rapid, widespread Southern Hemisphere climate change.

Read more: Volcanoes under the ice: melting Antarctic ice could fight climate change

These abrupt climate changes included the pronounced retreat of glaciers in Patagonia and New Zealand and reduced aridity in southern Australia. Lakes rapidly expanded in the Bolivian Andes, and summertime rain in subtropical Brazil increased. Atmospheric dust, recorded in ocean sediment and Antarctic ice cores, was sharply reduced.

Many of these changes have been attributed to a sudden poleward shift in westerly winds encircling Antarctica. The shifting winds changed ocean circulation and ventilation in the deep ocean, affecting glaciers across the southern hemisphere.

What our research explains for the first time is why the winds suddenly changed, and why there was a simultaneous climate transformation across the whole Southern Hemisphere.

Clues within the ice

Antarctica has always been home to globally significant volcanoes. However, 17,700 years ago a unique event began: nearly continuous volcanic eruptions over 192 years that spewed huge amounts of chemicals known as halogens into the Antarctic atmosphere.

A researcher loads 18,000-year-old Antarctic ice for continuous analysis. PNAS, CC BY

These halogens – including powerful ozone destroyers bromine, chloride and iodine – created a hole in the ozone layer, which was in many ways similar to the modern hole triggered by humans’ use of halogen-containing compounds called CFCs. This led to large-scale changes in atmospheric circulation and initiated the shift away from a glacial climate state.

These findings are based on detailed chemical measurements of a broad range of elements and chemical traces in Antarctic ice cores. Most of these came from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide (WAIS), a 3,405 metre deep drilling site that provides highly precise climate records over the past 68,000 years.

Read more: Explainer: what are ice cores?

Our research included the broadest suite of chemical and elemental analysis ever attempted on a deep ice core, and the most precise breakdown of time. This record of the eruptions was precisely duplicated in replicate samples from the same ice core, and in ice cores taken from near Byrd Station in West Antarctica, and Taylor Glacier in Antartica’s Dry Valleys.

The ice core records showed a very unusual, 192-year chemical anomaly from 17,748 to 17,556 years before present.

We augmented the high resolution ice core analyses with a host of lower resolution measurements of interplanetary dust, rock fragments ejected during volcanic eruptions, and sulphur isotopes. Together, they clearly showed the chemical anomaly was the result of a series of massive volcanic eruptions from Mt Takahe, about 350km north of our main drill site.

Other characteristics of the chemical record – including anomalies in sulfur isotopes and near complete bromine depletion in the ice during the event – were consistent with increased ultraviolet radiation at Earth’s surface. It suggests that halogens (chlorine, bromine, and iodine) and other material from the Mt Takahe eruptions reached the Antarctic stratosphere where they destroyed ozone.

The massive, halogen-rich eruptions of Mt. Takahe coincided with the onset of abrupt and widespread climate change in the southern hemisphere, and increasing greenhouse gas concentrations during the end of the last ice age. Author provided

These eruptions and their chemical signature are unique in the 68,000-year WAIS Divide record. Fallout containing elevated levels of hydrofluoric and hydrochloric acid, as well as toxic heavy metals, extended at least 2,800km from Mt Takahe and may have reached southern South America.

Correlation vs causation

The Southern Hemisphere’s glaciers took 10,000 years to fully retreat. But these unique volcanic eruptions occurred just before (or possibly during) the most significant period of rapid climate change in the Southern Hemisphere, and global greenhouse gas concentrations increased during this time.

The fundamental question is: “did these two events occur at the same time by coincidence or were they causally linked?” The probability that these two events coincided simply by chance is negligible. Based on the evidence we found in Antartica’s ice cores, the depletion of the ozone layer may be the crucial linking factor.

We can bolster this link by comparing the climate change of 17,700 years ago to observable climate change today attributed to the modern Antarctic ozone hole. We can also look to climate models that simulate the behaviour of an ozone hole under glacial conditions. Overall, the widespread climate change observed in many paleoclimate records can best be explained by this singular and dramatic event in western Antarctica.

Joe McConnell receives funding from U.S. National Science Foundation.

Hydro and gas generation get higher half hourly prices than coal in Australia's energy market. Wind & solar PV take a discount.

Australia faces energy crisis caused by failure of Labor and Coalition to face reality of both climate change and the technological transformation of the energy sector.