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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.

Greenland may have gained a small amount of ice over the 2016-17 year - a one-year blip in long-term trend of year-on-year declines.

Renewable energy is increasingly profitable without subsidies, and coal has become uninvestable without government intervention – this used to be the opposite.

Republican Congressman named to head NASA had demanded Obama apologize for funding climate change research.

Eight companies short-listed to tender for job to develop, operate 5MW solar farm on former landfill site at Newcastle.

NSW community-owned retailer to buy excess rooftop solar from customers, as well as from local community solar farms and gardens, to sell on to other customers who can’t generate solar themselves.

Scientists connect the solar storms behind the Aurora Borealis to the deaths of 29 whales in the North Sea.

Palaeontologists are turning to technology to preserve dinosaur fossils.

The Voyager 1 space probe was launched 40 years ago and continues to send back data from interstellar space.

Under the programme, based on schemes in Scandinavia, customers would pay a surcharge that would be reimbursed when they return to the shop

The Scottish government is planning to introduce a deposit return scheme for bottles and cans.

Customers would pay a surcharge when purchasing bottles or cans under the programme, which will be refunded when they return them to a shop.

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Snapper is one of the fish under New Zealand's Quota Management system. from www.shutterstock.com, CC BY-ND

In popular imagination, New Zealand’s fisheries management system is a globally recognised story of sustainability, reflecting a “clean and green” environmental ethos.

Indeed, New Zealand’s fisheries have been ranked among the best managed in the world - an accolade based on the early and wholehearted adoption of a Quota Management System (QMS).

This perception is echoed in a recently published article, but we take issue with the methodology and its conclusions. Claims that New Zealand’s QMS is an unmitigated success simply do not match the facts.

How New Zealand’s QMS works Scallops are among the species managed by the QMS. from www.shutterstock.com, CC BY-ND

The fundamental idea behind the QMS is that fishers own (or lease) the right to catch a certain proportion (quota) of the Total Allowable Catch (TAC) of a certain species of fish. These quotas can be freely traded. Market forces are assumed to achieve economically optimal outcomes.

The TAC is set via an assessment process incorporating biological data and fisheries information, where available. The TAC is supposed to ensure sustainability.

New Zealand is committed to the most comprehensive QMS, more so than any other fishing nation. The system is a seductively straightforward solution to control commercial fishing effort.

Currently, TACs are set for more than 640 fish stocks, and represent around 620,000 tonnes of fish. But not all stocks undergo an empirical stock assessment.

Because proposals for downward change usually meet resistance from the fishing industry, changing a TAC requires a persuasive case. Most have not changed in response to either over catching or under catching (a consequence of budgetary constraints and political lobbying by powerful quota owners).

From a TAC, allowances are made for customary catch by Māori, recreational fishing and other mortality caused by fishing, for example through poaching. The remainder is the total allowable commercial catch (TACC), which is divided among the quota owners in the form of Annual Catch Entitlements (ACE).

Red snapper at Auckland’s fish market. from www.shutterstock.com, CC BY-ND Trading quota vs catching fish

When fishers do not have enough ACE to cover their catch, they must either buy more or pay a penalty to the government. Both quota and ACE can be bought, sold and leased. One of the unfortunate consequences of the QMS is that more money is made through trading ACE than actually catching the fish. Unsurprisingly, this empowers quota owners at the expense of fishers.

In our rebuttal to the original article, we point out that fish stocks are nowhere near as healthy as suggested. There is a lack of scientific data to correctly run the QMS. Three quarters of fish stocks have no formal or detailed assessment, and very few have independent research surveys.

Most assessments rely on industry self-reported catch and effort data, rather than independent surveys. This is a dangerous strategy, as shown by the collapse of the Canadian Newfoundland Cod stocks in 1992. At that time, fisheries managers chose to believe industry data showing increasing catch per unit effort, rather than scientific surveys suggesting precipitous decline.

Wider ecosystems effects ignored

Funding for stock assessments has significantly decreased; it is about 45% of the levels in the early 1990s while the number of fish stocks in the QMS has increased 3.5-fold.

The broader environmental effects of commercial fishing on biodiversity, endangered species, seafloor habitats and the very ecosystem that supports the fish on which fisheries depend, are becoming increasingly obvious. Even so, little research targets these impacts. New Zealand’s QMS is a data hungry beast and it is starving.

As with all markets, not all behaviours that are incentivised are virtuous. There is money to be made or saved by dumping catches for which ACE is unavailable or too expensive, from poaching and falsifying catch returns. These behaviours have seriously distorted New Zealand’s catch data for decades. This includes massive dumping of unwanted catch and under-reported bycatch, including endangered dolphins and sealions.

Read more: Things fall apart: why do the ecosystems we depend on collapse

Compounding this is the low level of onboard observer coverage (about 8.4% in offshore fisheries and less than 1% inshore) and the lack of effective enforcement. An independent review of New Zealand’s Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) handling of illegal fish and dolphin dumping revealed industry capture of the regulator, involving flawed processes and inappropriate conduct.

A senior MPI manager admitted that:

… discarding is a systemic failure of the current system and something we have not been able to get on top of from day 1 of the QMS.

Thus, the QMS is not just starved of data: what little data it gets is highly questionable. MPI itself, succinctly illustrates the situation in the below diagram.

Glenn Simmons, CC BY-ND

New Zealand’s fishers are firmly trapped in the cycle of non-reporting. The recent government decision to place electronic monitoring and CCTV cameras on every vessel indicates the gravity of the situation. This, however, does nothing to remove the perverse incentives inherent in the QMS itself.

Comprehensive review needed

The QMS has undermined jobs and livelihoods - just five large companies own over 80% of quota, and 60% of the offshore catch is taken by foreign charter vessels (FCVs) under contract to New Zealand fishing companies. These FCVs arrive with foreign crew, denying employment to New Zealanders, and outsource value added processing to Asia.

For decades FCVs, have been associated with the inhumane treatment of migrant fishers working in slave-like conditions. Despite new laws, abusive treatment has continued.

Concentration of quota in the hands of a few has resulted in many disenfranchised fishers. There is a sense of hopelessness over their activities and alienation from the management of the resource they depend on. Tellingly, Iceland, a nation strongly associated with fishing, described ITQs as feudal, quota holders as lords of the seas and fishermen as serfs.

Just last month, the Faroese Islands’ fishing industry overwhelmingly rejected a quota management system. They had too many questions and too little evidence to support adoption of a QMS.

Ultimately, we need to lower the QMS from its undeserved pedestal, acknowledge its limitations and move forward through open and honest debate. We should also look beyond our own shores for ideas, as New Zealand is not the only country wrestling with these problems.

There are lessons to be learned from New Zealand’s QMS, and they are not all good. After 30 years, New Zealand’s fisheries management needs a comprehensive review.

We acknowledge the contribution of Philip Clarke, a former forensic scientist and fisheries compliance investigator for the New Zealand Ministry for Primary Industries.

Steve Dawson's research has had funding from DOC and MPI, but not on projects directly related to fisheries.

(David) Hugh Whittaker, Bruce Robertson, Elisabeth Slooten, Fiona McCormack, Glenn Simmons, Graeme Bremner, Nigel Haworth, and Simon Francis Thrush do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.