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The owner of the vehicle said her family had all been stung by the 20,000 strong swarm.

Improvements aim to ensure the vault’s role as an impregnable deep freeze for the world’s most precious food seeds after a recent flooding by melting permafrost

The Global Seed Vault, built in the Arctic as an impregnable deep freeze for the world’s most precious food seeds, is to undergo a multi-million dollar upgrade after water from melting permafrost flooded its access tunnel.

No seeds were damaged but the incident undermined the original belief that the vault would be a “failsafe” facility, securing the world’s food supply forever. Now the Norwegian government, which owns the vault, has committed $4.4m (NOK37m) to improvements.

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This week delivered two reviews and one federal court decision... and a thought bubble on energy storage that will almost certainly increase consumer costs.

The Finkel blue-print needs stress testing with real climate targets, a recognition of the shift to distributed generation, a smarter way to think about storage, and an assurance that asset-protecting incumbents will keep their mitts off the mechanism. And it needs to deliver bigger savings on bills.

WA-based Stellata Energy and UK investment group Ingenious to build 120MW solar farm in Merredin, as first of $200m pipeline of big solar projects.

West Sussex The male calls three times, then segues into a short, complex phrase of tweets and whistles

The wind crashes through the tree tops, like the sea breaking on the shore, the great pines and silver birches that encircle the heathland swaying and shimmering. A red admiral butterfly rises from the heather, but it is snatched up by the wind and tumbles away too quickly for me to follow it.

I walk along the muddy track that threads between the trees. Where only last week the ground had been dry and parched, offering very little moisture to thirsty animals and birds, now all the pools are replenished with just one day’s heavy rain. I stop to watch three goldfinches drink from a puddle in front of me.

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Are electric bikes just an early adopter pipe dream? Are they decades away from dominance?

Energy minister Josh Frydenberg eventually offers a wry smile after opposition MP Mark Butler makes a joke about Labor’s strategy on the clean energy target during Q&A. Butler says the plan is “to get Josh to do all the hard work. Then lose [the election] and hand it over.” The pair were on ABC TV program to discuss Australia’s energy future.

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Distributed energy additions like to overtake centralised plant in 2018, with 320GW large scale fossil fuel plants now not likely to be built.

‘Defer, delay and pray’ appear to be the unspoken new watchwords for the company that would build the Carmichael Coal Project.

A short video to put recent climate change and carbon dioxide emissions into the context of the past 800,000 years.

The Finkel report offers glimpse of opportunity for consumers and businesses to play the electricity market

To illustrate the impact of battery storage on the electricity network in Australia, Prof Guoxiu Wang likes to compare it to the invention of refrigeration.

“Before people invented the fridge, we produced food, we consumed food immediately,” says Wang, director of the Centre for Clean Energy Technology at the University of Technology, Sydney. “With the development of appropriate electricity storage technology, the electricity is like our food – you can store it and whenever you need that electricity, you can use that immediately.”

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Since the start of the coalition government in 2010, coal’s role in the generation mix has fallen to historic lows.

India’s energy minister, Piyush Goyal, says the country would be self-sufficient in coal, except that power plants had been designed to run only on imports

India now has “sufficient coal capacity” to power itself without Queensland’s Carmichael mine project, thanks to the increased productivity of domestic mines, cheaper renewables and lower than expected energy demand, the country’s energy minister has said.

But Piyush Goyal said India would be forced to keep importing coal, including from the proposed Queensland mine, because too many Indian power plants had been designed to run on foreign coal.

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Thousands of dying and dead fish were found in a river leading to the Gulf of Mexico.

Interior secretary Ryan Zinke urges president to shrink 1.3m-acre national monument as administration continues push against federal public lands

Ryan Zinke, the US interior secretary, has recommended to Donald Trump that Bears Ears national monument in Utah be reduced in size to the “smallest area compatible” with its conservation.

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Ice cores are a window into the past hundreds of thousands of years. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Ludovic Brucker

There are those who say the climate has always changed, and that carbon dioxide levels have always fluctuated. That’s true. But it’s also true that since the industrial revolution, CO₂ levels in the atmosphere have climbed to levels that are unprecedented over hundreds of millennia.

So here’s a short video we made, to put recent climate change and carbon dioxide emissions into the context of the past 800,000 years.

The temperature-CO₂ connection

Earth has a natural greenhouse effect, and it is really important. Without it, the average temperature on the surface of the planet would be about -18℃ and human life would not exist. Carbon dioxide (CO₂) is one of the gases in our atmosphere that traps heat and makes the planet habitable.

We have known about the greenhouse effect for well over a century. About 150 years ago, a physicist called John Tyndall used laboratory experiments to demonstrate the greenhouse properties of CO₂ gas. Then, in the late 1800s, the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius first calculated the greenhouse effect of CO₂ in our atmosphere and linked it to past ice ages on our planet.

Modern scientists and engineers have explored these links in intricate detail in recent decades, by drilling into the ice sheets that cover Antarctica and Greenland. Thousands of years of snow have compressed into thick slabs of ice. The resulting ice cores can be more than 3km long and extend back a staggering 800,000 years.

Scientists use the chemistry of the water molecules in the ice layers to see how the temperature has varied through the millennia. These ice layers also trap tiny bubbles from the ancient atmosphere, allowing us to measure prehistoric CO₂ levels directly.

Antarctic temperature changes across the ice ages were very similar to globally-averaged temperatures, except that ice age temperature changes over Antarctica were roughly twice that of the global average. Scientists refer to this as polar amplification (data from Parrenin et al. 2013; Snyder et al. 2016; Bereiter et al. 2015). Ben Henley and Nerilie Abram Temperature and CO₂

The ice cores reveal an incredibly tight connection between temperature and greenhouse gas levels through the ice age cycles, thus proving the concepts put forward by Arrhenius more than a century ago.

In previous warm periods, it was not a CO₂ spike that kickstarted the warming, but small and predictable wobbles in Earth’s rotation and orbit around the Sun. CO₂ played a big role as a natural amplifier of the small climate shifts initiated by these wobbles. As the planet began to cool, more CO₂ dissolved into the oceans, reducing the greenhouse effect and causing more cooling. Similarly, CO₂ was released from the oceans to the atmosphere when the planet warmed, driving further warming.

But things are very different this time around. Humans are responsible for adding huge quantities of extra CO₂ to the atmosphere – and fast.

The speed at which CO₂ is rising has no comparison in the recorded past. The fastest natural shifts out of ice ages saw CO₂ levels increase by around 35 parts per million (ppm) in 1,000 years. It might be hard to believe, but humans have emitted the equivalent amount in just the last 17 years.

How fast are CO₂ levels rising? Ben Henley and Nerilie Abram

Before the industrial revolution, the natural level of atmospheric CO₂ during warm interglacials was around 280 ppm. The frigid ice ages, which caused kilometre-thick ice sheets to build up over much of North America and Eurasia, had CO₂ levels of around 180 ppm.

Burning fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and gas, takes ancient carbon that was locked within the Earth and puts it into the atmosphere as CO₂. Since the industrial revolution humans have burned an enormous amount of fossil fuel, causing atmospheric CO₂ and other greenhouse gases to skyrocket.

In mid-2017, atmospheric CO₂ now stands at 409 ppm. This is completely unprecedented in the past 800,000 years.

Global Temperature and CO₂ since 1850. Ben Henley and Nerilie Abram

The massive blast of CO₂ is causing the climate to warm rapidly. The last IPCC report concluded that by the end of this century we will get to more than 4℃ above pre-industrial levels (1850-99) if we continue on a high-emissions pathway.

If we work towards the goals of the Paris Agreement, by rapidly curbing our CO₂ emissions and developing new technologies to remove excess CO₂ from the atmosphere, then we stand a chance of limiting warming to around 2℃.

Observed and projected global temperature on high (RCP8.5) and low (RCP2.6) CO₂ emission futures. Ben Henley and Nerilie Abram

The fundamental science is very well understood. The evidence that climate change is happening is abundant and clear. The difficult part is: what do we do next? More than ever, we need strong, cooperative and accountable leadership from politicians of all nations. Only then will we avoid the worst of climate change and adapt to the impacts we can’t halt.

The authors acknowledge the contributions of Wes Mountain (multimedia), Alicia Egan (editing) and Andrew King (model projection data).

Ben Henley receives funding from an ARC Linkage Project and is an associate investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.

Nerilie Abram receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

The Bloodhound 1,000mph car will conduct some "slow speed" runs at Newquay airport in Cornwall.

Canada’s PM is a counterfeit progressive who champions war-planes, pipelines and privatization - look across the pond for economic and environmental justice

Their depiction in the international media couldn’t be more different.

You know Justin Trudeau from the Buzzfeed photo-spread or the BBC viral video: the feminist Prime Minister of Canada who hugs refugees, pandas, and his yoga-mat. He looks like he canoed straight from the lake to the stage of the nearest TED Talk — an inclusive, nature-loving do-gooder who must assuredly be loved by his people.

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Great Britain is in the top 10% of areas for harbouring alien species, according to a study.