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British red squirrels are infected with strains of the bacterium that causes leprosy, according to a study.

From Hong Kong’s tiny subdivided flats to the migrant crisis, this year’s photography and sustainability award shortlist explores the theme of space from all perspectives

• The winners will be announced at an exhibition in London in May 2017. See last year’s winners here
  

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Rothamsted Research, a leading agricultural research institute, is attempting to make data from long-term experiments available to all scientists.

Read more about hypoxic blackwater, its causes and effects.

Langstone, Hampshire The newly attached, unfed, arachnids were red-brown and as tiny as sesame seeds, the fully engorged ones like glossy grey pearls

Hedgehogs that have had a hind leg amputation can struggle to groom themselves, so are more likely to harbour ectoparasites. I had noticed that Sweetpea, my resident hedgehog, had been flailing her shortened leg as she tried to scratch using her phantom limb. But it was still a shock to spot her emerging from her nest with one side of her body studded with ticks. They clustered in the folds of her right ear and along her right flank, where the coarse skirt of fur met the quill line.

Related: Specieswatch: Ixodes ricinus (tick)

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Congratulations to Charles Sturt University on receiving the award for Carbon Reduction at the 2016 Green Gown Awards Australia and ACTS Awards of Excellence last week in QLD. They have also been awarded the Climate Change Leadership Award and a joint winner of the Green Globe Climate Change and Leadership Award.

Can I introduce you to the word gastronification? In the case of an event in Berlin it involved eating climate change as sorbet.

Australian CleanTech Index fell by 0.7 per cent for the month of October, but cleantech stocks remain well ahead of ASX 200.

Adelaide City adds solar and battery storage install at a Council depot, and a UPark LED lighting upgrade, to its plans to be carbon neutral.

The British Beagle 2 spacecraft may have worked for several months on Mars, new analysis suggests.

With US transportation sector emissions surpassing electricity for the first time in decades, reducing CO2 from transportation is more critical than ever.

President-elect Trump’s “Energy Revolution” is based on unfettered expansion of American energy production, and opposition to anything that might limit it. But will it be as bad as it sounds?

In good news for Australian renewables – and perhaps even better news for a nervous US market – Deutsche report names "detrimental solar policy" as one of biggest drivers of booming global battery storage market, which it says has reached an inflection point.

A US withdrawal would be game over for the Paris Agreement, but there's still hope for the climate. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center/Flickr, CC BY-NC

November 9 will likely become the day that the Paris Agreement died, but not when the goal of limiting warming to 2℃ slipped out of reach.

President Donald Trump can, and likely will, drop out of the Paris climate agreement. Direct withdrawal will take four years.

But Trump could instead drop out from the overall climate convention under which the agreement operates. That would only take one year and would result in automatic withdrawal from the Paris Agreement.

It would shortcut any hopes that Paris would bind Trump’s hands for some time.

As I’ve argued in my research, a US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement would be its death knell.

A predictable loose cannon

Trump has also promised a range of further destructive international and domestic actions on climate and energy. These include cutting all international climate financing, rescinding energy regulations, reopening federal and offshore areas for coal and oil development and abolishing the clean power plan.

There is some hope that Trump is a loose cannon who may renege on his previous promises. Such hope is ultimately false. Trump has already appointed noted climate denier Myron Ebell as the head of his Environmental Protection Agency transition team.

More importantly, the Republican establishment supports this approach to climate policy. The agreed Republican platform of July rejects the Paris Agreement and calls for it to be submitted to the Senate (where it would be defeated) as well as an end of all funding to the UN climate convention. Their domestic policies are best summarised as “drill, baby, drill!”

It is foolish to believe that Trump would oppose his own party, and many of the voters of the US “rust belt” whose support he relied on, in an attempt to save the Paris Agreement.

Trump may be unpredictable in some regards, but his approach to climate change is not.

Counting the losses

Trump’s climate policy would lead to the US overshooting its already inadequate 2030 climate targets. The US needs additional measures on top of the Clean Power Plan to meet the targets established by Obama.

The US withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, or blatantly missing its climate targets, could be near fatal for a deal which relies on global ambition. The Paris Agreement relies on two things: increasing ambition through peer pressure, and a signal to markets and the public.

Both peer pressure and the signal will be shredded by a rogue, Trump-led United States.

States will be unlikely to feel pressured if the world’s second largest greenhouse emitter is polluting unabated. The effects of US recalcitrance were all too clear in the case of the Kyoto Protocol, which the United States simply refused to ratify. Trust would be undermined and excuses for inaction amplified if the US abandons international efforts again.

Any signal that existed from the framework of Paris would be largely extinguished. Already fossil fuels stocks have surged post-election despite a downturn in the rest of the market. Renewable energy share prices have plummeted. The idea of the signal hinged on broad participation creating investor confidence in international law. US withdrawal and the breaking of commitments will shatter any belief that investors may have had in Paris.

The Paris Agreement sacrificed binding emissions cuts and finance in order to ensure US participation. The few benefits it had were derived from broad participation, including from the United States. Such benefits will be lost by a US dropout.

Paris will likely survive as a structure. Countries will continue with the global show-and-tell, trading unbinding pledges every five years for some time to come. It will go on, but it will cease to be a large source of hope or change.

Opportunities for the future

A Trump presidency will also create opportunities for renewed action internationally.

Trump promises to usher in an age of protectionism, scrapping free trade agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). He has vowed to brand major trading partners such as China as “currency manipulators”.

At the same time nationalism and discontent with free trade have surged in Europe. China has scaled up its domestic renewable energy and climate policies and is looking to formally establish a national emissions trading scheme next year.

Both a protectionist Trump administration that has dropped out of Paris and trends in the European Union and China could bring the idea of climate trade measures back to the table.

The Paris Agreement could be amended to use trade measures against countries who are not part of the deal. Such a move could not be adopted until the next conference in November 2017. Amending the agreement would only require a three-quarters majority vote, but is still unlikely to garner the support to be adopted under the painfully slow and convoluted UN process.

Climate trade measures from the EU and or China are much more likely. The EU may be pushed by Trump’s trade policies towards imposing a carbon price on imports (carbon border tax adjustments) from the US and others. China may consider a similar move. The two could even act in tandem, creating their own bilateral climate club outside of the Paris Agreement. Such material penalties would likely force the US to eventually shift and reengage with international efforts.

Such an outcome seems unlikely for now, particularly in the politically paralysed Europe. But Trump at least opens the opportunity for such change.

The much maligned Trump will supercharge climate civil disobedience in both the US and around the globe.

The world’s best chance of avoiding dangerous global warming are a climate trade war and rampant climate disobedience.

Such actions will be more beneficial for the climate than the current Paris Agreement ever could have been. The incremental and baseless pledge and review of Paris Agreement would have never been enough to trigger the herculean transition needed.

The 2016 US election will almost certainly become the epitaph for the success of the Paris climate agreement. But it does not mean that 2℃ is necessarily out of reach; the future may not depend on the actions of an ageing superpower.

Luke Kemp has received funding from the German and Australian governments.

Yackandandah FoodWorks have just installed 80kW of solar panels on their roof.

At Marrakech, Australia's decision to ratify Paris was met with similar applause as in Bali 2007, when Kevin Rudd finally ratified Kyoto. But in the near decade since, climate diplomacy has become even more integrated to our international interests.

A new solar standard in France has developers competing on more than just price – they must also compete on their project's environmental sustainability.

Despite threats by the US President-elect Donald Trump to withdraw from the Paris Climate agreement, 'no one country can unilaterally end the agreement', says Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg.

The program can work well for polygamous species such as gorillas. Mary Ann McDonald/shutterstock.com

A quick look at the popularity of online dating services like OkCupid and eHarmony shows us that people are pretty comfortable with letting an algorithm choose them a mate. Now we at the Flinders Molecular Ecology Lab want to do a similar thing for other animals.

With human-driven extinctions on the rise, many species are likely to be left relying on captive breeding for their survival. We hope that our algorithm will help ensure these breeding programs are successful, by pairing up matches who will have healthy, thriving offspring.

Unlike human dating services, we cannot ask a snake, fish or possum to answer questions. But we can look at their DNA. This allows us to breed individuals who are not closely related, avoiding the genetic problems that arise from inbreeding, and thus producing healthy populations with a diverse gene pool.

We have created Swinger, a computer program that uses DNA profiling to matchmake endangered animals for captive breeding - especially those that have multiple mates - and which we describe in a paper published in the journal Molecular Ecology Resources. We envision it helping to conserve many endangered animals, with the first animals being native freshwater fishes in Australia.

It’s all in the DNA

Genetic diversity is crucial, because it helps populations to adapt and evolve in response to environmental changes that they may encounter in the future. So maintaining a large gene pool is an important consideration for captive breeding programs, particularly in populations that have already dwindled to small numbers. This makes avoiding inbreeding vitally important.

Many species kept in zoos – such as pandas – have clear family relationships or are bred in pairs and so their parentage is certain. Armed with pedigree information, it is relatively easy for zoos to select unrelated breeding pairs, often by working in collaboration with other zoos.

But most animals in the world are polygamous, with each individual naturally having multiple partners, even around the same time. This is where it becomes harder to track family relationships, unless you can examine their DNA.

It’s easier with pandas - well, the choosing part at least. Ritesh251123/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

The matchmaking algorithm is also ideal for starting a captive breeding program from individuals newly brought into captivity. This is because we often have no idea about their relationships to each other, except through DNA, and they may be highly related individuals.

The very circumstances that brought about the need for captive breeding also often results in inbreeding in wild populations. This is because the population has reduced in size to the point that individuals may unavoidably breed with their close relatives. This makes it especially important to ensure breeding in captivity occurs between unrelated individuals.

Captive breeding of swingers

Even when dealing with such serious issues as extinction, we like to keep a sense of humour – hence the name Swinger, which we feel is pretty appropriate given that individuals of most species in the world are naturally polygamous. Indeed, our algorithm is just as suitable for setting up polygamous breeding groups as monogamous ones.

The algorithm is inspired by our efforts to save freshwater fishes in Australia. Native freshwater fish lineages recently became at risk of extinction due to human activities during the Millennium Drought in the Murray-Darling Basin, in southeastern Australia. The fish needed to be saved by their removal from the wild before their habitat completely dried out.

We created breeding groups of these rescued polygamous fish. This was done by using DNA information to create, by hand, “swinger” groups of unrelated individuals. The breeding was successful, with offspring reintroduced to the wild. However, the breeding groups were unavoidably sub-optimal because at that time we had no algorithm to work out the best possible mates for individuals.

Swinger is now being used to save native rainbowfish in northern Queensland. Although it is still early days, the rainbowfish breeding has been very successful, producing thousands of fingerlings that our collaborators are releasing to the wild.

We are also using Swinger to inform the design of a breeding program of endangered species of Galápagos giant tortoises previously considered extinct. These tortoises were rediscovered in a remote volcano and moved to the captive breeding facility of the Galápagos National Park. The aim is to reintroduce the captive-born offspring to the island where they evolved.

The brilliance of DNA is that it is in all living things. This means that Swinger could potentially be used to help breed all endangered species with sexual reproduction - especially, of course, the many polygamous species.

To borrow another concept from the world of human dating, there will hopefully soon be “Plenty of Fish” as a result of our efforts.

Catherine R. M. Attard has received funding from the Australian Government and other organisations.

Luciano Beheregaray receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Jonathan Sandoval Castillo ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son poste universitaire.

The higher the plume, the bigger the problem. Jim Peaco/Wikimedia Commons

The journal Climatic Change has published a special edition of review papers discussing major natural hazards in Australia. This article is one of a series looking at those threats in detail.

Fire has been a driving force across Australia for millennia. Indeed, the health of many of our ecosystems is intrinsically dependent on fire. But bushfires are also one of our most frequent natural hazards, with a total cost estimated at A$8.5 billion per year.

In the past decade or so, extreme bushfires in southeastern Australia have burned more than a million hectares, claiming more than 200 lives and over 4,000 homes. Similar losses in other major urban areas have prompted questions about whether we are seeing a shift towards a significantly more hazardous fire regime, characterised by increasing fire frequency and intensity, and the development of catastrophic “firestorms”.

While these extreme bushfires account for only a very small percentage of fire events, they are responsible for the lion’s share of bushfire-related losses.

In contrast to typical bushfires, which spread across the landscape as well-defined burning fronts with smoke plumes perhaps a few kilometres high, extreme bushfires exhibit deep and widespread flaming and produce smoke plumes that can extend 10-15km into the atmosphere.

At these altitudes, bushfire plumes can actually develop into thunderstorms (hence the term “firestorm”). As such, extreme bushfires become much more difficult for emergency services to handle, making them all but impossible to suppress and their spread difficult to predict.

Beyond hot, dry and windy

Like other dangerous bushfires, firestorms are driven by hot, dry and windy weather. But to spawn a firestorm, a range of other conditions must also be met; these can include a rugged landscape, particularly nasty weather events that produce “spikes” in fire danger, and conditions in the upper atmosphere that allow fire plumes to grow to considerable heights.

While previous studies have considered past and projected changes in the hot, dry and windy aspect of fire danger, less research has been done on the future projections for these other types of conditions. This means that we have quite a poor understanding of how extreme bushfires might affect us in the future.

As part of a series of reviews produced by the Australian Energy and Water Exchange initiative, my colleagues and I have taken a closer look at the most catastrophic bushfire cases and the factors that drive them, beyond the usual hot, dry and gusty weather.

There has been an overall increase in the frequency of major bushfire events in southeastern Australia since the mid-19th century. In particular, in the past 15 years a major fire event has occurred every 5 years or less. While some of this increase is due to changes in land use since European colonisation, there is also strong evidence of climate-driven changes.

We found that besides increases in dangerous surface fire danger conditions, upper atmospheric conditions have also become more conducive to explosive fire growth. High levels of the c-Haines index, which signals greater potential for a fire’s plume to rise high into the atmosphere, have become considerably more prevalent since the 1980s. The effects of droughts and widespread heatwaves have also contributed to the occurrence of extreme bushfires.

Looking into the future, high c-Haines values are projected to grow more prevalent still, albeit more gradually than over recent decades. Frontal weather patterns associated with particularly bad fire days are also projected to become more frequent during this century, and rainfall is projected to decrease over southwest and southeastern Australia.

All of this suggests that extreme bushfires will become a more common occurrence into the future.

What we still don’t know

Our methods for assessing fire danger do not explicitly account for the effects of extended drought and heatwaves on larger fuel elements such as branches and logs, and so may not properly account for their effects on fire spread and heat release into the atmosphere.

There is also considerable uncertainty about how fuel loads will change into the future. It is possible that the higher fire intensities expected to result from the direct effects of a warmer, drier climate may be offset by lower fuel loads.

Our understanding of extreme fire occurrence is also hampered by the lack of long-term and prehistoric climate data, which makes it hard to work out what the “normal” level of extreme bushfires has been in the past. While charcoal records show promise in this regard, we still don’t know enough about how charcoal is generated, deposited and subsequently preserved during extreme fires.

To predict the future occurrence of extreme bushfires, we also have more work to do in understanding how the trends forecast by global climate models will play out in terms of creating regional-scale fire weather conditions. And we still need to figure out the likely effects of other large-scale patterns such as El Niño.

Given the relatively recent advances that have been made in understanding the key drivers of extreme bushfires, the field is now ready for targeted studies that will help us estimate the future risk of extreme bushfires – and how best we can confront the threat.

Jason Sharples receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre.