Feed aggregator

The man in his 60s is the third person to die on the reef this week, after two French tourists apparently had heart attacks on Wednesday

A British man has died while diving on the Great Barrier Reef, the third death in three days among visitors to Australia’s popular natural tourist attraction.

The 60-year-old man was found without a breathing device during a tandem scuba dive at Agincourt reef, 100km north of Cairns, on Friday.

Continue reading...

Lake Manasarovar, Tibet Bar-headed geese are popular with British fanciers, but better to think of them here, readying for their lofty migration over the Himalayas

From the roof of Chiu monastery, perched high on its rocky hill, the water of Lake Manasarovar was cobalt, the surrounding hills rich ochre, luminous in the sunlight of a late autumn afternoon. With a shoreline 55 miles (90km) long, and at an altitude of more than 4,500 metres (15,000ft), this is one of the highest and largest bodies of freshwater in the world. Its name translates from the Sanskrit as “mind’s lake”; the mind in question being that of the Hindu creator Brahma, and in the thin air there is something ethereal about it, something unworldly. It is a sacred site of pilgrimage for a quarter of the world, not just Hindus but Buddhists too, as well as the lesser known Tibetan religion of Bon and India’s Jains.

Continue reading...

On 19 November 2016 Australia will commemorate the 75th anniversary of the sinking of HMAS Sydney II and HSK Kormoran.

Astronaut Peggy Whitson has lifted off into space for her third mission to the International Space Station.

Swiss reactor operator Alpiq reportedly could find no buyer for its two nuclear plants and is therefore hoping to give them to the Swiss state.

Donald Trump is preparing to lead America during a perilous period for the 130 million residents of its coastal counties.

Elon Musk has announced that Tesla and SolarCity shareholders have approved the merger between the two companies.

Tesla's Australian Supercharger Network adds two six-bay stations between Sydney and Brisbane, one between Melbourne and Adelaide.

UK scientists are coming up with strategies to deal with the prospect of leaving the EU.

International Energy Agency questions economics of Galilee Basin coal projects, suggesting coal is not popular in India and its use will be rapidly usurped by solar and wind if climate targets are to be met.

Parliament adopts amendment that declares country’s abundant clean supplies are ‘a public good managed by the state’ and ‘not a market commodity’

Slovenia has amended its constitution to make access to drinkable water a fundamental right for all citizens and stop it being commercialised.

With 64 votes in favour and none against, the 90-seat parliament added an article to the EU country’s constitution saying “everyone has the right to drinkable water”.

Continue reading...

While the Australian government congratulates itself on ratifying the Paris Agreement on climate change, it is dragging its feet on a less well known, but very important, international treaty on air pollution. Despite signing in 2013, Australia has still not ratified the UN’s Minamata Convention on Mercury.

Mercury is a potent neurotoxin. In fact, the treaty is named after the city of Minamata in Japan, where mercury release was linked to developmental disorders after pregnant women ate contaminated fish in the 1960s.

Currently human activities are releasing around 2,000 tonnes of mercury each year. Scientists predict that this could reach 3,400 tonnes each year in 2050 unless we take action.

Australia’s reticence puts us behind 35 nations that have ratified the convention, including developing nations such as Madagascar, Gabon, Guinea, Guyana, Lesotho, Djibouti and Nicaragua. So what’s the holdup?

Why reduce mercury?

The goal of the Convention is to protect human health and the environment from anthropogenic (human-caused) emissions and releases of mercury and mercury compounds.

Airborne mercury emissions can be transported far from their point of origin, even across continents, and are dispersed widely before being deposited, primarily via rainfall, into lakes and streams and the ocean.

The most important chemical forms of mercury are elemental mercury (Hg), divalent inorganic mercury (Hg²⁺), methylmercury (CH₃Hg⁺), and dimethylmercury ((CH₃)₂Hg).

Through chemical conversion, mercury compounds enter food webs. Mercury becomes concentrated at the top of the food chain, in predatory fish through a process of biomagnification. Readers with a penchant for tuna sashimi or sushi might have some concern about mercury, as research highlighted on The Conversation pointed out that mercury levels in tuna are increasing.

People are exposed to methylmercury through their diet, particularly if it is high in fish, and especially those high up the food chain.

As methylmercury, mercury damages the human central nervous system and is extremely harmful to pregnant women and their offspring.

The Mercury Convention

Australia signed the Minamata Convention on Mercury on 10 October 2013 at Kumamoto in Japan, when the text of the Convention was first adopted and opened for signature. But it has not taken sufficient action since then to ratify it.

One issue is that the Convention will not come into force unless enough countries ratify it. 50 ratifications or accessions are required, but so far there have been only 35.

In March 2014, the Department of Environment issued a public consultation paper seeking the views of the Australian public on ratifying the Convention.

In January 2015, the Department of Environment commissioned an economics consulting firm to undertake a cost-benefit analysis of ratifying the Minamata Convention. That taxypayer-funded document has not been made public. Nor has the timetable for ratification. The consulting firm claims the report is the “intellectual property” of the Australian government.

Electricity sector a major source

It is likely that one reason for the delay in ratification is deference to the objections voiced by the fossil-fuel energy sector. The electricity sector is a significant source of mercury emissions in nations that rely heavily on coal-fired electricity generation, including Australia. Coal currently supplies about 75% of Australia’s electricity (excluding rooftop solar).

The latest data from the National Pollutant Inventory show that 2,700kg of mercury were emitted from 105 electricity generators in 2014-15, an increase from the previous year’s emissions of 2,600kg.

The nation’s top three mercury emitters from the electricity sector were all power stations in Victoria, burning brown coal (lignite): Hazelwood (420kg; due to close in 2017), Yallourn (310kg), and Loy Yang B (290kg, down from 470kg).

Pollution is regulated by state environment protection authorities, but pollution licenses show an alarming lack of attention by the regulator to the issue. For example, the licence for Hazelwood power station places limits on carbon monoxide, chlorine compounds, NO₂, particulate pollution, and sulfur oxides, but does not regulate mercury at all. The word does not even feature in the licence.

Mercury is capped under general Victorian air pollution regulations, but in combination with antimony, arsenic, cadmium and lead.

Tightening pollution controls

Unlike the United States, Australia does not have a federal Clean Air Act. The question of mercury emissions from coal combustion is largely left to state pollution laws.

Australian federal environmental laws do not regulate or restrict emissions of either mercury or carbon dioxide from coal-fired power stations. This is especially the case since the July 2014 repeal of the price signal that had been set by the carbon tax.

What would ratifying the Minimata Convention mean for coal power stations? As mercury pollution is now a matter of international concern there is a strong constitutional basis for Federal legislative action, even prior to the Convention coming into force.

State pollution control regulations will need to be tightened to impose stricter limits on mercury emissions. Presently the standards found in some of the pollution licences are much weaker than those to be applied under the US standard introduced in 2013.

Unsurprisingly, the owners of Australia’s coal-fired generators have pushed back against stricter pollution controls implied under the Convention, as shown by their submissions to the public consultation paper.

They claimed that “if Australia is forced to adopt US-based mercury emissions reduction technologies, new and existing coal-based plant would cease to be competitive”, and pleaded that “requirements to retrofit Australian coal-based power stations with mercury capturing equipment would not only be very costly and unnecessary”.

Such pollution controls are only unnecessary if we are unconcerned about the environmental and health implications of mercury emissions. Researchers at MIT found that the US standard will provide benefits worth billions of dollars each year.

Given Australia’s recent ratification of the Paris Agremeent, it would seem consistent for the Australian government to move ahead more rapidly with the ratification of the Mercury Convention. This will require a closer examination of the adequacy of domestic laws in order to implement the Minamata Convention.

The Minamata Convention has not been tabled yet in Federal Parliament and this means the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties has not yet moved ahead with its part of the ratification process.

New Zealand’s analysis of ratification concluded it was “strongly” in that country’s interest to ratify. Even if the Australian government continues to delay ratification of the Minamata Convention, it is likely to come into force quite soon, and the international scientific literature is already making a strong case for stricter emissions controls in Australia.

Ratification of the Mercury Convention by Australia is a necessary step for human health and the environment.

James Prest receives funding from the Australia-Indonesia Centre.

• Colin Scott, 23, was looking for a ‘hot pot’ to swim in with his sister
• Rescuers concluded that extreme heat and acidity dissolved remains

An Oregon man who died and “dissolved” after falling into a boiling, acidic hot spring at Yellowstone National Park last June, had been looking for a place to swim, officials investigating the incident have concluded.

Colin Scott, 23, was hiking through a prohibited section of the park on 7 June with his sister, Sable, when Scott fell into a hot spring “and did not get out”, according to a report released by the National Park Service on Thursday.

Continue reading...

BRIGHT FLASH: An ultra-bright cosmic flash of radio waves from a galaxy far, far away has given scientists an unprecedented view of what lies between galaxies in the Universe.

Nasa astronaut Peggy Whitson, 56, breaks more records as she heads to the ISS for the third time.

US President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to walk away from the deal to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Will Trump's win cause other countries to reconsider their commitment to the deal?

Delegates from more than 190 countries meeting in Marrakech issue a united call for action on climate change.

Scientists from the University of New South Wales have flown over every major river system and wetland in eastern Australia to count waterbirds.

Estimated 20bn barrels of oil found in Texas’s Permian Basin, three times larger than the Bakken oilfields of North Dakota, could be worth as much as $900bn

A huge deposit of untapped oil, possibly the largest ever discovered in the US, has been identified by the US Geological Survey (USGS) in west Texas.

The USGS estimated that 20bn barrels of oil was contained within layers of shale in the Permian Basin, a vast geological formation that stretches across western Texas and an area of New Mexico. The discovery is three times larger than the Bakken oilfields of North Dakota and is worth around $900bn.

Continue reading...

A genetic technique makes plants produce more food from sunlight - a key step in feeding the growing global population, scientists say.