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Australia’s government has announced that it is to ratify the Paris climate agreement, which was struck 11 months ago and entered into force last Friday.

The move comes despite the election of Donald Trump, who has called climate change a Chinese-inspired hoax. Trump has pledged to turn his back on the Paris treaty after he takes office in January, although this would take at least a year and technically leave the Agreement still in force, albeit weakened.

The question for Australia is how Canberra will react to such a seismic shift in US climate policy. The last time a US president pulled the plug on international climate negotiations was in March 2001, when George W. Bush withdrew from the Kyoto treaty. Australia’s prime minister John Howard followed suit on Earth Day 2002.

The temptation for Australia’s current government would be to follow in Trump’s slipstream in much the same way. Despite its 2030 climate target being widely seen as unambitious, Australia still lacks a credible plan to deliver the necessary emissions cuts, and has no renewable energy target beyond 2020.

While Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull may be a vocal supporter of climate action, not everyone on on his side of politics is as keen – such as MPs Craig Kelly and George Christensen. (It was not always thus under the Liberals.)

The temptation to defect might be strong, but the countervailing pressure will be much stronger that it was in 2002, and the clean energy transition is already underway. Just this week, a high-powered group of business leaders, energy providers, academics and financiers called on Turnbull to expand the renewable energy target and create a market mechanism to phase out coal.

Yet the US election has also reinvigorated Australian opponents of climate action, such as One Nation senators Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts, who were cracking champagne at the prospect of Trump in the White House, and media commentator Andrew Bolt, who jubilantly described Trump’s victory as a “revolt against the left’s arrogance”.

Which bit of history will repeat?

On balance, then, it is still hard to predict Australia’s next move – and past form is little guide for future performance.

Over the past 26 years, Australia has made two largely symbolic commitments to international climate action, and one very concrete refusal.

In 1990, ahead of the 2nd World Climate Conference which fired the starting gun for the United Nations’ climate negotiations, the Hawke government announced a target of a 20% reduction by 2005.

The pledge, however, was laced with crucial caveats, like this one:

…the Government will not proceed with measures which have net adverse economic impacts nationally or on Australia’s trade competitiveness in the absence of similar action by major greenhouse-gas-producing countries.

This target was sidelined in the final United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which Australia signed and ratified in 1992.

In 1997, Australia got a very sweet deal at the Kyoto climate talks, successfully negotiating an 8% increase in greenhouse gases as its emissions “reduction” target, as well as a special loophole that allowed it take account of its large reduction in land clearing since 1990. Australia signed the deal in April 1998, but never ratified it.

Kyoto’s rules hid a multitude of sins, anyway, as Oxford University’s Nicholas Howarth and Andrew Foxall have pointed out:

…its accounting rules obscure the real level of carbon emissions and structural trends at the nation-state level… it has shifted focus away from Australia as the world’s largest coal exporter towards China, its primary customer.

Although Kevin Rudd famously ratified Kyoto and received a standing ovation at the Bali Climate summit in 2007, a stronger Australian emissions reduction target was not forthcoming.

The next big moment came at the Paris negotiations of 2015. Australia’s official pledge was a 26-28% reduction on 2005 levels by 2030 – a target unveiled by the former prime minister Tony Abbott, and which met with a lukewarm response from analysts.

Since then, pressure has been building for Australia to explain how it can meet even that target, given the hostility to renewable energy among the federal government, the lack of a post-2020 renewables target, and the inadequacy of the current Direct Action policy.

And now we are looking at the prospect of a Trump presidency, already described as “a turning point in the history of climate action” and “the end of any serious hope of limiting climate change to 2 degrees”.

In a chaotic world that has confounded pollsters, it seems foolish to bet on anything. But two predictions seem sure: atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide will rise, and the future will be … interesting.

Marc Hudson does 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.

Australia’s iconic Great Barrier Reef has suffered through the worst bleaching event in its history, part of the world’s third mass bleaching event.

However, coral reefs from the other side of the continent have also experienced unprecedented bleaching and coral death. This is bad news because the unique coral reefs of Western Australia’s northwest are home to some of the toughest coral in the world.

Western Australia’s unique coral reefs

Although much less well-known, coral reefs in Western Australia are highly diverse. They include, for example, Australia’s largest fringing reef, the World Heritage-listed Ningaloo Reef, as well as Australia’s largest inshore reef, Montgomery Reef which covers 380 square kilometres.

WA’s remote Kimberley region also features “super-corals” – corals that have adapted to a naturally extreme environment where tidal swings can be up 10m. These corals can therefore tolerate exposure to the air during low tide as well as extreme daily temperature swings.

My past research has shown that these naturally extreme conditions increase the heat tolerance of Kimberley corals but that they are nevertheless not immune to bleaching when water temperatures are unusually hot for too long.

Previously I had put these super-corals in tanks and subjected them to a three-week heatwave to see how they would respond, but I always wondered how they would cope in the wild where such events typically unfold over longer timescales. Unfortunately, I did not have to wait long to find out.

The hottest years on record

2015 was the hottest year on record and 2016 will likely be hotter still. This has caused an unprecedented global coral reef crisis. Although global coral bleaching events already occurred in 1998 and 2010, this third global bleaching event is the longest on record and still ongoing.

Sadly, in WA the Kimberley region was hit the hardest. As part of Australia’s National Coral Bleaching Taskforce, colleagues and I conducted extensive monitoring before, during and after the predicted bleaching event along the entire WA coastline. In the southern Kimberley, we also carried out aerial surveys to assess the situation on a regional level.

The severity and scale of bleaching that we observed in April was devastating. Almost all inshore Kimberley reefs that we surveyed had about 50% bleaching, including Montgomery Reef. Researchers from the Australian Institute of Marine Science found that offshore Kimberley reefs such as Scott Reef fared even worse, with 60-90% bleaching in shallow lagoon waters.

Many corals had already died from the severe bleaching in April, but the final death toll has only been revealed during visits to the Kimberley last month. Vast areas of coral reef are now dead and overgrown with algae, both at the inshore and offshore Kimberley reefs.

According to local Indigenous Rangers and Traditional Owners who assisted in the research, this appears to be unprecedented. Such events had never previously been described in their rich local history of the coastal environment.

Bleached staghorn coral on inshore Kimberley reefs in April 2016. Verena Schoepf Dead staghorn coral on the same reefs in October 2016. Verena Schoepf Some good news

There was nevertheless some good news. Corals living in intertidal areas, where they regularly experience exposure to air, stagnant water, and extreme temperature fluctuations, bleached less than corals from below the low-tide mark, where conditions are far more moderate. And importantly, the majority of intertidal corals were able to fully recover within a few months.

Similarly, researchers from the Western Australian Museum and Curtin University confirmed last month that intertidal coral reefs in the central Kimberley (Bonaparte Archipelago) were in great condition.

Overall, these observations confirm the findings from my past research which showed that highly-variable, extreme temperature environments can boost the bleaching resistance of corals.

It is also important to note that the 2016 severe bleaching event in WA was restricted to the Kimberley region. Ningaloo Reef as well as coral reefs in the Pilbara and the Abrolhos Islands all escaped the bleaching. This is great news because some of these locations are still recovering from major bleaching in 2010-11 and 2013.

Healthy coral at Ningaloo Reef in 2016. Morane Le Nohaic The future of WA’s coral reefs

Although it is now clear that WA’s coral reefs are at risk of bleaching during both El Niño (as in 2016) and La Niña years (as in 2010-11), they have some advantages over other reefs that may hopefully allow them to recover from bleaching more quickly and stay healthy in the long term.

For example, most of WA’s coral reefs are located far away from major population centres and are thus less affected by environmental threats such as poor water quality (though other threats such as oil and gas exploration do exist). We also know that their isolation, particularly in the case of offshore reefs, helped them recover from previous mass bleaching events.

Finally, it is critical that we identify coral populations worldwide that are already naturally adapted to higher temperatures and have a greater bleaching resistance, such as the Kimberley corals.

These super-corals, while not immune to climate change, should be a priority for research into the limits of coral tolerance, as well as conservation efforts.

Verena Schoepf is affiliated with the University of Western Australia, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and the Western Australian Marine Science Institution (WAMSI). The research presented here was funded by WAMSI, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, the PADI Foundation and an ARC Laureate Fellowship to Prof Malcolm McCulloch.

Riseley, Bedfordshire Nissen huts stored ammunition here, hidden by tall elms whose offspring are just bushes, cursed with perpetual youth

American servicemen came in wartime with concrete and bombs to Coppice Wood. They paved the paths with cement and put up a parking lot – a series of wide bays with Nissen huts storing explosive shells. Chipped and cracked, this network of hard standing remains, though the army is long gone. So too the elms remain, the trees that hid the ammunition stores from enemy aircraft under their canopy.

The elms’ descendants are cursed with perpetual youth. Always a bush, never a tree, seems to be the mantra, the leafy sprays doomed to shrivelled adolescence by Dutch elm disease. Only a few have made it to the heights.

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At an extraordinary meeting on 7 October 2016, COAG Energy Ministers agreed to an independent review of the national electricity market to take stock of its current security and reliability and to provide advice to governments on a...

Toyota will begin mass production of electric vehicles by 2020, according to a report from the Nikkei Asian Review.

The Turnbull government's decision to ratify the Paris Agreement is welcome news so soon after the election of Trump. But there is much tough policy work to be done if Australia is serious about meeting its climate obligations.

Not even 24 hours after Trump's election win, global stock markets are foretelling a comeback for the most carbon-intensive fossil fuels.

Dogs have been dining on human food scraps since the early days of their domestication, a scientific study suggests.

An implant that beams instructions out of the brain is used to restore movement in paralysed primates.

How will the Trump presidency impact climate research, and efforts to curb further warming and mitigate its effects? We ask the experts.

Trump appears to be a disaster in so many ways for climate and clean energy, but incumbents should not be complacent: they are more exposed then ever to disruption.

Plastic pollution in the sea gives off a smell that attracts foraging birds, scientists find.

Streets around the country have been brightened by the trees’ blooms in the lead-up to summer. Here are some of our favourite snaps from Instagram

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There are now more than 500 pairs of golden eagles in Scotland, a survey of the birds finds.

The use of electric car charging points across Scotland has more than doubled in the last year.

Donald Trump's election doesn't augur well for US solar. Worse news, however, is the Republican Party has retained control of the US Senate.

The impact on global climate action of a Trump presidency will depend on a number of factors including the resolve of other countries, investors and the state governments in the US.

The Australian Heritage Council is assessing Quinkan Country for potential inclusion in the National Heritage List. Comments close 13 January 2017.

Caper whites descend on state’s south-east – only to be replaced by plague of flies as temperatures climb to 38 degrees

From butterflies to plain old flies, south-east Queensland is experiencing a two-phase swarm of insects amid weather conditions that allow both species to thrive.

Last Friday residents began reporting a sudden surge of butterflies, an influx of tens of millions of caper whites in what experts said was a phenomenon that occurred about once a decade.

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

Australia is no stranger to heatwaves. Each summer, large areas of the continent fry under intense heat for days on end, causing power outages, public transport delays, and severe impacts to human health. The estimated impact on our workforce alone is US$6.2 billon per year. Heatwaves are also Australia’s deadliest natural hazard, accounting for well over half of all natural disaster-related deaths.

Along with our colleagues, we have taken a close look at what we know and don’t know about heatwaves in Australia, as part of a series of reviews produced by the Australian Energy and Waster Exchange initiative.

Let’s start with the stuff we know. First, we are very clear on the weather systems that drive heatwaves in Australia’s densely populated coastal areas. Typically, a persistent high-pressure system sits next to the region experiencing the heatwave, pushing hot air from the centre of Australia towards that region. The location of the high depends on the region experiencing the heatwave, but there is always one there.

These high-pressure systems are created and sustained by other weather influences farther afield, for instance. We know for instance that heatwaves in Melbourne are coupled with tropical cyclones to the northwest of Australia.

Other, longer-term variables can affect not just individual heatwaves but their patterns, timing and severity too. So heatwaves are likely to be much longer and more frequent during El Niño than La Niña phases over much of northern and eastern Australia. However, this does not influence heatwaves over Australia’s far southeast – here, the most important driver is changes to wind patterns over the Southern Ocean.

We also know that heatwave trends have increased in the observational record, and, unfortunately, that they will continue to do so. By far the strongest trend is in the number of heatwave days experienced each season. Over much of eastern Australia, this trend is as large as two extra days per season, per decade.

Looking into the future, heatwaves are projected to become more frequent, with increases of between 20 and 40 extra days per season in the north and 5-10 extra days in the south likely by the end of this century, under a “business as usual” scenario. The intensity of heatwaves over southern Australia is also increasing faster than the average temperature. This is not good news for our ageing population, our fragile ecosystems and our outdated infrastructure.

The Australian research community has been successful in leading the development of a comprehensive way to measure marine heatwaves. Just like the atmosphere, areas of the ocean can experience prolonged periods of abnormally warm temperatures. These marine heatwaves can be every bit as damaging as atmospheric ones, decimating marine habitats and killing coral.

What we don’t yet know

Perhaps surprisingly, given the amount of research and public attention that heatwaves attract, they still do not have an official definition. The Bureau of Meteorology uses a concept called excess heat factor, which looks at maximum temperatures and ensuing minimum temperatures over a three-day period, incorporating the key characteristic of heatwaves of heat tending to persist overnight. However, we still do not have a universal definition that fits all situations.

We are also unclear on how the physical mechanisms that drive heatwaves will change under ongoing greenhouse warming. Recent research suggests that background warming will predominantly drive future increases in heatwaves, with some heatwave-inducing systems moving further south. But we don’t really know how future changes to patterns such as El Niño will continue to influence our heatwaves.

We also don’t really understand the extent to which the land surface drives Australian heatwaves. European studies have shown that dry conditions leading up to heatwave season, resulting in more parched soils, are a recipe for more intense and longer events, particularly when coupled with a persistent high-pressure system.

For Australia, we know that dry soil contributed to the deadly heatwave that preceded the Black Saturday bushfires in 2009. But more extensive studies are needed to understand this complex relationship over Australian soil (pun intended).

We also need a more comprehensive understanding of marine heatwaves. So far there has been only a handful of studies describing individual events. We still don’t know how much marine heatwaves have increased over recent decades, or how their causes and severity will change in the future. Given how vulnerable we are to marine heatwaves here in Australia, this topic should be a national research priority.

Finally, we need to develop more practical predictions of how heatwaves are likely to affect people in the future. We know how bad the impacts of heatwaves can be, and we know in general terms how heatwaves will change in the future. Yet the vast majority of our projections come from global climate models. Forecasting the exact impacts calls for finer spatial detail, using regional climate models. But these models are far more computationally expensive to run, and more investment into this area is necessary.

There is no doubt that heatwaves have been, and will continue to be, an integral feature of Australia’s climate, and recent research has taught us a lot about them. But there is more work to be done if we want to safeguard Australians properly from their deadly impacts in the future.

Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Christopher J. White receives funding from various Tasmanian State Government research funding programs, Wine Australia and the Bushfire and Natural Hazard CRC.