Feed aggregator

Acciona Energy is about to take delivery of critical components for its 132 MW under-construction wind farm at Mt Gellibrand in Victoria.

Over its first year, the Trump administration has taken extreme steps to unravel progress on U.S. climate action domestically.

The popular NEM-Watch facility now includes the Tesla big battery, state demand levels and "hidden demand" from rooftop solar PV.

The Trump tax bill will devastate the renewable industry and jobs, while incentivising automation, and the manufacture of polluting, unprofitable robots.

A new report from the Rocky Mountain Institute lists 22 policies that could help get the job done.

The annual calendar features stunning shots of the red-tailed black cockatoo and the red-capped robin, as well as the shy and unobtrusive painted button-quail, and the crested shrike-tit, which is heard more often than it’s seen

• Vote for Australia bird of the year 2017

Continue reading...

Low flows in the Murray River in recent years have harmed tiny marine plants called phytoplankton, with consequences for local marine species and management. Hannah Auricht, PhD candidate, University of Adelaide Kenneth Clarke, Researcher, School of Biological Sciences, University of Adelaide Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.

It has been a quarter of a century since the world's largest sand island was listed on the World Heritage register.

Astronomers discover the most distant "supermassive" black hole known to science.

It took 20 years to excavate, clean and put together Little Foot, found in caves north of Johannesburg.

An algorithm developed by the DeepMind team claims victory against a world-beating AI chess program.

Andrew Warren of the British Energy Efficiency Federation says that Rolls-Royce’s calls for public subsidies are unwarranted

You report that the defence firm Rolls-Royce has been lobbying for government funds to assist it to diversify into building nuclear reactors (Millions on offer to develop small nuclear plants, 4 December). It is arguing that the switch to electric transport will “drive up future demand”.

The National Grid concludes that, provided that vehicle recharging is concentrated into non-peak demand hours, even large-scale electrification of surface transport requires an increase in electricity system capacity by around 15%.

Continue reading...

Tim Evans says that UK beekeepers should swap their frame hives for top-bar hives if they want to avoid chemical interventions and sugar feeding

The photograph accompanying your piece (How Liberia’s killer bees are helping to rebuild livelihoods, 4 December) shows a Liberian beekeeper holding curved comb from a top-bar hive, not the oblong combs of the frame hives generally used in the UK. Top-bar hives, traditional in Africa, allow bees to build comb in the shape they wish, and to structure their nest according to their natural instincts. These hives are usually managed without constant intrusive inspections, chemical interventions and sugar feeding.

A significant minority of UK beekeepers have adopted these methods. We find that they keep bees healthier than conventional systems, and our experience is borne out by the work of Cornell University’s eminent Professor Thomas Seeley, among other scientists.

Continue reading...

After a series of set backs the international project is back on track, say scientists, giving tentative hope for a major new source of clean power by 2025

An international project to generate energy from nuclear fusion has reached a key milestone, with half of the infrastructure required now built.

Bernard Bigot, the director-general of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter), the main facility of which is based in southern France, said the completion of half of the project meant the effort was back on track, after a series of difficulties. This would mean that power could be produced from the experimental site from 2025.

Continue reading...

Australian and Chinese banks have turned it down, and analysts say Adani’s failure to secure funding for the Carmichael mine leaves it high and dry

Adani’s operations in Australia appear to be hanging on by a thread, as activists prove effective at undermining the company’s chances of getting the finance it needs.

China seems to have ruled out funding for the mine, which means it’s not just Adani’s proposed Carmichael coalmine that is under threat, but also its existing Abbot Point coal terminal, which sits near Bowen, behind the Great Barrier Reef.

Continue reading...

One of the oldest and most complete skeletons of our ancestors is unveiled in South Africa.

The end of the era of throwaway plastic has been signalled by UN environment ministers meeting in Kenya.

A small group of civilian para-enforcers is taking the protection of Palawan’s threatened rainforest from illegal loggers into their own hands

Tata gives hand signals for his men to drop to the rainforest floor as the searing whine of a chainsaw fades, their mission to save a critically endangered piece of paradise in the Philippines suddenly on hold.

Former paramilitary leader Efren “Tata” Balladares has been leading the other flip flop-wearing environmental crusaders up and down the steep mountains of Palawan island for the past 15 hours in the hunt for illegal loggers.

Continue reading...

Wildlife photographer Ian Wood has been capturing great apes in the wild for decades, but when a young orangutan discovered his hidden camera on a recent Borneo trip he got some truly unexpected results

One of the challenges of wildlife photography is trying to come up with ways to take images that haven’t been shot before. Through my conservation work with orangutans I’ve had numerous opportunities to photograph these great apes over the last couple of decades, but on a recent annual fundraising trip to Tanjung Puting national park in Borneo I got some unexpected, close-up results.

I had decided to hide a GoPro camera near to where orangutans often appear, hoping to get some close-up wide-angle images of them in the forest. I figured that in the worse case, if an orangutan found my camera it would realise it wasn’t food and discard it.

Continue reading...

All of nature’s thermometers indicate a rapid rise in global temperatures.

The US Global Change Research Program recently released a Climate Science Special Report. It is clearly written – an authoritative summary of the science, and easy to understand.

The first main chapter deals with changes to the climate and focuses much attention on global temperatures. When most people think of climate change, they think of the global temperature – specifically the temperature of the air a few meters above the Earth surface. There are other (better) ways to measure climate change such as heat absorbed by the oceans, melting ice, sea level rise, or others. But the iconic measurement most people think of are these air temperatures, shown in the top frame of the figure below.

Continue reading...