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Radiation levels in the Pacific are almost back to their pre-Fukushima levels (except around Fukishima itself), and are expected to have fully recovered by 2020.

Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 11 July 1916

Close to the sands – indeed, washed by the highest tides – is a small marsh where, amidst a forest of sea club-rush and sea-plantain, both now in flower, young natterjacks, each with its yellow back-stripe, well earn their name of running toad: here a few sea asters, wild Michaelmas daisies, are already out, long before their scheduled date. A few sturdy ragworts grow on the seaward sides of the dunes which back the marsh, but little else can keep its head above the drifting sand; on the sheltered landward side, however, is a rich harvest of flowers, where blown small heaths, coppers, and blues flit from blossom to blossom, sampling their sweets. Until recently bird’s-foot trefoil monopolised the slopes and levels, at any rate in places where the burnet rose and dewberry had failed to spread; now the pink flowers of the rest-harrow mingle with the yellow pea-like flowers of the trefoil, and great pitches are still more yellow with bedstraw and stonecrop. Starting as a downy bud, the crimson flowers of the wild thyme are opening, shedding fragrance, and amongst them are the still softer and silky flowers of the hare’s-foot clover.

A wheatear, showing his white lower back as he flies from us, dodges amongst the dunes, and the meadow pipit ascends with his chittering song: surely he is singing to his mate in view of a second brood, for young titlarks are now strong on the wing. By no means all birds have ceased to sing, silent though the country is; a fine crimson-breasted linnet was in splendid song as he sat, showing off, on a gorse bush, and near by a healthy family, perhaps his own, twittered as they followed a more sombre hen.

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In May 2012, my colleagues and I had a paper accepted for publication in the Journal of Climate, showing that temperatures recorded in Australasia since 1950 were warmer than at any time in the past 1,000 years.

Following the early online release of the paper, as the manuscript was being prepared for the journal’s print edition, one of our team spotted a typo in the methods section of the manuscript.

While the paper said the study had used “detrended” data – temperature data from which the longer-term trends had been removed – the study had in fact used raw data. When we checked the computer code, the DETREND command said “FALSE” when it should have said “TRUE”.

Both raw and detrended data have been used in similar studies, and both are scientifically justifiable approaches. The issue for our team was the fact that what was written in the paper did not match what was actually done in the analysis – an innocent mistake, but a mistake nonetheless.

Instead of taking the easy way out and just correcting the single word in the page proof, we asked the publisher to put our paper on hold and remove the online version while we assessed the influence that the different method had on the results.

Enter the bloggers

It turned out that someone else had spotted the typo too. Two days after we identified the issue, a commenter on the Climate Audit blog also pointed it out.

The website’s author, Stephen McIntyre, proceeded to claim (incorrectly) that there were “fundamental issues” with the study. It was the start of a concerted smear campaign aimed at discrediting our science.

As well as being discussed by bloggers (sometimes with a deeply offensive and sexist tone), the “flaw” was seized upon by sections of the mainstream media.

Meanwhile, our team received a flurry of hate mail and an onslaught of time-consuming Freedom of Information requests for access to our raw data and years of our emails, in search of ammunition to undermine and discredit our team and results. This is part of a range of tactics used in Australia and overseas in an attempt to intimidate scientists and derail our efforts to do our job.

Bloggers began to accuse us of conspiring to reverse-engineer our results to dramatise the warming in our region. Former geologist and prominent climate change sceptic Bob Carter published an opinion piece in The Australian claiming that the peer-review process is faulty and climate science cannot be trusted.

Checking the facts

Meanwhile, we set about rigorously checking and rechecking every step of our study in a bid to dispel any doubts about its accuracy. This included extensive reprocessing of the data using independently generated computer code, three additional statistical methods, detrended and non-detrended approaches, and climate model data to further verify the results.

The mammoth process involved three extra rounds of peer-review and four new peer-reviewers. From the original submission on 3 November, 2011, to the paper’s re-acceptance on 26 April, 2016, the manuscript was reviewed by seven reviewers and two editors, underwent nine rounds of revisions, and was assessed a total of 21 times – not to mention the countless rounds of internal revisions made by our research team and data contributors. One reviewer even commented that we had done “a commendable, perhaps bordering on an insane, amount of work”.

Finally, today, we publish our study again with virtually the same conclusion: the recent temperatures experienced over the past three decades in Australia, New Zealand and surrounding oceans are warmer than any other 30-year period over the past 1,000 years.

Our updated analysis also gives extra confidence in our results. For example, as the graph below shows, there were some 30-year periods in our palaeoclimate reconstructions during the 12th century that may have been fractionally (0.03–0.04℃) warmer than the 1961–1990 average. But these results are more uncertain as they are based on sparse network of only two records – and in any event, they are still about 0.3℃ cooler than the most recent 1985–2014 average recorded by our most accurate instrumental climate network available for the region.

Comparison of Australasian temperature reconstructions. Red: original temperature reconstruction published in the May 2012 version of the study; green: more recent reconstruction published in Nature Geoscience in April 2013; black: newly published reconstruction; orange: observed instrumental temperatures. Grey shading shows 90% uncertainty estimates of the original 2012 reconstruction; purple shading shows considerably expanded uncertainty estimates of the revised 2016 version based on four statistical methods. The recent 30-year warming (orange line) lies outside the range of temperature variability reconstruction (black line) over the past 1,000 years.

Overall, we are confident that observed temperatures in Australasia have been warmer in the past 30 years than every other 30-year period over the entire millennium (90% confidence based on 12,000 reconstructions, developed using four independent statistical methods and three different data subsets). Importantly, the climate modelling component of our study also shows that only human-caused greenhouse emissions can explain the recent warming recorded in our region.

Our study now joins the vast body of evidence showing that our region, in line with the rest of the planet, has warmed rapidly since 1950, with all the impacts that climate change brings. So far in 2016 we have seen bushfires ravage Tasmania’s ancient World Heritage rainforests, while 93% of the Great Barrier Reef has suffered bleaching amid Australia’s hottest ever sea temperatures – an event made 175 times more likely by climate change. Worldwide, it has never been hotter in our recorded history.

Speed vs accuracy

There are a couple of lessons we can take away from this ordeal. The first is that it takes far more time and effort to do rigorous science than it does to attack it.

In contrast to the instant gratification of publishing a blog post, the scientific process often takes years of meticulous evaluation and independent expert assessment.

Yes, we made a mistake – a single word in a 74-page document. We used the word “detrended” instead of “non-detrended”. Atoning for this error involved spending four extra years on the study, while withstanding a withering barrage of brutal criticism.

This brings us to the second take-home message. Viciously attacking a researcher at one of Australia’s leading universities as a “bimbo” and a “brain-dead retard” doesn’t do much to encourage professional climate scientists to engage with the scores of online amateur enthusiasts. Worse still, gender-based attacks may discourage women from engaging in public debate or pursuing careers in male-dominated careers like science at all.

Although climate change deniers are desperate to be taken seriously by the scientific community, it’s extremely difficult to engage with people who do not display the basic principles of common courtesy, let alone comply with the standard scientific practice of submitting your work to be scrutinised by the world’s leading experts in the field.

Despite the smears, a rummage through hundreds of our emails revealed nothing but a group of colleagues doing their best to resolve an honest mistake under duress. It wasn’t the guilty retreat from a flawed study produced by radical climate activists that the bloggers would have people believe. Instead, it showed the self-correcting nature of science and the steadfast dedication of researchers to work painstakingly around the clock to produce the best science humanly possible.

Rather than take the easy way out, we chose to withdraw our paper and spent years triple-checking every step of our work. After the exhaustive checking, the paper has been published with essentially the same conclusions as before, but now with more confidence in our results.

Like it or not, our story simply highlights the slow and unglamorous process of real science in action. In the end, this saga will be remembered as a footnote in climate science, a storm in a teacup, all played out against the backdrop of a planet that has never been hotter in human history.

Joelle Gergis receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

We are still a long way from being able to breathe air that does not harm our health

Last week Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, joined campaigners to call for a new clean air act.

This July marks the 60th anniversary of the original legislation that transformed the air in our cities and saved many lives. The Act followed the deaths of nearly 13,000 Londoners in the 1952 and 1956 smogs. Government finally accepted that regulating factory chimneys was not enough. We had to tackle home fires, too. This was politically difficult, since a cheery fire was seen as the heart of a family home. The Act required smokeless coals and, importantly, provided money to help people to change their fireplaces and boilers to burn cleaner fuels. It worked. Air pollution improved across the UK and the deaths of up to 700 Londoners during the last great coal smog in December 1962 marked the welcome end of an era.

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Archaeologists in Israel say they hope the discovery of a Philistine cemetery will shed new light on the mysterious migrant people.

New research into the complex links of the food chain suggest that the lovable mammals play a key role in managing carbon dioxide levels

Charles Darwin once mused on the impacts that predators could have on the landscapes around them. In particular, he wondered – in On the Origin of Species – how neighbourhood cats might affect the abundance of flowers in the fields near his house at Downe in Kent. He concluded the animals’ potential to change local flora was considerable.

A robust cat population, he argued, would mean that local mouse numbers would be low and that, in turn, would mean there would high numbers of bumble bees – because mice destroy bee combs and nests. And as bees pollinate clover, Darwin argued that this cascade of oscillating species numbers would result in there being more clover in fields in areas where there are lots of feline pets. Cats mean clover, in short.

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Baking your own bread sounds like the pinnacle of green cooking, but we still need to be aware of road miles and heat use

For a non-baker (like me), a zero-energy cake used to mean one someone else made. But I’ve forced myself to recognise the footprint of shop-bought croissants and cream puffs. It’s no joke. First, there are obviously the giant ovens devouring energy, then there’s industrial baking’s reliance on palm oil, too. A new report highlights the devastating impact of the continued march of palm oil monocultures. A further ingredient is bread miles: in the UK an estimated 130m extra road miles are caused by getting “fresh” bread into stores.

Home baking gives you some control. But a homemade cake still has an impact. Research from the Centre for Alternative Technology highlighted the impact of the eggs (1.8kg of CO2 per box) and the 350 ears of wheat it takes for one loaf.

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What do we mean by the term 'nature writing' and how has it changed?

An archaeological dig is under way on what experts say is a very rare undisturbed Bronze Age burial mound in Lancashire.

Russian, American and Japanese astronauts enter the International Space Station.

The deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, France beat Germany to reach the final of Euro 2016, Tony Blair and the Iraq war inquiry, Serena Williams at Wimbledon – the best photography in news, culture and sport from around the world this week

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Aileen Moreton-Robinson has spent her intellectual life exploring racism and power. But it all begins in the bush on Stradbroke Island when her grandfather taught her the skill of tracking. The latest idea to grip her considerable mind is possessive logic and the way it superimposes itself on the land by denying the sovereign will of indigenous people.

The two most important bike races in the world are on right now: but you can only watch the Tour de France boys on telly. Meanwhile, fans of the Giro Rosa must check Twitter to follow the girls. Helen Pidd talks to TV networks — and cycling commentator Ned Boulting —to find out why

July is the best month of the year for cycling fans: three glorious weeks of the Tour de France to gorge on, provided you can wrestle the remote from any Wimbledon watchers in your life.

Yet while it is possible to watch Mark Cavendish’s renaissance live on both Eurosport and ITV4, anyone wanting to follow the Giro Rosa has to make do with crumbs posted on social media.

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South Uist If the oystercatchers had sounded anxious, the new arrival sounds almost desperate, for its call has a panicky breathlessness about it

At the end of a hot summer day what could be pleasanter than a peaceful evening stroll down to the beach? The sun is still warm, there’s just the lightest of breezes, and the only sound to be heard is that of a skylark singing overhead. But we haven’t walked far before an oystercatcher takes to the air, uttering a succession of loud, shrill calls.

Over and over again it repeats its brief, anxious notes as it flies over our heads away across the field, and then returns to make another pass above us. A second oystercatcher a little further away echoes the vocal performance so that our eyes are constantly drawn to one or the other. They accompany us for a 100 metres or more along the track without once letting up. Then they are joined by a lapwing.

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These gadgets are programmable, self learning, sensor driven, wifi enabled, and access the internet optimising energy use.

One was caught in 2010. Just one. A tiny, nine centimetre long mouse, with whiskers like a spray of fireworks and a white, fluffy belly. Since then, none.

Professor Hugh Possingham says authorities must confront prospect that some parts of reef are doomed and focus on what to preserve

Governments must decide which parts of the Great Barrier Reef they most want to save and confront the prospect that some of it may be doomed, an expert on conservation modelling has warned.

University of Queensland professor Hugh Possingham said agencies, including the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, needed to make tough decisions about which parts of the natural wonder are most worth preserving “rather than trying to save everything”.

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Sadiq Khan plans to introduce a new charge for London’s most polluting cars (Report, 5 July). The mayor is right to propose bold action to tackle the public health crisis of air pollution, which causes thousands of premature deaths each year in London. Liberal conservative thinktank Bright Blue is calling for city councils throughout England to be given the powers to set up low-emission zones, so that similar radical action can be taken wherever air pollution is a problem. The government’s current air-quality plan gives low-emission zones to just five other English cities, despite many others being affected by harmful pollution. It also excludes private cars from any charges. The revenue raised by low-emission zones should be used to fund a national diesel scrappage scheme, so that dirty vehicles are taken off our roads for good. Sixty years after the Clean Air Act 1956 was signed into law, the government must urgently address today’s challenge from polluting cars.
Sam Hall
Researcher, Bright Blue

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Two predatory species are added to IUCN Red List of endangered species as pressure from fishing sees their populations fall by half in the last 75 years

Whale sharks and winghead sharks have moved one step closer to extinction, after the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) redefined them both as endangered species on the group’s ‘Red List’.

The two predatory species have fallen foul of increased pressure from human activity, especially the fishing industry, with populations of whale sharks – the world’s largest living fish – halving in the last 75 years.

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The week’s top environment news stories and green events. If you are not already receiving this roundup, sign up here to get the briefing delivered to your inbox

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