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Chief medical officer for England Prof Dame Sally Davies to carry out study into health impacts of tiny particles of plastic consumed by fish

The government is to conduct an investigation into the impact on human health of microplastic particles found in shellfish and other marine animals.

The study by the chief medical officer for England, Prof Dame Sally Davies, is to be carried out as part of a wider, year-long review of the health effects of pollution.

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Premier Jay Weatherill says Indigenous people will have final say even if public backs dump in referendum

South Australia’s proposal for a high-level nuclear waste dump in the state’s north will go to a referendum, the premier, Jay Weatherill, has announced, but only if it has bipartisan support.

The government has been considering the proposal following a recommendation by a royal commission into the nuclear fuel cycle that found the state could reap billions of dollars by storing waste from other countries. But the royal commission found public and political support for the dump was essential if it was to go ahead.

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But while increase in emissions has been halted, CO2 concentrations in atmosphere still at record high and rising

Global carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels have seen “almost no growth” for a third consecutive year, according to figures released as world leaders begin to arrive in Marrakech for a UN climate summit.

Related: Donald Trump presidency a 'disaster for the planet', warn climate scientists

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Latest Cedex report says October had the biggest proportion of renewables of any month since data made available

Australia’s renewable energy sector hit a record in October, with 21.7% of electricity in the national electricity market coming from renewables, according to the latest Cedex report.

That represents the biggest proportion of any month since the data was made available by the Australian Energy Market Operator in 2005, according to the report from the engineering consultants Pitt&Sherry and the Australia Institute.

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Caistor St Edmund, Norfolk Today, however, I cannot be a hermit. There are stick-swinging children, scurrying woodlice and cross-looking treecreepers

When modern life seems too much, I dream of living in the woods. I’ll be a mad, feral woman eating hazelnuts and tending a fire obsessively. It’s this specific wood where I would go, with its deciduous mix of ash, oak and chestnut, its sandy badger sett, wild garlic, bluebells in spring, and the clear, fast-flowing water of the gravel-bottomed stream. Known as Fox’s Grove, it’s just a few miles from the centre of Norwich.

Today, I am not a hermit. I have a troop of children for company, who are enthusiastically den-building and stick swinging. They’ve collected plenty of dead wood and a wigwam shape is emerging from their collective imagination. I am happily redundant, sitting under a large beech tree, on a comfortably curved root. My fingers are drawn to the mulchy earth, into leaves and soil, as I inhale that musty, fungus scent.

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The rising cost of gas generation has more than doubled electricity prices in NSW and Qld, with Qld facing a particularly expensive summer.

The South Australian Government is inviting applications for the $10 million Future Mobility Lab Fund to boost local testing, research and development of connected and autonomous vehicle technologies.

AGL Energy Limited (AGL) today announced on behalf of the Powering Australian Renewables Fund (PARF), that it has reached financial close on selling its 102 MW Nyngan and 53 MW Broken Hill solar plants into the fund.

City of Sydney to try again to remove barriers to local generation, as energy rule maker challenged to move its thinking into 21st Century.

Australia's wholesale electricity prices have barely moved for nearly two decades, and renewables will play key role in keeping a lid on them in future.

Two draft savanna fire management methods are now open for informal public consultation. The formal public consultation period will commence on the 21 November until the 19 December 2016.

Two draft savanna fire management methods are now open for informal public consultation. The formal public consultation period will commence on the 21 November until the 19 December 2016.

The Department of the Environment and Energy is seeking comments on the draft Carbon Credits (Carbon Farming Initiative) Amendment Rule 2016 (No.1). The consultation period closes 19 December 2016.

The Department of the Environment and Energy is seeking comments on the draft Carbon Credits (Carbon Farming Initiative) Amendment Rule 2016 (No.1). The consultation period closes 19 December 2016.

Record output from wind and hydro in October nearly matches brown coal for first time, as new data highlights how quickly renewables could reduce emissions.

National Australia Bank updates tally of “financed emissions” from power generation assets, while firming its commitment to a global carbon budget that limits global warming to less than 2°C. But what does this mean for future fossil fuel lending?

ANU method of making semi-transparent perovskite solar cells achieves "one of highest" efficiencies reported for a perovskite-silicon cell.

Bureau of Meteorology says wind gusts of 260km/h knocked down grid in South Australia blackout. It says it issued multiple warnings of destructive winds, raising questions about why AEMO took no action, and instead tried to pass the blame to wind farms.

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.

Storms, wind and hail do a lot of damage to Australians and their property. The 1999 Sydney hailstorm, for instance, cost A$1.7 billion in insured losses. That makes it the biggest single insurance loss in Australian history; in today’s money it would have cost more than A$4 billion.

Our understanding of wind and hail depends on the type of storm that generates them – and this is where it gets complicated. Thunderstorms can generate not just heavy rainfall but also high winds, lightning and hail, albeit in very localised areas. Large-scale storms such as tropical cyclones are a different phenomenon altogether, bringing not just destructive winds, but also storm surges and soaking rains, often over wide areas.

This complexity makes storms difficult to study, because limited research resources are spread across the many different storm types and their associated hazards.

To help address these issues, we collated and reviewed the latest knowledge and understanding of storms in Australia, covering the current scientific literature on the assessment, causes, observed trends and future projected changes of storm hazards, with a specific focus on severe wind and hail. We found that progress has been made in many areas, but also that much remains to be done.

Are we getting more or less storms?

In short - we don’t know with confidence. Despite the severity of the impacts wrought by storms, there is limited observational data for some types of storms and their associated hazards, particularly for the estimation of hail and wind.

Current estimates of the hail hazard in Australia, for example, are available only from the Bureau of Meteorology’s severe storm archive, which suffers from large uncertainties associated with biases and changing reporting practices. This makes it unsuitable for assessing the climatology of hail storms on a national scale.

Similarly, issues such as changes to Automatic Weather Stations (AWS) and limited records of atmospheric pressure observations, have hampered efforts to develop high-quality surface wind datasets across Australia. Bob Dylan might have been right when he told us “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” but then again he didn’t win his Nobel Prize for meteorology.

European researchers have analysed hailstorm trends using networks of devices called “hailpads”. But these records do not exist in Australia, and so there is a significant gap in our knowledge about hailstorm histories and trends.

The projections of future wind hazard in and around Australia are equally limited and differ from region to region. For example, in the tropics, research suggests that extreme wind hazard may decrease in the future, although confidence in this prediction is low. Meanwhile, summer wind increases are possible in those parts of Australia that are subjected to East Coast Lows.

We also don’t really know what to expect from future severe thunderstorms, and while research suggests that they may become more frequent in southeastern Australia, there is a wide range of uncertainty around this projection.

For future trends in hail, again there are only a few studies currently available, but there is at least an indication of increases in hail frequency in southeastern regions.

But while the picture is very uncertain for now, we hope this uncertainty will be reduced with the help of improvements in both the observation and computational modelling of storms and their associated hazards. We are growing more confident in our predictions for tropical cyclone, forecasting that the overall number will decline, but that the strongest storms will grow stronger still.

We also hope to improve our understanding of severe thunderstorms by using remote sensing platforms to record hail and extreme wind events right across Australia. These include the GPATS lightning-detection network, the new Himawari-8 and 9 satellites, and the Bureau of Meteorology’s soon-to-be upgraded radar network. Validation of these techniques, of course, will also require high-quality direct observations of these severe weather conditions – the very thing we currently lack.

Is this where you come in?

Citizen scientists may, however, help to fill some of these gaps. There are exciting prospects for improving severe weather observations, such as the success of the mPING crowdsourced weather reports project in the United States, which allows participants to use a mobile phone app to report severe weather, which then feeds into new research.

This approach could prove to be an excellent way of getting data in such a vast and diverse landscape as Australia, while simultaneously engaging with both the public and the atmospheric science community. We could also enlist the help of scientific study groups, which bring together academics, scientists and industry partners to exchange ideas and develop research techniques.

“The storm is up, and all is on the hazard,” cried Cassius in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. How true that is of storms in Australia.

If we don’t increase our observational and research abilities, we might never fully understand the impacts of severe storms, much less be able to deal with them.

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

Jason Evans receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the National Environmental Science Programme Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub, Sydney Water, Water Research Australia, and various NSW state government research funding programs.

Kevin Walsh receives funding from the Australian Research Council and other international funding organizations.

Declining US coal consumption played a significant role in keeping down global emissions of carbon dioxide, says a report.