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Can an algorithm turn you into an efficient sock-sorting machine?

Air pollution in UK cities has failed to improve because politicians prioritise road safety and economic growth instead, research suggests.

One week after energy ministers met to consider opening up Australia's gas market, Victoria Labor announces permanent legislative ban on coal-seam gas fracking.

SA family installs state’s first Fronius battery system, adding 6kWh storage to 10kW rooftop solar, with help from Adelaide City Council grant.

COLD CASE: One of the world's coldest cases may have finally been cracked - human ancestor 'Lucy' died after falling from a tree, according to detailed scans of her 3.18-million-year-old bones.

Tesla says it doesn’t make economic sense for EVs to send electricity back to the grid, but concedes that “dynamic charging” of EVs at times convenient to the grid is coming.

For the first time, a traditional network company is leveraging non-network solutions to fix an age-old grid problem that used to mean only one thing: more poles and wires.

Data from Australia's solar farms show that utility-scale solar is working better than expected and is a lot more productive than official government forecasts suggest. And most new solar farms should have tracking devices to follow the sun.

There is a battle under way near Cannon Ball, North Dakota, over plans for a multibillion-dollar oil pipeline. The North Dakota Access pipeline will run just outside the formal boundary of the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, and tribal members fear it will pollute local drinking water and disturb sacred sites

• Faces of the North Dakota pipeline protest: ‘Sacred land is who we are’

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Storm damage and a high tide in Adelaide. Witness King Tides/Flickr

The wild storms that lashed eastern Australia earlier this year damaged property and eroded beaches, causing millions of dollars' worth of damage. As sea levels rise, the impact of storms will threaten more and more homes, businesses and services along the coastline.

CSIRO projections suggest that seas may rise by as much 82cm by the end of the century. When added to high tides, and with the influence of winds and associated storms, this can mean inundation by waters as high as a couple of metres.

As a community, we have to start deciding what must be protected, and how and when; where we will let nature take its course; how and if we need to modify the way we live and work near the coast; and so on. Many of these decisions fall largely to local governments.

We have launched a website to help local councils and Australians prepare for a climate change future. CoastAdapt lets you find maps of your local area under future sea-level scenarios, read case studies, and make adaptation plans.

How will sea-level rise affect you?

Using sea-level rise modelling from John Church and his team at CSIRO, CoastAdapt provides sea-level projections for four greenhouse gas scenarios, for individual local government areas. This also provides a set of inundation maps for the selected local government area.

Sydney’s possible sea level in 2100 under a worst-case scenario. Inundated areas shown in pale blue. NCCARF

The inundation maps (developed by the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information) show the average projected sea-level rise for a particular climate change scenario, combined with the highest tide. The method provides an approximation of where flooding may occur.

Because water is simply filled onto the map according to elevation, it doesn’t account for things like estuary shapes and water movement, the behaviour of waves and so on.

Brisbane’s possible sea level in 2100 under a worst-case scenario. Inundated areas shown in pale blue. NCCARF

But both the maps and the sea-level projections are a useful way to start thinking about where risks may lie in any given local government area.

CoastAdapt also looks at what we know about coastal processes in the present day. Understanding these characteristics helps us understand where and why the coast is vulnerable to inundation and erosion.

For instance, sandy coasts are much more vulnerable to erosion than rocky coasts. The information will help decision-makers understand the behaviour of their coasts and their susceptibility to erosion under sea-level rise.

Darwin’s possible sea level in 2100 under a worst-case scenario. Inundated areas shown in pale blue. NCCARF Local councils already adapting

Adaptation is already happening on the ground around Australian local councils. We have highlighted several of these on CoastAdapt.

In the small seaside town of Port Fairy in southeast Victoria, for example, an active community group is monitoring the accelerated erosion of dunes on one of their beaches. The council and community have worked together to prioritise protecting dune areas with decommissioned landfill to prevent this rubbish tip being exposed to the beach.

Other councils have already undertaken the process of assessing their risks and drafting adaptation plans.

Low-lying areas in the City of Lake Macquarie already experience occasional flooding from high seas. This is expected to become more common and more severe.

Lake Macquarie Council has successfully worked with the local community to come up with 39 possible management actions, which the community then assessed against social, economic and environmental criteria. The area now has a strategy for dealing with current flooding and for gradually building protection for future sea-level rise.

This approach has engaged community members and given them the opportunity to help decide the future of their community.

Melbourne’s possible sea level in 2100 under a worst-case scenario. Inundated areas shown in pale blue. NCCARF Getting prepared

What stumps councils and other coastal decision-makers is the scale and complexity of the problem. Each decision-maker needs to have some sense of the risk of future climate change to their interests, then develop plans that will help them to cope or adapt to these risks. Planners and adaptors must navigate uncertainty in where, when and how much change they must consider, and how these changes interact with other issues that must be managed.

To better understand the risk, decision-makers need access to timely, authoritative advice presented in ways and levels that are useful for their needs. This is particularly true for an issue such as climate science, which is technically complex.

Climate projections, particularly at the local level, come with a level of certainty and probability. The further we look into the future, the more extraneous factors are unknown – for example, will global policy succeed in bringing down greenhouse emissions? Or will these keep increasing, which will necessitate planning for worst-case scenarios?

Add to this the questions around legal risk, financing adaptation measures, accommodating community views and so on, and the task is daunting.

That’s the thinking behind CoastAdapt – the first national attempt to create a platform that brings together a range of data, tools and research that have been developing and growing over the last decade. As well as maps and case studies, we’ve also built an adaptation planning framework (Coastal Climate Adaptation Decision Support) and set up an online forum for people to ask questions, exchange ideas and even pose questions to our panel of experts.

The author would like to acknowledge the work of staff of the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility. CoastAdapt is in beta version and is seeking feedback. The final version will be released in early 2017.

Sarah Boulter works for NCCARF. NCCARF receives funding from the Department of Environment and Energy.

New evidence suggests that the famous fossilised human ancestor dubbed 'Lucy' by scientists may have died falling from a great height - probably from a tree.

More than 300 reindeer have been killed in a lightning storm on a mountain plateau in Norway.

The darkest prognosis is that bio, cyber or environmental catastrophes could foreclose humanity’s potential. But there is an optimistic option

On Christmas Eve 1968, the Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders took a photograph of the view outside the window as his spaceship orbited the moon. The now iconic Earthrise image shows our half-moon blue planet under a decoration of clouds rising from the blackness of space over the lunar surface.

The picture encapsulated Earth’s precariousness in the cosmos and, for many, contained a message of humility and stewardship for our home.

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Experts say human impact on Earth so profound that Holocene must give way to epoch defined by nuclear tests, plastic pollution and domesticated chicken

Humanity’s impact on the Earth is now so profound that a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – needs to be declared, according to an official expert group who presented the recommendation to the International Geological Congress in Cape Town on Monday.

The new epoch should begin about 1950, the experts said, and was likely to be defined by the radioactive elements dispersed across the planet by nuclear bomb tests, although an array of other signals, including plastic pollution, soot from power stations, concrete, and even the bones left by the global proliferation of the domestic chicken were now under consideration.

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Nova Innovation deploys first fully operational array of tidal power turbines in the Bluemull Sound

A power company in Shetland has claimed a breakthrough in the race to develop viable offshore tidal stations after successfully feeding electricity to local homes.

Nova Innovation said it had deployed the world’s first fully operational array of tidal power turbines in the Bluemull Sound between the islands of Unst and Yell in the north of Shetland, where the North Sea meets the Atlantic.

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Researchers at Stanford University have designed a unique bird tunnel to observe how tiny birds fly.

The California state government passed AJR 43, urging the national government to pass a revenue-neutral carbon tax

Last week, the California state senate passed Assembly Joint Resolution 43, urging the federal government to pass a revenue-neutral carbon tax:

WHEREAS, A national carbon tax would make the United States a leader in mitigating climate change and the advancing clean energy technologies of the 21st Century, and would incentivize other countries to enact similar carbon taxes, thereby reducing global carbon dioxide emissions without the need for complex international agreements; now, therefore, be it Resolved by the Assembly and the Senate of the State of California, jointly, That the Legislature hereby urges the United States Congress to enact, without delay, a tax on carbon-based fossil fuels; and be it further Resolved ... That all tax revenue should be returned to middle- and low-income Americans to protect them from the impact of rising prices due to the tax

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Conservationists fear this year’s cool spring and slow start to summer have taken their toll on one of UK’s best-loved butterflies

Conservationists are warning of the decline of one of the UK’s best-loved butterflies.

Numbers of the small tortoiseshell – which is one of the most recognisable and widespread in the country – appear to have plummeted this summer.

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Turbines installed off the coast of Shetland could herald a "new era" in tidal energy, according to the company running the project.

Paula Kahumbu: Elephant diplomacy is helping to get Japan on board in efforts towards a global ban on ivory trade

The global coalition for a total ban on the trade in ivory is taking shape. In Africa calls for the ban are led by the 29 nation African Elephant Coalition (AEC). In the consumer countries, both the US President Obama and China’s President Xi have made commitments to close the domestic markets which will have a huge impact on demand.

To be sure, progress towards building the coalition is uneven. Key African nations such as Zimbabwe and Namibia are opposed to the ban, and have even petitioned CITES for a relaxation of current restrictions. In Europe, while the French Environment Minister Ségolène Royal has signed a decree banning the trade, in the UK the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs says it is still “working” on its pledge to implement a total ban on ivory sales.

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