Feed aggregator

We asked readers living in the area to share their thoughts with us, one month on after Lancashire council’s rejection of a fracking site was overturned

I felt so strongly about the Cuadrilla proposal that I demonstrated outside Lancashire County Council in Preston on two occasions when the council were voting on the applications.

Continue reading...

‘The officers cautiously unzipped the bag and found this gorgeous boy,’ Queensland police say of Alfred the joey

A woman taken into custody by Queensland police has stunned officers by handing over a baby koala she had been secretly carrying inside a zipped canvas bag.

The East Brisbane woman, 50, was asked if she had anything to declare after her arrest on unrelated matters by officers on patrol in the city’s south on Sunday night. She produced the bag, saying it contained a joey.

Continue reading...

Environment minister Steven Miles calls on federal government to fast-track extra $1.65m for agency tasked with protecting the reef

Queensland’s environment minister has flagged concerns that the agency tasked with protecting the Great Barrier Reef is running as a “shell of its former self” amid the underfunding of a cornerstone program.

Steven Miles called on the federal government to fast-track an extra $1.65m for the main “on-water” management program for the reef, which had seen no increase to its funding since 2008.

Continue reading...

The Chevin, Otley, West Yorkshire Dry stone walls intrigue because there is a hint of the impossible about them. They stand as if by sleight of hand, artificial but organic

A gentle, mysterious, monosyllabic presence, Alan Dickinson was, to my childhood imagination, less a man and more a wildling from some semi-mythical moorland tribe. He looked as rugged as Almscliff Crag and smelled of woodchip and weather. I viewed him with quiet awe.

The husband of Andrea, my childminder, Alan was of farming stock, and his occupation was building dry stone walls. He has shaped my image of this trade ever since: inscrutable men stacking stones in windswept, lonely places where walls define the landscape.

Continue reading...

By including Toma in my film at the Great Barrier Reef I want to show how environmental disasters are creating a lonely world for our children

The short film I’ve made with the Guardian stars my son, Toma, aged four years and five months. That’s a little scary for me to write, since, up until this moment, my husband, Avi, and I have been pretty careful about protecting him from public exposure. No matter how damn cute we think he’s being, absolutely no tweeting is allowed.

So I want to explain how I decided to introduce him to you in this very public way.

Continue reading...

Exclusive: In Under the Surface, a special Guardian film, the award-winning writer and environmental campaigner Naomi Klein travels to the Great Barrier Reef with her son, Toma, to see the impact of coral bleaching caused by climate change. In a personal but also universal story, Klein tells how she wants him to bear witness. ‘Just in case, amid the coral that is still alive, he can find something beautiful to connect with, something he can carry with him as he navigates life on a warmer, harsher planet than the one I grew up on. Because climate change is already here – and kids are on the frontlines’
Extra footage supplied by David Hannan

• Naomi Klein: Climate change is intergenerational theft. That’s why my son is part of this story

• Help us continue to cover the stories that matter. Support the Guardian with a monthly or one-off contribution

• Great Barrier Reef: a catastrophe laid bare

Continue reading...

The Department is seeking a partner to commercialise a humane new bait that will help fight extinction by tackling feral cats

New report says 2016 to be defined by an acceleration to renewable energy, faster-than-expected shifts regionally and nationally, and growing risk for investors who lag behind.

UNEP says door will close on 1.5°C warming limit unless countries raise their ambition before 2020.

Move over Elon Musk. Mercedes-Benz Energy Americas has entered the wide-open US EV+storage market.

New ownership models and technological advances will utterly transform the mobility market. And that's bad news for Big Oil.

Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs) appear to be making a comeback, but do they have a chance against the electric vehicle?

Carnegie Wave wins $15.5m from European Regional Development Fund towards first phase of 15MW commercial project at Cornwall Wave Hub.

Melbourne-based company Independent Products wins Company of the Year at ATC for its retrofit ultra-efficient cooling technology.

Generation Y has grown up in a rapidly warming world. According to the US National Climate Data Centre, every month since February 1985 has seen above average global temperatures, compared with the twentieth century. I have no memories of a “normal” month.

2016 is on track to be the hottest year on record, surpassing the previous records set in 2015 and in 2014. These are just a few of the flurry of recent record temperatures, which includes Australia’s hottest day, week, month, season and year.

The question now is what the future will look like. At some point in the decades to come, these record-breaking temperatures will not be rare; they will become normal. But when exactly?

In a new study just released in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, I (together with co-authors Andrew King and Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick) find that on the current greenhouse gas emissions trajectory, global temperatures like 2015 will by normal by 2030, and Australia’s record-breaking 2013 summer will likely be an average summer by 2035.

While we still have time to delay some of these changes, others are already locked in - cutting emissions will make no difference - so we must also adapt to a warmer world. This should be a sobering thought as world leaders gather in Marrakech to begin work on achieving the Paris Agreement which came into force last week.

Today’s extremes, tomorrow’s normal

The recent record-breaking temperatures have often been described as the “new normal”. For example, after the new global temperature record was set in 2016, these high temperatures were described as a new normal.

What is a new normal for our climate? The term has been used broadly in the media and in scientific literature to make sense of climate change. Put simply, we should get used to extremes temperatures, because our future will be extreme.

But without a precise definition, a new normal is limited and difficult to understand. If 2015 was a new normal for global temperatures, what does it mean if 2017, 2018, or 2019 are cooler?

In our study we defined the new normal as the point in time when at least half the following 20 years are warmer than 2015’s record breaking global temperatures.

We examined extreme temperatures in a number of state-of-the-art climate models from an international scientific initiative. We also explored how different future greenhouse gas emissions impact temperatures.

We used four different greenhouse gas scenarios, known as Representative Concentration Pathways, or RCPs. These range from a business-as-usual situation (RCP8.5) to a major cut to emissions (RCP2.6).

It is worth emphasising that real-world emissions are tracking above those covered by these hypothetical storylines.

2015’s record temperatures will likely become normal between 2020 and 2030. Future extremes

Our findings were straightforward. 2015’s record-breaking temperatures will be the new normal between 2020 and 2030 according to most of the climate models we analysed. We expect within a decade or so that 2015’s record temperatures will likely be average or cooler than average.

By 2040, 2015’s temperatures were average or cooler than average in 90% of the models. This result was unaffected by reducing greenhouse gas emissions or not - we are already locked in to a significant amount of further warming.

We also looked at the timing of a new normal for different regions. Australia is a canary in the coal mine. While other regions don’t see extreme temperatures become the new normal until later in the century, Australia’s record-breaking 2013 summer temperatures will be normal by 2035 - according to the majority of the models we looked at.

At smaller spatial scales, such as for state-based based temperature extremes, we can likely delay record-breaking temperatures becoming the new normal by committing to significant greenhouse gas cuts. This would clearly reduce the vulnerability of locations to extreme temperatures.

Living in a warmer world

If you like heading to the beach on hot days, warmer Australian summers seem appealing, not alarming.

But Australia’s position as a hot spot of future extremes will have serious consequences. The 2013 summer, dubbed the “angry summer”, was characterised by extreme heatwaves, widespread bushfires and a strain on infrastructure.

Our results suggest that such a summer will be relatively mild within two decades, and the hottest summers will be much more extreme.

My co-authors, Andrew and Sarah, and I all grew up in a world of above-average temperatures, but our future is in a world were our recent record-breaking temperatures will be mild. Our new research shows this is not a world of more pleasantly hot summer days, but instead of increasingly severe temperature extremes.

These significantly hotter summers present a challenge that we must adapt to. How will we protect ourselves from increases in excess heat deaths and increased fire danger, and our ecosystems from enhanced warming?

While we have already locked ourselves into a future where 2015 will rapidly become a new normal for the globe, we can still act now to reduce our vulnerability to future extreme events occurring in our region, both through cutting emissions and preparing for increased heat.

Sophie Lewis receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Using the hashtags #DelhiSmog and #DelhiChokes, locals are voicing concern over heavy pollution shrouding the city

Residents and visitors to Delhi are struggling to cope with severe levels of toxic air pollution that have prompted authorities to declare and “emergency situation” in the city.

Locals have expressed their concern over the dangerous smog on Twitter, with some saying they have been forced to take their families out of Delhi due to concerns over their health and others noting that they haven’t seen the sunrise in more than a week due to the haze that clogs the sky.

Continue reading...

Australia’s debate about energy costs has been framed around reports that are either ignorant or deliberately pessimistic about the cost of renewable energy alternatives. But a whole series of events is now causing industry to think differently.

Volunteers are tagging turtles off the Pilbara coast, and we check out new-age hoof care for horses. Old fridges and bath tubs get a new lease of life in the Beswick community garden, and we visit an edible flower farm off the coast of Brisbane.

Concerns over a Trump presidency are set to dominate the start of global climate talks in Morocco.

Finding hope and taking positive action can be a tricky thing to do, when it comes to climate change.