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Evidence is growing that air turbulence is becoming stronger and more frequent because of climate change.

President Donald Trump is keeping some of his promises. Late last month he signed an executive order that tore up Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan. Some commentators see this as putting the world on “the road to climate catastrophe”, while others have described it as an effort at “killing the international order”.

Will America lose out? Will China, which has chided Trump for selfishness, be the prime beneficiary as its solar panel industry continues to expand?

Here in Australia, in response to Trump’s order, Liberal backbencher Craig Kelly, chair of the government’s Environment Committee, took predictable aim at Australia’s international climate commitments, labelling the 2015 Paris Agreement “cactus”.

Kelly is on the record as disputing climate science and poured scorn on the Paris deal when it was struck. He is certainly not alone among the government’s ranks in this view.

The day after Trump’s election win last November, Australia ratified the Paris deal and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said that it would take four years for Trump to pull out.

So is the Paris deal really “cactus”? What would we have lost if so? And does it matter?

What was agreed in Paris?

The Paris Agreement came after the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (agreed at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992) had suffered a body blow at the 2009 UN climate talks in Copenhagen .

Opinion was divided on the reasons for the failure of the Copenhagen summit, but the then prime minister Kevin Rudd didn’t mince words in blaming the Chinese, infamously accusing them during the negotiations of trying to “rat-fuck us”. (For what it is worth, the British climate writer Mark Lynas agreed, albeit in less incendiary tones.)

A series of fence-mending meetings and careful smoothing of frayed nerves and wounded egos followed over the next five years. The French took charge and, with the price of renewable energy generation plummeting (and so making emissions reductions at least theoretically “affordable”), a deal was struck at the Paris summit in December 2015.

The agreement, notably silent on fossil fuels, calls on nations to take actions to reduce their emissions so that temperatures can be held to less than 2℃ above the pre-industrial average. This limit, which is not actually “safe”, will require a herculean effort and luck. If you add up all the national commitments, they will most likely take us to roughly 3℃ or beyond.

Australia’s commitment of a 26-28% reduction in greenhouse emissions by 2030, relative to 2005 levels, was seen as being at the low end of acceptable, and not enough to help meet the 2℃ limit.

Eminent climate scientist James Hansen labelled Paris a fraud, while Clive Spash (the economist monstered by Labor in 2009 for pointing out that Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme was not much cop) thought it was worthless.

British climatologist Kevin Anderson is similarly dubious, arguing that the agreement assumes we will invent technologies that can suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in, well, industrial quantities in the second half of this century.

So why the relative optimism among the climate commentariat? They’re desperate for a win after so many defeats, which stretch back all the way to the Kyoto climate conference of 1997.

Second time as farce?

After Australia’s initial promises to be a “good international citizen”, reality quickly set in during the early years of serious climate diplomacy.

Although Australia was an early ratifier of the treaty that emerged from the Rio summit, it nevertheless went to the first annual UN climate talks (chaired by a young Angela Merkel) determined to get a good deal for itself, as a country reliant on coal for electricity generation and eyeing big bucks from coal exports.

That meeting resulted in the “Berlin Mandate”, which called on developed nations to cut emissions first. Australia, gritting its teeth, agreed. Later that year the Keating Government released economic modelling (paid for in part by fossil fuel interests) which predicted economic Armageddon for Australia if a uniform emissions-reduction target was applied. This work was picked up by the new Howard government.

After much special pleading and swift footwork, Australia got two very sweet deals at Kyoto in 1997. First, its “reduction” target was 108% of 1990 levels within the 2008-12 period (the then environment minister Robert Hill reportedly refused to push for Howard’s preferred 118%).

Second, Australia successfully lobbied for a clause in the Kyoto treaty allowing reductions in land clearing to count as emissions reductions. This meant that Australia could bank benefits for things that were happening for entirely different reasons.

Australia signed the Kyoto Protocol in April 1998, but in September of the same year the cabinet decided not to ratify the deal unless the United States did. In March 2001 President George W. Bush pulled out, and Howard followed suit on World Environment Day in 2002.

Kyoto ratification then became a symbol of green virtue out of all proportion with its actual impact. Rudd got enormous kudos for ratifying it as his first official act as Prime Minister. And then reality set in again when he tried to actually implement an emissions-reduction policy.

Why does it matter?

Reality keeps on impinging. In a beautifully written piece in the New York Times, Ariel Dorfman lists disasters befalling Chile (readers in Queensland will feel like they know what he is on about). He concludes:

As we get ready to return to the United States, our friends and relatives ask, over and over, can it be true? Can President Trump be beset with such suicidal stupidity as to deny climate change and install an enemy of the earth as his environmental czar? Can he be so beholden to the blind greed of the mineral extraction industry, so ignorant of science, so monumentally arrogant, not to realize that he is inviting apocalypse? Can it be, they ask. The answer, alas, is yes.

Will the opinions of politicians like Donald Trump and Craig Kelly matter at all as long as the price of renewables keeps dropping? Well, possibly. “Shots across the bow” of renewables policy have in the past made investors nervous.

As Alan Pears on this website, and Giles Parkinson at Reneweconomy have explained, investors in electricity generation got spooked by the policy uncertainty caused by former prime minister Tony Abbott’s hostility to the Renewable Energy Target. That’s the real (and presumably intended) effect of statements like Kelly’s.

Will it work? Optimists will point to last week’s announcement that a $1bn solar farm will be built in South Australia, regardless of the concatenating Canberra catastrophe. Perennial pessimists will point to the Keeling Curve, which shows a remorseless and escalating rise in the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Time and prevailing politics are certainly not on our side.

New poll reveals most people – including Coalition voters – not buying Turnbull govt anti-renewables rhetoric, want more ambitious action.

Windfarm commissioner’s first report says complainants may fail to seek medical advice ‘due to the possibly incorrect assumption’ that nearby turbines are to blame

The office of the national windfarm commissioner is concerned people are not going to the doctor because they are incorrectly attributing symptoms of illness to windfarms.

Commissioner Andrew Dyer published his first report to the Australian parliament on 31 March which revealed the office had received 90 complaint between November 2015 and 31 December 2016.

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Coal power plant emissions fell by an impressive 11%, according to new EU data, but still accounted for 39% of total emissions.

Falling costs allowed the world to add record new renewable capacity even as investment fell, according to a new report.

Back-to-back severe bleaching events, caused by warming oceans, have affected two-thirds of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, new aerial surveys have found. Climate change is not the only challenge – runoff-affected water quality, reef-killing crown of thorns starfish and the destruction of Cyclone Debbie also threaten the reef’s health. Scientists are warning that Australia has little time left to act on climate change and save the world’s largest living structure.
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Coral bleaching has hit two-thirds of Australia's Great Barrier Reef within two years, surveys show.

Originally published in the Guardian on 13 April 1967

NORTH DEVON: At the time of writing no oil from the Torrey Canyon has reached local beaches. On the other hand one has never had to look very far for oil waste in its coagulated state during recent years. It occurs in tiny pulverised fragments, indistinguishable from some of the constituents of shingle till it adheres to one’s foot, and in lumps up to the size of a football. The oiled carcass of a gannet or an auk is an only too familiar sight on the high water mark.

The Atlantic drift which brings oil on to our coastline also carries less objectionable material: seeds, skeletons and bodies of sea creatures, shells, many of which have travelled a very long distance. Among these are seed cases and fruit from trees which are native to the banks of the Amazon; the flat, purple Entada scandens, the Sacoglottis amazonica, Mucuna the fruit of a climbing plant; objects which are of the size of a marble or golf ball. At the other end of the scale whales and sharks in addition to ships are sometimes cast up. What appeared to its discoverers to be the exceptionally well-preserved bones of “an extinct prehistoric reptile” turned out to be the skeleton of a whale buried by locals, as the simplest method of disposing of its bulk, earlier in the century. And when an expert hurried out to inspect an “Elizabethan canon” uncovered by the tide, he found it to be the rusted end-section of an old sewer!

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The big lie propagated by government and big business is that it is possible to turn things around for the reef without tackling global warming

Once upon a time, in the distant 60s and 70s, the Great Barrier Reef faced imminent destruction. Tenement applications for drilling and mining covered vast swathes of the reef, with both government and industry enthusiastically backing the plans for mass exploitation.

In the face of the reef’s impending doom a motley collection of ordinary Australians shared a common determination that something had to be done. But the odds didn’t look good. The poet turned campaigner Judith Wright wrote that “if it had not been for the public backing for protection of the reef that we knew existed, we might have given up hope”.

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Aerial surveys of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef conducted in late 2016 and early 2017 show the Unesco world heritage site has suffered severe coral bleaching for the second year in a row. According to Prof Terry Hughes, who conducted the surveys, the bleaching is caused by ‘record-breaking temperatures driven by global warming’

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‘Last year was bad enough, this is a disaster,’ says one expert as Australia Research Council finds fresh damage across 8,000km

Back-to-back severe bleaching events have affected two-thirds of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, new aerial surveys have found.

The findings have caused alarm among scientists, who say the proximity of the 2016 and 2017 bleaching events is unprecedented for the reef, and will give damaged coral little chance to recover.

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‘The combined impact of this bleaching stretches for 1,500km, leaving only the southern third unscathed,’ says Prof Terry Hughes, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, who undertook aerial surveys in 2016 and 2017. He has warned Australia faces a closing window to take action on climate change in time to save the reef

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Warmer days are welcome, but this is often our most polluted time of year, with agriculture one of the biggest culprits

Longer days are here at last, but in terms of air quality, spring is often our most polluted time of year. Pollutants left over from the northern hemisphere winter cause increased ozone at ground level. Coastal areas are most vulnerable and the problem tends to move south through spring.

During March, ozone on Shetland reached four on the UK’s 10-point warning scale. Heavy fertiliser use and spreading manure that was stored over winter causes big releases of ammonia each spring. This reacts chemically with pollution from traffic and industry to create particles that can stay in the air for a week or more. These caused pollution to reach eight on the UK’s 10-point scale across England in February, and six during March.

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Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s response to the looming east coast gas shortage has been to secure a promise from gas producers to increase domestic supply.

In a televised press conference last month, he said:

We must continue the pressure on state and territory governments to revisit the restrictions on gas development and exploration.

But if an onshore gas boom is indeed in the offing, my research suggests that gas companies should tread carefully and take more seriously the social context of their operations.

Shell chief executive Erik van Beurden, one of the big players in the Australian gas industry, recently admitted that “social acceptance [for our industry] is just disappearing”, while Shell Australia’s chairman Andrew Smith last year urged the industry to be less hubristic and more willing to collaborate.

Industrial developments have social consequences, particularly in the case of unconventional gas extraction. But my analysis of the social research done by gas firms in the Darling Downs – Queensland’s coal seam gas heartland – indicates a lack of rigorous research to identify community attitudes.

I looked specifically at the “social impact assessments” carried out for Arrow Energy’s Surat Gas Project. I evaluated this assessment against the academic literature on best-practice methods and the results of my own anthropological fieldwork on coal seam gas developments in the Darling Downs, including interviews and participant-observations among a broad variety of residents. This included farmers with and without gas wells on their land, town residents, Indigenous people, activists, and those who viewed the industry favourably.

In my experience, the industry’s social impact assessments do not generally meet the benchmark of good social anthropological research. They are largely completed using computer surveys, with limited amounts of direct local fieldwork and relatively little real attention paid to the particular issues raised by vulnerable groups or what actually matters to local communities.

Social impact assessments should be participatory and take into account the unequal distribution of the impacts among local populations. Some people will feel the impacts more than others – this means that in-depth research in the region is required.

A desktop analysis of census data, complemented with information obtained during a few “consultation” meetings, is unlikely to reveal the variety of impacts caused by industrial projects. The conclusion is that such studies, combined with a regulatory agenda that prioritises economics, have created problematic “silences in the boom”.

Conflicting priorities

In Australia, policies governing extractive industries such as onshore gas are mostly viewed in terms of economic cost and benefit – or to use the current mantra, jobs and growth. The projects themselves, meanwhile, are seen chiefly as a series of technical challenges to be overcome by scientists and engineers.

Public concerns about the effect on quality of life or uncertainties about underground impacts are commonly dismissed as irrational, emotional or uninformed. But the main problem faced by onshore gas producers is not an engineering one.

Social research has shown that the fundamental problems include lack of trust between gas producers and local communities, as well as differing views on livelihoods, culture and the environment.

In the coal seam gas fields of the Darling Downs – a rural and agricultural area – the effects on the ground, including concerns about extraction techniques such as fracking really matter. While individual gas wells typically have a relatively small footprint of about one hectare, the cumulative regional footprint of numerous connected gas fields and associated infrastructure is considerable.

The management of the impacts is negotiated in individual agreements with landholders as well as indigenous groups with traditional connections to country. Dealing with this social world is relatively new to many oil and gas companies that have previously focused mainly on offshore projects.

Unconventional gas and fracking developments have led to demonstrations, blockades, and the rise of vocal anti-fracking groups both in Australia and around the world. Gas producers in Colorado, for example, seem to have been shocked and surprised at the level of protest against fracking, a technique they have used for decades.

Instead of dismissing public concerns as irrational or ill-informed, politicians and gas producers could look carefully at why their proposals provoke these reactions. Just calling for more gas, more science, and less red tape is unlikely to diminish anti-fracking sentiment.

Invisible gas

Gas can be scary. It is everywhere and nowhere. You can’t feel it, see it, hear it or smell it unless you add something to it or measure it with an expensive device. Gas doesn’t have the same cultural symbolism as coal, the black gold of our settler history, or the Snowy Mountains, scene of the great “nation-building” hydroelectric project that Turnbull has pledged to make even bigger.

Anti-fracking activists, meanwhile, have sought to imbue gas with a cultural symbolism that draws on the underground world of demons and danger. Footage of burning tapwater is a potent example of “matter out of place”. No matter that methane is sometimes found naturally in water. Cultural anxieties are rarely be eased by natural science.

So while the federal government and industry figures call on states and territories to ease restrictions on gas exploration, they should bear in mind that unconventional gas can provoke strong anxiety and opposition. The architects of Queensland’s coal seam gas boom were slow to recognise this.

Energy is fundamental to our ways of life, and social support is crucial for the companies that provide this energy. Such support is not earned with desktop studies or by dismissing non-economic concerns. It is earned with genuine engagement and social policies that take seriously the experiences and diverse views of people now on fractured and uncertain ground.

Kim de Rijke works for The University Queensland and intermittently undertakes contract native title research for Indigenous groups around Australia. He received funding for his postdoctoral research on coal seam gas and fracking disputes in Queensland and the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales from The University of Queensland.

Leaving the EU could make moving animals abroad for breeding programmes a lot harder. But how easy is it to transport zoo inhabitants across the continent anyway?

In the latest warnings about the effects of a post-Brexit future, it isn’t just humans who could be affected. The British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums has said that leaving the EU without a deal could threaten already endangered species, whose survival depends on easy access to Europe-wide breeding programmes.

At the moment, breeding progammes in Europe are overseen by the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria (EAZA), and work efficiently thanks to shared resources and free movement. “I think the lack of clarity [over post-Brexit legislation] is the largest concern for us,” says Zak Showell, animal records registrar at Twycross zoo. “There are more than 400 breeding programmes operated by EAZA. These breeding programmes are there to ensure the genetic and population survival of those species we have in captivity.”

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Government will also instruct councils to end charging at tips, and issue on-the-spot fines for motorists caught throwing rubbish

Fly-tippers could be forced to pick up litter as part of community service, the environment secretary, Andrea Leadsom, has said.

The government will also instruct councils to end the “unfair” practice of charging people to use tips, which Leadsom said could be a lead factor in the rise of fly-tipping.

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Not so long ago, they were the pests that made a mess on the lawn. But now they have crept into our homes – their images on mugs, cushions and tea towels – into TV adverts, fashion and literature

British cities are full of foxes. Within a mile of my home in east London, there is one with an organic gastro menu, one stuffed with feathers that, when plumped, makes my desk chair more comfortable, and another, in pen and ink, on the masthead of the Hackney Citizen. There is one on a mug, another on a toast rack, one on a poster advertising the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition. And then, of course, there are the two – one a little mangy, the other fine and bushy – that visit my back garden. I say “visit”, but I doubt they see it like that.

Foxes are having a moment in popular culture. Admittedly, I have a highly sensitive fox radar, because four years ago I started to write a novel, called How to be Human, about a woman who sees a fox on her lawn one day, and thinks he winks at her. She becomes obsessed with him – she never doubts he is a he – and undergoes a, let’s say, emotional rewilding. I had only written two chapters when Sarah Hall won the BBC short story award with Mrs Fox, and the Norwegian duo Ylvis released their song The Fox (What Does the Fox Say)? I remember feeling aghast that the fox was finished.

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With the Trump administration poised to roll back rules on smog and drilling off Alaska and the east coast, environmental campaigners are ready for legal action

Environmental campaigners promised on Saturday to wage fierce and protracted legal battles against “outrageous and wrong-headed” Trump administration moves to open Atlantic and Arctic waters for drilling and loosen smog limits.

Related: Environmentalists sue EPA for reversing Obama-era move to ban pesticide

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Australian rooftop solar installations reached record number for the first quarter, as consumers reacted to soaring electricity bills.