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Professor Sir Peter Mansfield, who left school at 15 and won the Nobel prize, dies aged 83.

To really understand climate change, we need to look at the way the climate behaves over a long time. We need many years of weather information. But the Bureau of Meteorology’s high-quality instrumental climate record only dates back to the start of the 20th century.

This relatively short period makes it hard to identify what is natural climate change and what is human-induced, particularly when it comes to things like rainfall. We really need data that go further back in time.

Natural records of climate such as tree rings and ice cores can tell us a lot about pre-industrial climate. But they too need to be verified in some way, matched against some other form of data.

So, we went hunting for some. Over two years, we looked through newspapers, manuscripts, government documents and early settlers’ diaries from Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Tasmania. We took thousands of photos of letters, journals, tables and graphs. We rediscovered handwritten observations from farmers, convicts, sailors and reverends across southeastern Australia, stretching all the way back to European settlement in 1788.

Rummaging around in libraries might not seem like the best way to understand what’s been happening with our climate. But weather diaries kept by dedicated observers in the 1800s are proving important for climate research.

While there are still many observations to be rescued, the records we’ve found so far have already called into question the stability of the relationship between El Niño, La Niña and rainfall in southeastern Australia.

The records

We collected 39 different sources of weather data covering 1788–1860, with continuous observations from the mid-1830s. The numbers we’ve found so far paint a dramatic picture of the weather and climate experienced by Australia’s colonial settlers.

For example, Thomas Lempriere, who ran the Port Arthur penal settlement, recorded the harsh Tasmanian winters he suffered in the 1830s. Surgeon William Wyatt in Adelaide noted heatwaves and snowfall during the 1840s. And William Dawes, Australia’s first meteorologist, diligently observed the first drought encountered by Australia’s English settlers in 1790 and 1791.

Weather diaries kept by Reverend William Clarke in Sydney in the 1840s, now at the State Library of New South Wales. Author supplied. Connecting past and present

While the observations taken by these “weather people” are valuable insights into the climate of the past, observations made more than 150 years ago are not quite the same as those taken today. Many of the instruments were not kept in the best locations. John Pascoe Fawkner, one of Melbourne’s early settlers, even stored his thermometer in a cellar!

Differences in exposure, observation techniques and instruments also mean that it’s difficult to use these observations to quantify the exact size of the temperature change since the First Fleet arrived.

However, old weather records can still tell us a lot about year-to-year climate variations. Historical rainfall observations, for example, are less prone to large biases, because rain gauges are less complex than, say, a thermometer or barometer. By using a combination of instrumental and documentary information, we can tell the story of our climate over a much longer time scale than ever before.

Flagstaff Hill in Melbourne 1858, by George Rowe. On the right you can see the weather observer taking his daily observations on the white platform, with a rain gauge behind him. State Library of Victoria

Australia’s climate is almost manic in its ability to swing between droughts and floods. Combining our rescued weather observations with modern data from similar locations means we can see this in southeastern Australia’s rainfall over the past 170 years.

Periods of low rainfall stand out, such as the mid-1840s, the Federation Drought at the turn of the 20th century, the World War II Drought in the early 1940s, and the Millennium Drought from 1997 to 2009. There are also clear times of high rainfall, including the 1870s, 1890s and 1970s.

Rainfall, and prolonged wet and dry periods, in two regions of southeastern Australia from 1840 to 2010. Adapted from Ashcroft et al. 2016.

Most of these periods are associated with El Niño and La Niña events: dry conditions in southeastern Australia are generally linked to El Niño, while wet years often coincide with La Niña. However, this is not always the case. Previous studies have found a breakdown in the relationship in the mid-20th century, and natural palaeoclimate records suggest a similar breakdown in the early 1800s.

Understanding these periods might help us better understand how El Niño and La Niña events might change in the future. But what do the observations from the weather people say?

We compared our historical rainfall data to previous El Niño/La Niña events and found a weakening in the relationship during 1920–1940 and 1835–1850. The breakdown was especially clear in data from the southern part of our study region. This is the first time the 19th-century breakdown has been seen in Australia using instrumental data.

The hunt continues

Of course, the next question is why? Why does the impact of El Niño and La Niña on Australian rainfall change over time? What happened in the mid-1800s? It might be El Niño’s cranky uncle, the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation, or perhaps strange behaviour in the atmosphere around Antarctica.

We’re still not sure. But the weather observations taken by dedicated settlers more than 150 years ago are helping us answer these questions. Until then, the hunt continues.

Linden Ashcroft has received funding from the Australian Research Council.

David Karoly receives funding from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science and an ARC Linkage grant. He is a member of the Climate Change Authority and the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists.

Joelle Gergis receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

While it is good news for the environment that UK sales of electric cars are rising (Report, 7 February) this trend is unlikely to really take off while we have such a disjointed and shortsighted policy regarding electric vehicle (EV) charging infrastructure.

Boris Johnson sold the London-wide charging network to a French company that now runs the system as Source London. It has started to charge for charging, at rates that are unviable for many drivers, especially those with hybrid vehicles, where the cost of the electricity is more than the cost of petrol for the same mileage travelled. Furthermore, some London councils now make their own arrangements with other providers so there is no longer a functioning London-wide system.

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Experts say decline to coverage of only 7.19 acres of forest could be due to late winter storms last year that knocked down more than 100 acres of trees

The number of monarch butterflies wintering in Mexico dropped by 27% this year, reversing last year’s recovery from historically low numbers, according to a study by government and independent experts released Thursday.

The experts say the decline could be due to late winter storms last year that blew down more than 100 acres (40 hectares) of forests where migrating monarch butterflies spend the winter in central Mexico.

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He's only 19cm (7.4 in) tall and has been named Thanos.

Europe will vastly overshoot its carbon emissions target for coal unless it closes all 300 power stations, says thinktank Climate Analytics

The European Union will “vastly overshoot” its Paris climate pledges unless its coal emissions are completely phased out within 15 years, a stress test of the industry has found.

Coal’s use is falling by about 1% a year in Europe but still generates a quarter of the continent’s power – and a fifth of its greenhouse gas emissions.

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Dogs mirror the personalities of their human companions, according to research.

Authorities say no risk of contamination after blast in machine room at facility 15 miles west of Cherbourg

An explosion has occurred at EDF’s Flamanville nuclear plant in northern France, causing minor injuries but no risk of contamination, authorities have said.

The blast took place in the engine room at the plant, which is 15 miles west of the port of Cherbourg.

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GoT’s Jaime Lannister has shown little love for the far north, unlike the man who plays him, Danish actor Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who has been collecting street view imagery for Google in southern Greenland to highlight the impact of climate change

• Discover Machu Picchu from your sofa

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Plans to launch satellites - and even people - from the UK get a boost from government.

Fake news propagates through the conservative media to the halls of Congress where science is under attack

This weekend, conservative media outlets launched an attack on climate scientists with a manufactured scandal. The fake news originated from an accusation made by former NOAA scientist John Bates about a 2015 paper by some of his NOAA colleagues. The technical term to describe the accusation is ‘a giant nothingburger,’ as Bates clarified in an interview with E&E News:

The issue here is not an issue of tampering with data, but rather really of timing of a release of a paper that had not properly disclosed everything it was.

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I grew up with a piano in my bedroom, but now the thought of ivory fills me with revulsion. The UK needs to impose a total ban on the trade of elephant tusks

Growing up in our two up, two down terraced house on the Southside of Edinburgh, I shared my bedroom with a cherished family heirloom – my granny’s mini-grand. This beautiful piano had been to the other side of the world and back. It ended up taking up half my room and a whole lot of my life. I taught myself to play on it, bashing out the sevenths while pretending to be (pre-Wings) McCartney. Now I think of that piano with total revulsion. I believe anyone in the possession of ivory should feel the same. It is over. It has to be.

Look at the knife handles or antique toothpick and then think of the dead mother with her face hacked off as her tuskless, helpless one-year-old tries to nudge her back to life. Google image search is always a useful resource. I feel no differently about the thought of a gorilla-hand ashtray (yes, they are a thing in parts of the Far East) or a nice cool glass of lion bone wine (ditto). One more time: ivory is so over.

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Galilee Blockade, which opposes the $16bn Carmichael mine, urges followers to apply for jobs with the Indian company

A civil disobedience campaign targeting Adani’s controversial Queensland coal project has asked almost 12,000 supporters to sign up for a job with the miner.

The Galilee Blockade is working on infiltrating Adani and related companies to gain sources of information to help its plans for “direct action”.

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The decision comes after Donald Trump formally backed the pipeline in an early act as president.

Sandy, Bedfordshire: Peewit, teeack, chewit … whatever you call it, it sounds like the Clangers

Unearthly sounds have filled the fields lately, breaking frosty silences or cocking a whooping snook at louring skies. The lapwing’s voice is the joker in the pack, shooting up and down the scales like a novice twiddling the knobs on a synthesiser. It does not feel grounded in this landscape of puddles, mud slaked over boots, ragged grass margins, finches giving out throwaway chirrups, and the dull ribbed skeleton leftovers of last year’s flowers.

Our field-working forebears must have listened daily and tried to capture the distinctive peculiarity of these sounds in words. So much so that Vanellus vanellus may well have more regional names than any other bird. Lancashire’s chewit calls to Orkney’s teeack, Norfolk’s pie-wipe answers Lothian’s peasiewheep. I’m a child of the TV generation, and I always think when I hear the birds that the Clangers have landed.

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Wind energy overtakes coal as the EU’s second largest form of power capacity but concerns remain over politicians’ enthusiasm for renewables

Renewable energy made up nearly nine-tenths of new power added to Europe’s electricity grids last year, in a sign of the continent’s rapid shift away from fossil fuels.

But industry leaders said they were worried about the lack of political support beyond 2020, when binding EU renewable energy targets end.

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Australian owned, CSIRO-developed battery storage technology tested as possible solution for powering remote, rural communities in India.

Korean-owned zinc refiner ups size of proposed Qld solar farm to 116MW, casting shade on claim renewables are a "manufacturing killer".

With the help of snake handlers and Trish Prendergast, a senior veterinary nurse at a clinic in Townsville, Queensland, the 1.5m-long carpet python manages to regurgitate an entire tennis ball after it was found swollen in a residential yard.

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South Australia threatens to take "decisive action" to regain control of the energy industry. The privately owned generators only have themselves to blame.