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Australia's first community-owned energy retailer says latest big price rises caused by "greed" of fossil fuel generators and "gaming" of markets.

Adélie penguin at the Mt Siple breeding colony, West Antarctica. Jasmine Lee, Author provided

When you think of Antarctica, you probably picture vast, continuous ice sheets and glaciers, with maybe a penguin or two thrown in. Yet most Antarctic plants and animals live in the permanently ice-free areas that cover about 1% of the continent. Our new research predicts that these areas could grow by a quarter during this century, with mixed prospects for the species that currently live there.

Besides everyone’s favourite Emperor and Adélie penguins, terrestrial Antarctic species also include beautiful mosses, lichens, two types of flowering plants, and a suite of hardy invertebrates such as nematodes, springtails, rotifers and tardigrades, many of which are found nowhere else on Earth. Tardigrades – tiny creatures sometimes nicknamed “waterbears” – are so tough they can survive in space.

Antarctica’s ice-free areas are currently limited to a scattering of rocky outcrops along the coastline, or cliff faces, or the tops of mountain ranges. They form small patches of suitable habitat in a huge sea of ice, much like islands.

As a result, the plants and animals that live there are often isolated from each other. But as Antarctica’s climate warms, we expect ice-free areas to get bigger and eventually start joining up. This would create more habitat for native species, but also new opportunities for non-native species to spread.

Our study, published today in Nature, forecasts that climate change will expand Antarctica’s ice-free areas over the course of this century. Under the most severe scenario that we modelled (which is also the one on which the globe is currently tracking), more than 17,000 square km of new ice-free area could emerge across the continent by 2100.

This would increase the current total ice-free area by nearly a quarter. The majority of this new ice-free land will be on the Antarctic Peninsula, which could have three times as much ice-free area as it does today.

Projected Antarctic ice melt this century. Lee et al. (2017) Nature Brave new world

As the ice-free areas expand, the distances between them will decrease, giving plants and animals more opportunity to spread through the landscape. On the Antarctic Peninsula, which has already warmed more than anywhere else in Antarctica, many of the ice-free patches will expand so much that they will start joining together.

Will this increase in habitat availability benefit the plants and animals that live there? It will definitely provide new opportunities for some native plants and animals to expand their range and colonise new areas. The warming climate may also give a boost to species that are currently hampered by the lack of warmth, nutrients and water. Some Antarctic mosses, for example, are expected to grow faster as temperatures rise, and Antarctica’s two flowering plant species are already expanding southward.

However, the potential benefits seem likely to be outweighed by the negatives. The joining-up of habitat patches could allow species that have been isolated for much of their evolutionary past to meet suddenly. If the newcomers to a particular area outcompete the native species, then it may lead to localised extinctions. Over the coming centuries this could lead to the loss of many plants and animals, and the homogenisation of Antarctica’s ecosystems.

Antarctic aliens

An even bigger concern is that Antarctica’s great thaw could provide new opportunities for species to invade. Antarctica’s best bulwark against non-native species is its harsh climate and extreme weather, to which native Antarctic species have spent many thousands of years adapting.

A native Frisea springtail. Melissa Houghton

We already know that many plants and invertebrates are reaching Antarctica, most often in food or cargo shipments. As the climate warms, some of these non-native species may be able to establish themselves on the Antarctic Peninsula, and the increasing connectivity will allow them to easily move through the landscape. Many of these animals and plants may become invasive, competing with the native species for space and resources.

We don’t know how Antarctica’s species will cope with the increasing competition. But if the sub-Antarctic islands provide any indication, the outlook is depressing. Australia’s World Heritage-listed Macquarie Island, for example, was severely impacted by invasive cats, rats, rabbits and mice (although it has since been declared free of these pests after an intensive eradication effort).

Several non-native species have already come to Antarctica, including the invasive annual meadowgrass Poa annua (a common weed around the world), which has colonised newly ice-free areas left behind by retreating glaciers. It is thought to outcompete Antarctica’s native plants, although we don’t yet know what the impact will be on animals.

Invasive meadowgrass on Macquarie Island. Laura Williams

Humans – both scientists and tourists – are key transporters of non-native species to the continent, and tourist numbers continue to grow (almost 37,000 visited in the 2016-17 summer).

Biosecurity is paramount for the ongoing protection of Antarctica. If bags, shoes, clothes and field equipment are not properly cleaned and inspected before arriving on the continent, then non-native seeds, microbes and insects could be transported to Antarctica and begin to spread.

We call for protection of ice-free areas that will remain intact in a changing climate, and for the Antarctic scientific and tourism communities to pinpoint key areas where greater biosecurity and monitoring for invasive species may be needed.

Jasmine Lee is also affiliated with CSIRO. She receives funding from from the Holsworth Wildlife Research Endowment - Equity Trustees Charitable Foundation, the Ecological Society of Australia, and the Australian Antarctic Science Program (Project 4297).

Justine Shaw receives funding from Australian Government’s National Environmental Science Programme through the Threatened Species Recovery Hub

Richard Fuller receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Researchers have captured footage of cockatoos in North Queensland, Australia, playing drum solos with little sticks and pods in an attempt to attract the opposite sex

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Former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres among signatories of letter warning that the next three years will be crucial to stopping the worst effects of global warming

Avoiding dangerous levels of climate change is still just about possible, but will require unprecedented effort and coordination from governments, businesses, citizens and scientists in the next three years, a group of prominent experts has warned.

Warnings over global warming have picked up pace in recent months, even as the political environment has grown chilly with Donald Trump’s formal announcement of the US’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement. This year’s weather has beaten high temperature records in some regions, and 2014, 2015 and 2016 were the hottest years on record.

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The city is not just restricting sales but working to ensure people have access to safe high-quality tap water

Americans drink enough bottled water each week to circle the globe two times around. That was one of the many alarming facts that motivated politicians in San Francisco to pursue a progressive environmental regulation no other major US city had dared – a ban on bottled water.

The liberal California city had previously led the way on banning plastic shopping bags, but the 2014 proposal to restrict bottled water was more modest. Although the board of supervisors voted unanimously to phase out the sale of single-use plastic water bottles, the rule only applied to city property.

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On the seabed, where the water is as dark as ink, lies a vast treasure of untouched resources. Nautilus Minerals will use remote-controlled robots to steamroll the bottom of the Bismarck Sea off the coast of Papua New Guinea – but this emerging technology could forever scar the landscape of the sea

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Fear of nuclear energy runs deep but it may be the most efficient and clean energy source we have, albeit with complications

Of all the hazards facing humankind, climate change is the single greatest threat we have ever faced. In a few short decades, we have altered the climate more than we ever thought possible and now, in the midst of the greatest heatwave recorded in decades in the hottest year on record, we are finally beginning to countenance the scale of problem before us.

The poorest of the poor have been the first to suffer – droughts and food shortages are already imperilling the lives of countless millions, with ensuing conflicts threatening even more. We have rendered some areas uninhabitable, and the number of climate refugees will only increase. Even we privileged folk in the western world are no longer immune, with the dangers steadily encroaching.

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In the global rush for bottled water, China leads the way. But while cities lack official recycling schemes, some residents are turning the tide of plastic waste into cash and keeping it out of landfil in the process

In the great global rush for bottled water, nowhere is thirstier than Asia. Demand is predicted to surge by more than 140% across the region this decade, to account for one-third of the global total by 2020.

China leads the way. The country accounted for 28% of the global demand for polyethylene terephthalate (Pet) bottles in 2015. Consumers bought 73.8bn bottles of water in 2016, up more than five billion on the previous year.

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Exclusive: Annual consumption of plastic bottles is set to top half a trillion by 2021, far outstripping recycling efforts and jeopardising oceans, coastlines and other environments

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A million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute and the number will jump another 20% by 2021, creating an environmental crisis some campaigners predict will be as serious as climate change.

New figures obtained by the Guardian reveal the surge in usage of plastic bottles, more than half a trillion of which will be sold annually by the end of the decade.

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UK will not be bound by EU deal and opposition MPs say Tory government unlikely to have political will to develop equivalent system

The UK risks becoming the “dirty man of Europe” after Brexit with no plan to deal with the millions of plastic bottles dumped by consumers every week, according to politicians and leading environmental campaigners.

Related: A million bottles a minute: world's plastic binge 'as dangerous as climate change'

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After warm weather and summer rain, flying ants emerge from nests for a mass mating event to ensure survival and dispersal of the species

A steady stream of black ants scurries in and out of a crack in the patio. They have been living there quietly for weeks. Perhaps you tried to get rid of them – especially if they were taking sugar from the kitchen or crawling across your bedroom. Perhaps you ignored them, or marvelled at their ability to navigate over apparently featureless paving stones back to their nest.

Then we have a spell of warm weather, a summer downpour, and when it stops there are winged explorers erupting from the ground – welcome to flying ant day!

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‘Global covenant of mayors’ to work together on climate change whether current White House resident agrees or not

Mayors of more than 7,400 cities across the world have vowed that Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris accord will spur greater local efforts to combat climate change.

At the first meeting of a “global covenant of mayors”, city leaders from across the US, Europe and elsewhere pledged to work together to keep to the commitments made by Barack Obama two years ago.

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And in the process, illustrated the difference between skepticism and denial

Whenever they hold one of their frequent hearings to reject and deny established climate science, congressional Republicans invariably trot out contrarian scientist John Christy, who disputes the accuracy of climate models. In doing so, Christy uses a cherry-picked, error riddled chart, but there’s a nugget of truth in his argument. Although the discrepancy isn’t nearly as large as Christy’s misleading chart suggests, atmospheric temperatures seem not to have warmed quite as fast since the turn of the century as climate model simulations anticipated they would.

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Around 30,000 honey bees swarm on a ledge at One Times Square, where the New Year’s Eve ball drop happens, in New York. Andrew Coté, a fourth generation beekeeper of AndrewsHoney.com, was called to the rescue and used a vacuum to suck up the bees, who he said were looking for a new home

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RN Drive brings you the latest in business

The discovery of a hundred-million-year-old specimen, beautifully preserved in amber, shows how the birds of yesteryear hatched fully prepared for takeoff

We’re back with News from the World of Old Feathers, and Lida Xing and colleagues strike again. They describe a new amber specimen of a Cretaceous bird with parts of the head, feet and wings beautifully preserved. Why is this important? After all, we have seen feathers in amber before, we have seen wings of juvenile birds in amber and last year we even had a piece of an actual dinosaur in amber. Haven’t we reached peak amber? I like to think we have not*.

What Xing and his team of paleontologists from China, Canada and the US describe in a new paper is a hatchling Enantiornithine bird that became trapped in sticky conifer resin about 99 million years ago, in what is now Burma. Although Enantiornithes looked superficially like modern birds – which is to say they were feathered and likely to have been good fliers – the anatomy of their shoulder girdle is different, they were toothed and the fingers in their wing had claws. The newly described specimen, nicknamed Belone, offers an unparalleled glimpse into feather development and molting in young Enantiornithes.

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New study finds smarter electricity network regulation would improve reliability, reduce emissions and cut power bills for energy users.

Wenlock Edge, Shropshire Birds verminous and ominous, persecuted and mythologised, foolproof, climateproof, futureproof

Two crows fly into a tree towards the end of a long dreamy summer’s day. They had been walking their beat on Windmill Hill, through the flowering cocksfoot, lady’s bedstraw, pyramidal orchids and whitlowgrass, hunting there as they have done every day for 15 years I know of. They now perch together as if watching the sunset, and so do I.

In the same place doing the same thing, what can I know of the corvid mind? We know corvid intelligence is equal to that of primates. We know early people were intimately connected to the crow tribes and there are funerary relics from more than 5,000 years ago containing the bones of crows and ravens buried in this land. This belongs to ancient rituals that suggest a mutual trade in death; these were birds of omen long before they were thought of as vermin.

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Why baseload should not be confused with "reliability" - and why building new coal fired generators - as proposed by conservatives in US and Australia - may make the grid less reliable, and more expensive.

Over the past decade we have seen a substantial increase in our scientific understanding of how climate change affects extreme rainfall events. Not only do our climate models suggest that heavy rainfall events will intensify as the atmosphere warms, but we have also seen these projections start to become reality, with observed increases in rainfall intensity in two-thirds of the places covered by our global database.

Given this, we might expect that the risk of floods should be increasing globally as well. When it comes to global flood damage, the economic losses increased from roughly US$7 billion per year in the 1980s to US$24 billion per year in 2001-11 (adjusted for inflation).

It would be natural to conclude that at least some of this should be attributable to climate change. However, we know that our global population is increasing rapidly and that more people now live in flood-prone areas, particularly in developing countries. Our assets are also becoming more valuable – one only needs to look at rising Australian house prices to see that the values of homes at risk of flooding would be much greater now than they used to be in decades past.

So how much of this change in flood risk is really attributable to the observed changes in extreme rainfall? This is where the story gets much more complicated, with our new research showing that this question is still a long way from being answered.

Are floods on the rise?

To understand whether flood risk is changing – even after accounting for changes in population or asset value – we looked at measurements of the highest water flows at a given location for each year of record.

This sort of data is easy to collect, and as such we have reasonably reliable records to study. There are more than 9,000 streamflow gauges around the world, some of which have been collecting data for more than a century. We can thus determine when and how often each location has experienced particularly high volumes of water flow (called “large streamflow events”), and work out whether its flood frequency has changed.

A streamflow gauging station in Scotland. Jim Barton/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

We found that many more locations have experienced a decrease in large streamflow events than have experienced an increase. These decreases are particularly evident in tropical, arid, and humid snowy climate regions, whereas locations with increasing trends were more prevalent in temperate regions.

To understand our findings, we must first look closely at the factors that could alter the frequency and magnitude of these large streamflow events. These factors are many and varied, and not all of them are related directly to climate. For example, land-use changes, regulated water releases (through dam operations), and the construction of channels or flood levées could all influence streamflow measurements.

We looked into this further by focusing on water catchments that do not have large upstream dams, and have not experienced large changes in forest cover that would alter water runoff patterns. Interestingly, this barely changed our results – we still found more locations with decreasing trends than increasing trends.

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology and similar agencies worldwide have also gone to great lengths to assemble “reference hydrological stations”, in catchments that have experienced relatively limited human change. Studies that used these sorts of stations in Australia, North America and Europe are all still consistent with our findings – namely that most stations show either limited changes or decreases in large streamflow events, depending on their location.

What can we say about future flood risk?

So what about the apparent contradiction between the observed increases in extreme rainfall and the observed decreases in large streamflow events? As noted above, our results don’t seem to be heavily influenced by changes in land use, so this is unlikely to be the primary explanation.

An alternative explanation is that, perhaps counterintuitively, extreme rainfall is not the only cause of floods. If one considers the 2010-11 floods in Queensland, these happened because of heavy rainfall in December and January, but an important part of the picture is that the catchments were already “primed” for flooding by a very wet spring.

Perhaps the way in which catchments are primed for floods is changing. This would make sense, because climate change also can cause higher potential moisture loss from soils and plants, and reductions in average annual rainfall in many parts of the world, such as has been projected for large parts of Australia.

This could mean that catchments in many parts of the world are getting drier on average, which might mean that extreme rainfall events, when they do arrive, are less likely to trigger floods. But testing this hypothesis is difficult, so the jury is still out on whether this can explain our findings.

Despite these uncertainties, we can be confident that the impacts of climate change on flooding will be much more nuanced than is commonly appreciated, with decreases in some places and increases in others.

Your own flood risk will probably be determined by your local geography. If you live in a low-lying catchment close to the ocean (and therefore affected by sea level rise), you’re probably at increased risk. If you’re in a small urban catchment that is sensitive to short sharp storms, there is emerging evidence that you may be at increased risk too. But for larger rural catchments, or places where floods are generally caused by snow melt, the outcome is far harder to predict and certain locations may see a decrease in flooding.

All of this means that a one-size-fits-all approach is unlikely to be suitable if we are to allocate our resources wisely in adjusting to future flood risk. We must also think about the effects of climate change in a broader context that includes changes to land-use planning, investment in flood protection infrastructure, flood insurance, early warning systems, and so on.

Only by taking a holistic view, informed by the best available science, can we truly minimise risk and maximise our resilience to future floods.

Seth Westra receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Water Corporation of Western Australia and the Goyder Institute.

Hong Xuan Do does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.