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Treasurer Scott Morrison blocks sale of majority stake in Ausgrid to Chinese interests, citing national security issues.

Australia record small drop in electricity sector emissions as renewable generation rises, but is still well above levels when carbon price was in place.

Melbourne Energy Institute report sees evidence of "monopoly rents" in recent South Australia "energy crisis", adding up to $60m to electricity costs.

Researchers say that by 2050, regional sea-level rises in China’s three most vulnerable regions including the PRD will be half to one metre.

Malcolm Robert's utterances can teach us a great deal about the psychology of science denial.

Scientists are studying killer whales in an effort to understand the mysterious biology behind the menopause - in both orcas and humans.

Market operator uses "blackout" threat to push for new markets to encourage battery storage and other technologies. But the risk of blackouts? An extra 10 minutes a year in worst case scenario.

Galileo was right, but that doesn't mean his fans are. Justus Sustermans/Wikimedia Commons

The recently elected One Nation senator from Queensland, Malcolm Roberts, fervently rejects the established scientific fact that human greenhouse gas emissions cause climate change, invoking a fairly familiar trope of paranoid theories to propound this belief.

Roberts variously claims that the United Nations is trying to impose world government on us through climate policy, and that CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology are corrupt institutions that, one presumes, have fabricated the climate extremes that we increasingly observe all over the world.

In the world of Malcolm Roberts, these agencies are marionettes of a “cabal” of “the major banking families in the world”. Given the parallels with certain strands of anti-Jewish sentiment, it’s perhaps an unfortunate coincidence that Roberts has reportedly relied on a notorious Holocaust denier to support this theory.

It might be tempting to dismiss his utterances as conspiratorial ramblings. But they can teach us a great deal about the psychology of science denial. They also provide us with a broad spectrum of diagnostics to spot pseudoscience posing as science.

The necessity of conspiracism

First, the appeal to a conspiracy among scientists, bankers and governments is never just a slip of the tongue but a pervasive and necessary ingredient of the denial of well-established science. The tobacco industry referred to medical research on lung cancer as being conducted by an “oligopolistic cartel” that “manufactures alleged evidence”. Some people accuse the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of creating and spreading AIDS, and much anti-vaccination content on the web is suffused with conspiratorial allegations of totalitarianism.

This conspiratorial mumbo jumbo inevitably arises when people deny facts that are supported by an overwhelming body of evidence and are no longer the subject of genuine debate in the scientific community, having already been tested thoroughly. As evidence mounts, there comes a point at which inconvenient scientific findings can only be explained away by recourse to huge, nebulous and nefarious agendas such as the World Government or Stalinism.

If you are addicted to nicotine but terrified of the effort required to give up smoking, it might be comforting instead to accuse medical researchers of being oligopolists (whatever that means).

Likewise, if you are a former coal miner, like Malcolm Roberts, it is perhaps easier to accuse climate scientists of colluding to create a world government (whatever that is) than to accept the need to take coal out of our economy.

There is now ample research showing the link between science denial and conspiracism. This link is supported by independent studies from around the world.

Indeed, the link is so established that conspiracist language is one of the best diagnostic tools you can use to spot pseudoscience and science denial.

The Galileo gambit

How else can science dissenters attempt to justify their contrarian position? Another tactic is to appeal to heroic historical dissenters, the usual hero of choice being Galileo Galilei, who overturned the orthodoxy that everything revolves around the Earth.

This appeal is so common in pseudoscientific quackery that it is known as the Galileo gambit. The essence of this argument is:

They laughed at Galileo, and he was right.

They laugh at me, therefore I am right.

A primary logical difficulty with this argument is that plenty of people are laughed at because their positions are absurd. Being dismissed by scientists doesn’t automatically entitle you to a Nobel Prize.

Another logical difficulty with this argument is that it implies that no scientific opinion can ever be valid unless it is rejected by the vast majority of scientists. Earth must be flat because no scientist other than a Googling Galileo in Gnowangerup says so. Tobacco must be good for you because only tobacco-industry operatives believe it. And climate change must be a hoax because only the heroic Malcolm Roberts and his Galileo Movement have seen through the conspiracy.

Yes, Senator-elect Roberts is the project leader of the Galileo Movement, which denies the scientific consensus on climate change, favouring instead the opinions of a pair of retired engineers and the radio personality Alan Jones.

Any invocation of Galileo’s name in the context of purported scientific dissent is a red flag that you’re being fed pseudoscience and denial.

The sounds of science

The rejection of well-established science is often couched in sciency-sounding terms. The word “evidence” has assumed a particular prominence in pseudoscientific circles, perhaps because it sounds respectable and evokes images of Hercule Poirot tenaciously investigating dastardly deeds.

Since being elected, Roberts has again aired his claim that there is “no empirical evidence” for climate change.

But “show us the evidence” has become the war cry of all forms of science denial, from anti-vaccination activists to creationists, despite the existence of abundant evidence already.

This co-opting of the language of science is a useful rhetorical device. Appealing to evidence (or a lack thereof) seems reasonable enough at first glance. Who wouldn’t want evidence, after all?

It is only once you know the genuine state of the science that such appeals are revealed to be specious. Literally thousands of peer-reviewed scientific articles and the national scientific academies of 80 countries support the pervasive scientific consensus on climate change. Or, as the environmental writer George Monbiot has put it:

It is hard to convey just how selective you have to be to dismiss the evidence for climate change. You must climb over a mountain of evidence to pick up a crumb: a crumb which then disintegrates in the palm of your hand. You must ignore an entire canon of science, the statements of the world’s most eminent scientific institutions and thousands of papers published in the foremost scientific journals.

Accordingly, my colleagues and I recently showed that in a blind test – the gold standard of experimental research – contrarian talking points about climate indicators were uniformly judged to be misleading and fraudulent by expert statisticians and data analysts.

Conspiracism, the Galileo gambit and the use of sciency-sounding language to mislead are the three principal characteristics of science denial. Whenever one or more of them is present, you can be confident you’re listening to a debate about politics or ideology, not science.

Stephan Lewandowsky receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Royal Society, and the Psychonomic Society.

Snow leopards are just one of the species still threatened by hunting. from www.shutterstock.com

History might judge the Paris climate agreement to be a watershed for all humanity. If nations succeed in halting runaway climate change, this will have enormous positive implications for life on Earth.

Yet as the world applauds a momentous shift toward carbon neutrality and hope for species threatened by climate change, we can’t ignore the even bigger threats to the world’s wildlife and ecosystems.

Climate change threatens 19% of globally threatened and near-threatened species – including Australia’s critically endangered mountain pygmy possum and the southern corroboree frog. It’s a serious conservation issue.

Yet our new study, published in Nature, shows that by far the largest current hazards to biodiversity are overexploitation and agriculture.

The biggest threats to the world’s wildlife Sean Maxwell et al. The cost of overexploitation and agriculture

We assessed nearly 9,000 species listed on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species. We found that 72% are threatened by overexploitation and 62% by agriculture.

Overexploitation (the unsustainable harvest of species from the wild) is putting more species on an extinction pathway than any other threat.

And the expansion and intensification of agriculture (the production of food, fodder, fibre and fuel crops; livestock; aquaculture; and the cultivation of trees) is the second-largest driver of biodiversity loss.

Hunting and gathering is a threat to more than 1,600 species, including many large carnivores such as tigers and snow leopards.

Unsustainable logging is driving the decline of more than 4,000 species, such as Australia’s Leadbeater’s possum, while more than 1,000 species, including southern bluefin tuna, are losing out to excessive fishing pressure.

Land change for crop farming and timber plantations imperils more than 5,300 species, such as the far eastern curlew, while the northern hairy-nosed wombat is one of more than 2,400 species affected by livestock farming and aquaculture.

The far eastern curlew is threatened by farming. Curlew image from www.shutterstock.com

The threat information used to inform our study is the most comprehensive available. But it doesn’t tell the complete story.

Threats are likely to change in the future. Climate change, for example, will become increasingly problematic for many species in coming decades.

Moreover, threats to biodiversity rarely operate in isolation. More than 80% of the species we assessed are facing more than one major threat.

Through threat interactions, smaller threats can indirectly drive extinction risk. Roads and energy production, for example, are known to facilitate the emergence of overexploitation, land modification and habitat loss.

But until we have a better understanding of how threats interact, a pragmatic course of action is to limit those impacts that are currently harming the most species.

By ensuring that major threats that occur today (overexploitation, agriculture and so on) do not compromise ecosystems tomorrow, we can help to ameliorate the challenges presented by impending climate change.

Getting it right

Overexploitation and agriculture demand a variety of conservation approaches. Traditional approaches, such as well-placed protected areas and the enforcement of hunting, logging and fishing regulations, remain the strongest defence against the ravages of guns, nets and bulldozers.

Achieving a truly effective protected area network is impossible, however, when governments insist on relegating protected areas to “residual” places – those with least promise for commercial uses.

Reducing impacts from overexploitation of forests and fish is also futile unless industries that employ clearfell logging and illegal fishing vessels transition to more environmentally sustainable practices.

Just as critical as traditional approaches are incentives for hunters, fishers and farmers to conserve threatened species outside designated conservation areas.

Australia’s Leadbeater’s possum remains threatened by logging. Greens MPs/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

For nations like Australia, our study shows there is a growing mismatch in environmental policy and the outcomes for biodiversity. Environmental programs such as the once well-funded National Reserve System Strategy and Biodiversity Fund were important in that they helped conserve wildlife on private and public land, and were fundamental to defeating the biggest, prevailing threats to Australia’s biodiversity. But these programs either do not exist anymore or have little funding to support them at state and federal levels.

On top of this, land-clearing – without doubt one of the largest threats to biodiversity across the country – is on the increase because laws have been repealed across the country. Any benefits accrued by previous good environmental programs are being eroded.

If we are to seriously tackle the largest threats to biodiversity in Australia, we need to recognise the biggest threats. This means efforts to reduce threats from agriculture and overexploitation of forests and fish must include durable environmental regulation.

This article was co-authored by Thomas Brooks, head of science and knowledge at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

Sean Maxwell receives funding from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions.

James Watson receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is Director of the Science and Research Initiative at the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Richard Fuller receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

California wants to limit the amount of greenhouse gas emitted by belching and farting of 5.5 million cows, but the industry is hitting back with a dose of reality

California’s attempt to curb emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, is facing vocal opposition from a dairy industry that fears government meddling in the flatulence of its cows.

The California Air Resources Board (ARB) has set a goal of slashing methane emissions by 40% by 2030, from 2013 levels, and has targeted the belching and farting – known as “enteric fermentation” – of California’s 5.5 million beef and dairy cows, as well as the manure they create.

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The latest “community support” offer from the Treasury (Fracking payouts condemned as ‘bribes’, 8 August) for those areas having fracking rigs installed is truly a Russian roulette gamble for local people. An article in the Washington Post on 10 April last year, headlined “Rise of deadly radon gas in Pennsylvania buildings linked to fracking industry”, reported on a detailed study in the journal Environmental Health Perspective that revealed a “disturbing correlation” between unusually high levels of radon gas in mostly residences and fracking that has become the industry standard over the past decade.

Moreover, this is what Public Health England (the health watchdog) stated in October 2013: “If the natural gas delivery point were to be close to the extraction point with a short transit time, radon present in the natural gas would have little time to decay … there is therefore the potential for radon gas to be present in natural gas extracted from UK shale.” This health trade-off for money is what this offer really asks residents to accept. In light of this clear precautionary approach, it is odd that all ministers seem to be uncritically cheerleading for expanded fracking, despite its possible radon risk.
Dr David Lowry
Institute for Resource and Security Studies, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

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Efforts to address climate change must not overshadow more immediate priorities for the survival of the world’s flora and fauna, say researchers

Agriculture and the overexploitation of plants and animal species are significantly greater threats to biodiversity than climate change, new analysis shows.

Joint research published in the journal Nature on Wednesday found nearly three-quarters of the world’s threatened species faced these threats, compared to just 19% affected by climate change.

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Americans dispose of about 12.8m tons of textiles annually. But a growing number of environmentalists and clothing retailers say it’s time to begin making new clothes out of old items on a large scale, reports Yale Environment 360

Fast-growing, fast-fashion retailer H&M, which has more than 4,000 stores in 62 countries, sold $24.5bn worth of T-shirts, pants, jackets, and dresses last year. It also took 12,000 tons of clothes back. In a glossy, celebrity-studded video, H&M says: “There are no rules in fashion but one: Recycle your clothes.”

Recycling has become a rallying cry in the apparel industry, with H&M as its most vocal evangelist. The Swedish firm launched a €1m contest to seek out ideas for turning old clothes into new, invested in Worn Again, a company that is developing textile recycling technology, and enlisted hip-hop artist MIA. to produce a music video called Rewear It, that aims to “highlight the importance of garment collecting and recycling”. With Nike, H&M is a global partner of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, whose mission is to drive a transition to a circular economy – that is, an industrial system in which everything at the end of its life is made into something new, in contrast to today’s economy, where most consumer goods are produced, used, and then thrown away.

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British nuclear testing on Australian ground: cover-ups, aftershocks and contamination.

After an eight-year study, researchers conclude that history's most infamous fake fossils were made by one man - the prime suspect, Charles Dawson.

China’s floods, Russian wildfires and urban expansion in Delhi were among the images captured by European Space Agency and Nasa satellites last month

Clew Bay in County Mayo, Republic of Ireland, contains Ireland’s best example of sunken glacial drumlins – low hills formed from glacial sediment deposited at the end of the last ice age. The bay is associated with Elizabethan pirate queen Grace O’Malley and Dorinish, a private island purchased by John Lennon.

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John Fasullo and colleagues predict that satellites will detect accelerating sea level rise within the next decade

One of the great things about science is that it allows you to make predictions. Three top climate scientists just made a very bold prediction regarding sea level rise; we should know in a few years if they are correct.

As humans emit greenhouse gases, it’s causing the Earth to warm. That’s indisputable and proven. We can actually measure the amount of extra heat. Since most of it ends up in the oceans, we can also measure other changes in the oceans.

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Shipping noise in the North Atlantic could impact population levels of the whales, new research shows

Increased shipping noise is disrupting the foraging behaviour of humpback whales in the North Atlantic, according to a new study.

Scientists in the US and UK said their findings could impact upon the numbers of humpback whales in the long term.

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Conservation scientist Jo Barker from London zoo takes us on a tour of the greater Thames estuary to see the harbour and grey seal populations. The harbour seal population has largely increased in spite of the episodic phocine distemper virus. There are concerns that the seals’ habitat will be damaged as a result of dredging

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Scientists conducting annual count of grey and common seals warn of potential impact of dredging, a deadly virus and predation between species

Scores of seals loll on the riverbank of the Stour, snorting and bellyflopping as they sun themselves a couple of miles outside Ramsgate’s busy marina.

Far from exceptional, these are just a smattering of the hundreds of seals that the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) hopes to count this week in the Greater Thames estuary. The mammals are sighted as far up as Teddington Lock, and Canary Wharf is a hotspot for seeing them.

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