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American photographer Tim Laman was named winner of the prestigious annual competition for his image Entwined Lives, showing a critically endangered Bornean orangutan in the Indonesian rainforest. The award is given for a story told in just six images, which are judged on their story-telling power as a whole as well as their individual quality.

The images will go on display at the Natural History Museum in London from 21 October, before touring internationally

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This week is bird week, and BirdLife Australia is running its annual 'Backyard Bird Count'. The count is a citizen science project that gets people to record the birds they see outdoors in a special app or online.

Dozens of people enlisted to remove small ‘patties’ found between Eurong beach and Dilli village

An oil spill clean-up is about to begin on world heritage-listed Fraser Island in Queensland.

On Wednesday dozens of people were to begin removing oil “patties” scattered along a 40km stretch of sand, from Eurong beach to Dilli village.

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Peak hour making you hot under the collar? It's not just you. Traffic image from www.shutterstock.com

Do you ever feel that the weather is worse on the weekend? Well you might be right!

Our research, published in Environmental Research Letters, shows that in Australia’s biggest cites, the temperature is on average up to 0.3℃ cooler on Sundays compared to Thursdays and Fridays.

Not only are humans affecting the temperature on a global scale, we’re also doing it in our own backyards.

There is nothing in nature that occurs on a weekly cycle. Therefore any weekly pattern seen in weather (such as temperature and rainfall) must result from human activity, such as generating electricity, powering motor vehicles and using air-conditioners.

Most of these activities deposit waste heat and pollution into the atmosphere, and weekly cycles in temperature provide valuable insights into the consequences of such activities on the urban environment.

Our study shows that weekly cycles in daytime temperature occur in almost all Australian major cities. Sundays are often the coolest and Thursday or Friday the hottest due to human activity. This differs according to the time of day, with early mornings showing a much stronger signal than the afternoon.

Rush hour weekly cycle

Early mornings are often associated with cooler air temperatures, which can trap any waste heat near the surface. By contrast, in the afternoon the temperature has warmed and the local surface heat can be carried away to higher levels. So we see less of a strong relationship between human activity and temperature.

Hence the 9am temperature is higher during the week (coinciding with the morning rush hour) and much cooler on the weekend (when the traffic volume is quieter).

Melbourne 1955-2013 average midnight and morning (9am) temperature

Melbourne and other major Australian cities are cooler at the weekend during the day, because they’re less busy. But what about night life?

In western cultures, with Saturdays and Sundays being days off work for a large proportion of the population, Friday and Saturday evenings have become popular with people going to restaurants, pubs, and theatres. This means there is more traffic and human activities in the city centres on these evenings through to the early hours of the following day.

Melbourne’s midnight temperature is warmest on Saturday (Friday night) and Sunday (Saturday night), which is the opposite to what we see for 9am.

Islands of heat

Cities are also generally warmer than their surroundings, a phenomena known as the “urban heat island” effect. Don’t rush off to the beach though – it’s only hotter in the city. We can see this in weekly temperatures by comparing city centres to surrounding suburbs.

When we compare Melbourne city temperature to the airport temperatures at Tullamarine, Laverton and Moorabbin, the city is a lot warmer than the airports, especially at night time. This difference is largest on Saturdays and Sundays, showing that Melbourne’s active night-life is increasing the urban heat island effect.

1972-2013 average difference between Melbourne city temperature airport temperatures at midnight and 9am.

The difference is less in the morning, especially on Saturdays and Sundays. There is even a small urban cool island on Sunday mornings compared to some suburbs.

Temperatures are closely linked to traffic volumes within cities. These can be used as a good indicator of the overall level of human activity.

Traffic volume at a typical Melbourne CBD junction during October 2014.

Consistent with traffic volumes (at a typical busy inner-city intersection), temperatures on Sunday mornings are much less than weekday mornings. It’s this difference in morning traffic that allows us to measure the difference of the city without cars (Sunday) and with cars (Monday to Friday) at the same time of day.

Figures show that traffic congestion costs about A$4.6 billion in Melbourne each year. Reducing this is high on the agenda for Infrastructure Victoria and the state government, putting forward numerous traffic reducing strategies including peak-time penalties for motorists and a London-style congestion charge for central Melbourne.

Beyond Victoria, the Australian government is concerned with the need to create cooler, greener and more liveable cities in the face of climate change.

Reducing traffic has obvious benefits for travel time and sanity, but our study shows that Melbourne is significantly cooler when traffic levels (and general human activity) are low, based on the weekly cycles of urban temperatures.

Nick Earl receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Don't write it off just yet. american_rugbier/Flickr, CC BY-SA

A recently published obituary for the Great Barrier Reef has drawn ire from reef scientists. While obituaries, even satirical ones, are undoubtedly premature, they are part of a long and complicated history of death on the reef.

The obituary comes after this year’s record bleaching event in the northern section of the reef, where more than 50% of coral has died on some reefs.

Since settlement, dead reefs along the Great Barrier Reef have been celebrated as an economic resource, criticised as a scientific misnomer, and now seemingly embraced by conservationists as a shock tactic.

A coral reef flat near Port Denison. William Saville-Kent, The Great Barrier Reef of Australia: Its Products and Potentialities (London: W.H. Allen, 1893). A dead reef is a good reef

In the 19th and 20th centuries, settler Australians did not grieve the abundance of dead coral they found; they celebrated it. Live coral was praised for its aesthetic beauty and natural charms but dead coral could be crushed, burned down, and turned into building materials or fertiliser. Dead coral had a use and potential for economic development.

When the colonial government was considering a site for settlement in Cape York, one of the appeals of Somerset was the abundance of coral lime on nearby Albany Island.

In 1872, the sub-collector of customs and police magistrate at Cardwell, Charles Eden, wrote that Cardwell’s bay was “one mass of dead coral”, lying loose and easily collected in minutes. The use of coral lime as building materials or fertiliser continued into the 20th century.

Historical geographer Ben Daley claims that between 1900 and 1940 licensed coral mining took place at at least 12 different locations, largely between Townsville and Cairns.

Despite the odd protest the reef’s endless supply of dead coral continued to be viewed as an economic asset. In 1951, marine zoologist Frank McNeill wrote that the reef was a “wealth in coral gravel”.

He compared the reef’s coral with “a dead reef” in Moreton Bay, Brisbane. There a company had been milling the dead coral for cement manufacturing but the coral was “not nearly the quality of that from the Great Barrier Reef deposits”. He wondered when the reef’s limitless supply would be “turned to account”.

Frank McNeill’s article on the Reef’s coral debris drew attention to a latent economic resource awaiting mass development. Dead, or just rocky?

In the postwar era, as the impacts of western economic development on the environment became more clear, the idea of exploiting an environment such the Great Barrier Reef for minerals became less socially acceptable.

The issue came to a head in 1967 when a Cairns cane grower, Donald Forbes, lodged an application to mine Ellison Reef (35km northeast of Dunk Island) for limestone. Forbes believed the area he wanted to mine was “dead”.

He told reporter Patricia Clare, author of the 1971 book The Struggle for the Great Barrier Reef, that “the lime he wanted to take was not living coral but coral … that was lying all over the place out there, just waiting to be gathered up”.

Forbes’ application prompted one of longest environmental campaigns in Australian history, which ended with the establishment of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.

The conservationists’ main objection to Forbes’ application was the idea that Ellison Reef was dead. To prove that it was alive, members of the Queensland Littoral Society (the original name for the Australian Marine Conservation Society) completed surveys of the reef.

Their survey constructed an image of Ellison Reef which contrasted sharply with its supposed demise. While to outward appearances it seemed dead, it was in fact a complex living community.

The Innisfail mining warden, who recommended that the lease be rejected, announced that “the term ‘dead reef’ is a misnomer … the reef is in fact not ‘dead’ but very much alive”.

Wanted: alive

In the 1960s the idea of the reef being dead was anathema to conservationists and scientists alike. Conservationists foresaw a future in which dead reefs would be plundered for their remaining useful qualities. Scientists saw a misunderstanding that needed to be rectified.

Today, claims of a dead reef are still criticised by scientists. In contrast, conservationists are more willing to embrace the notion both to draw attention to their cause and to shock the public into activism.

The Great Barrier Reef’s future is clearly uncertain, but we can learn many things from its past. I wonder if conservationists should stay on the message established in 1967: that the Great Barrier Reef is very much alive. That in itself might be enough to shock folks into action.

A living reef offers hope and opportunity for change. As tourist operators lamented earlier this year, dead reefs could deter visitors who have no interest in visiting a coral graveyard. It is unlikely that concerned citizens would organise to save a dead Great Barrier Reef.

Rohan Lloyd is a member of the Australian Labor Party.

Howard J Curtis of Liverpool asks why the shale gas and oil under the South Downs national park is not being exploited (Letters, 17 October). He needs to check his facts. Oil is being extracted from under the South Downs (in Lidsey, Markwells Wood, Singleton and Storrington, for example), there are applications for four wells, including horizontal drilling at Markwells Wood, and there is a site at Broadford Bridge that was prepared by one company, and which is now on the action list by another to bring in a drill. The issues haven’t gone away from Balcombe either.

And I do object to such activity taking place, not only here in West Sussex but also elsewhere, including Lancashire and North Yorkshire, when the climate change issues need to be addressed, and quickly.

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Pedals the bear, known for walking like a human on his two hind legs, has apparently been been killed by hunters near Rockaway, New Jersey. Pedals was a YouTube sensation, as people shared videos of him walking through their yards. He appears to have been was one of 562 bears shot during a seasonal six-day hunt

• Pedals the bear, known for walking on hind legs, apparently killed by hunters
  

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Data shows September was the warmest in modern temperature monitoring following months of record-breaking anomalies this year

Nasa has all but declared this year to be the hottest yet recorded, after September narrowly turned out the warmest in modern temperature monitoring.

Last month was 0.91C above the average temperature for that time of year from 1951 to 1980, the benchmark used for measuring rises.

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Sustainable development goal target 12.5 is to reduce waste. But with a planet increasingly dependent on technology, is that even possible? Kai Loeffelbein’s photographs of e-waste recycling in Guiyu, southern China show what happens to discarded computers

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Milk from Tasmanian devils could offer up a useful weapon against antibiotic-resistant superbugs, according to Australian researchers.

High court hears evidence in air pollution case against the government that environment and transport department plans were overruled

The Treasury blocked other government departments from charging diesel cars to enter towns and cities blighted by air pollution, documents revealed during a high court hearing on Tuesday.

Legal NGO ClientEarth is challenging the government’s pollution plan, which by law should cut illegal levels of nitrogen dioxide in the “shortest possible time”. Air pollution causes 50,000 early deaths and £27.5bn in costs every year, according to the government’s own estimates, and was called a “public health emergency” by MPs in April.

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Campaigners say decision to open up the Barents Sea violates the nation’s constitution and threatens the Paris climate agreement

A lawsuit has been filed against the Norwegian government over a decision to open up the Barents Sea for oil exploration which campaigners say violates the country’s constitution and threatens the Paris climate agreement.

The case is being brought by an alliance including Greenpeace, indigenous activists, youth groups, and the former director of Nasa’s Goddard institute for space studies, James Hansen.

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The global farming sector has a big role to play in the effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to future climate change, the UN says.

Subpoena would force oil company to hand over decades of documents that would establish whether it misled investors about climate risks

Exxon Mobil Corp asked a federal court on Monday to throw out a subpoena from New York state that would force the oil company to hand over decades of documents as part of a wide-ranging inquiry into whether it misled investors about climate change risks.

The filing means Exxon has now requested the US district court in Fort Worth, Texas for injunctions against two major climate subpoenas: one issued by New York and another from Massachusetts that the company challenged in June.

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So the demand for authentic and sustainable leisure experiences has never been higher. But how green is eco-tourism really?

So the demand for authentic and sustainable leisure experiences has never been higher. But how green is eco-tourism really?

A new deal to reduce the use of powerful climate-changing chemicals will require Senate approval in the US, reports Climate Central

The jubilation and relief that flowed from United Nations climate talks in Rwanda over the weekend may be short-lived in the U.S., where legal experts say the agreement risks being blocked by Republican senators.

Weary U.N. diplomats finalized a deal Saturday to phase out the use of most HFCs, which are chemicals used in refrigerators and air conditioners and by other industries. The agreement was designed to accelerate a shift to safer substitutes for some of the world’s fastest growing and worst greenhouse gases.

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Research shows milk from devils could kill superbugs and combat the facial tumour that has killed 80% of their population

Milk from Tasmanian devils could kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria like golden staph and potentially combat the deadly facial tumour disease that has killed 80% of the wild devil population in the past 20 years.

According to research led by Sydney University PhD student Emma Peel, milk produced by the marsupials contains antimicrobial peptides called cathelicidins which had been tested as being effective against a number of pathogens, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or golden staph.

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Elephants will certainly survive. But it may only be in ‘fortress’ conservation parks. Is there any way to allow elephants to stay wild?

I have just returned from Kenya’s North Eastern Province where one night, camped out in a dry riverbed with just a mosquito net for cover, a herd of elephants emerged out of the dark – a great and almost silent mass of shapes.

They passed through our makeshift camp, looming over us, their tusks white against the night. I was close enough to hear them breathe, to hear the sound of their feet in the sand. Another minute and they were gone, leaving me awestruck in the truest sense of the word.

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National Audit Office says household bills will be £17 higher annually than planned by 2020 due to the installation rate of windfarms and solar panels

Household energy bills in four years’ time will be £17 higher annually than planned because of the number of windfarms and solar panels installed in recent years, according to the government’s spending watchdog.

The amount of money levied on bills each year to pay for renewable energy subsidies is capped under a system called the levy control framework, to limit costs for consumers and businesses. The cap was set at £7.1bn for 2020/21, but government officials warned last year it was on track to hit £9.1bn because so much green energy was being deployed.

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