Feed aggregator

Energy minister Josh Frydenberg eventually offers a wry smile after opposition MP Mark Butler makes a joke about Labor’s strategy on the clean energy target during Q&A. Butler says the plan is “to get Josh to do all the hard work. Then lose [the election] and hand it over.” The pair were on ABC TV program to discuss Australia’s energy future.

Continue reading...

Distributed energy additions like to overtake centralised plant in 2018, with 320GW large scale fossil fuel plants now not likely to be built.

‘Defer, delay and pray’ appear to be the unspoken new watchwords for the company that would build the Carmichael Coal Project.

A short video to put recent climate change and carbon dioxide emissions into the context of the past 800,000 years.

The Finkel report offers glimpse of opportunity for consumers and businesses to play the electricity market

To illustrate the impact of battery storage on the electricity network in Australia, Prof Guoxiu Wang likes to compare it to the invention of refrigeration.

“Before people invented the fridge, we produced food, we consumed food immediately,” says Wang, director of the Centre for Clean Energy Technology at the University of Technology, Sydney. “With the development of appropriate electricity storage technology, the electricity is like our food – you can store it and whenever you need that electricity, you can use that immediately.”

Continue reading...

Since the start of the coalition government in 2010, coal’s role in the generation mix has fallen to historic lows.

India’s energy minister, Piyush Goyal, says the country would be self-sufficient in coal, except that power plants had been designed to run only on imports

India now has “sufficient coal capacity” to power itself without Queensland’s Carmichael mine project, thanks to the increased productivity of domestic mines, cheaper renewables and lower than expected energy demand, the country’s energy minister has said.

But Piyush Goyal said India would be forced to keep importing coal, including from the proposed Queensland mine, because too many Indian power plants had been designed to run on foreign coal.

Continue reading...

Thousands of dying and dead fish were found in a river leading to the Gulf of Mexico.

Interior secretary Ryan Zinke urges president to shrink 1.3m-acre national monument as administration continues push against federal public lands

Ryan Zinke, the US interior secretary, has recommended to Donald Trump that Bears Ears national monument in Utah be reduced in size to the “smallest area compatible” with its conservation.

Continue reading...

Ice cores are a window into the past hundreds of thousands of years. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Ludovic Brucker

There are those who say the climate has always changed, and that carbon dioxide levels have always fluctuated. That’s true. But it’s also true that since the industrial revolution, CO₂ levels in the atmosphere have climbed to levels that are unprecedented over hundreds of millennia.

So here’s a short video we made, to put recent climate change and carbon dioxide emissions into the context of the past 800,000 years.

The temperature-CO₂ connection

Earth has a natural greenhouse effect, and it is really important. Without it, the average temperature on the surface of the planet would be about -18℃ and human life would not exist. Carbon dioxide (CO₂) is one of the gases in our atmosphere that traps heat and makes the planet habitable.

We have known about the greenhouse effect for well over a century. About 150 years ago, a physicist called John Tyndall used laboratory experiments to demonstrate the greenhouse properties of CO₂ gas. Then, in the late 1800s, the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius first calculated the greenhouse effect of CO₂ in our atmosphere and linked it to past ice ages on our planet.

Modern scientists and engineers have explored these links in intricate detail in recent decades, by drilling into the ice sheets that cover Antarctica and Greenland. Thousands of years of snow have compressed into thick slabs of ice. The resulting ice cores can be more than 3km long and extend back a staggering 800,000 years.

Scientists use the chemistry of the water molecules in the ice layers to see how the temperature has varied through the millennia. These ice layers also trap tiny bubbles from the ancient atmosphere, allowing us to measure prehistoric CO₂ levels directly.

Antarctic temperature changes across the ice ages were very similar to globally-averaged temperatures, except that ice age temperature changes over Antarctica were roughly twice that of the global average. Scientists refer to this as polar amplification (data from Parrenin et al. 2013; Snyder et al. 2016; Bereiter et al. 2015). Ben Henley and Nerilie Abram Temperature and CO₂

The ice cores reveal an incredibly tight connection between temperature and greenhouse gas levels through the ice age cycles, thus proving the concepts put forward by Arrhenius more than a century ago.

In previous warm periods, it was not a CO₂ spike that kickstarted the warming, but small and predictable wobbles in Earth’s rotation and orbit around the Sun. CO₂ played a big role as a natural amplifier of the small climate shifts initiated by these wobbles. As the planet began to cool, more CO₂ dissolved into the oceans, reducing the greenhouse effect and causing more cooling. Similarly, CO₂ was released from the oceans to the atmosphere when the planet warmed, driving further warming.

But things are very different this time around. Humans are responsible for adding huge quantities of extra CO₂ to the atmosphere – and fast.

The speed at which CO₂ is rising has no comparison in the recorded past. The fastest natural shifts out of ice ages saw CO₂ levels increase by around 35 parts per million (ppm) in 1,000 years. It might be hard to believe, but humans have emitted the equivalent amount in just the last 17 years.

How fast are CO₂ levels rising? Ben Henley and Nerilie Abram

Before the industrial revolution, the natural level of atmospheric CO₂ during warm interglacials was around 280 ppm. The frigid ice ages, which caused kilometre-thick ice sheets to build up over much of North America and Eurasia, had CO₂ levels of around 180 ppm.

Burning fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and gas, takes ancient carbon that was locked within the Earth and puts it into the atmosphere as CO₂. Since the industrial revolution humans have burned an enormous amount of fossil fuel, causing atmospheric CO₂ and other greenhouse gases to skyrocket.

In mid-2017, atmospheric CO₂ now stands at 409 ppm. This is completely unprecedented in the past 800,000 years.

Global Temperature and CO₂ since 1850. Ben Henley and Nerilie Abram

The massive blast of CO₂ is causing the climate to warm rapidly. The last IPCC report concluded that by the end of this century we will get to more than 4℃ above pre-industrial levels (1850-99) if we continue on a high-emissions pathway.

If we work towards the goals of the Paris Agreement, by rapidly curbing our CO₂ emissions and developing new technologies to remove excess CO₂ from the atmosphere, then we stand a chance of limiting warming to around 2℃.

Observed and projected global temperature on high (RCP8.5) and low (RCP2.6) CO₂ emission futures. Ben Henley and Nerilie Abram

The fundamental science is very well understood. The evidence that climate change is happening is abundant and clear. The difficult part is: what do we do next? More than ever, we need strong, cooperative and accountable leadership from politicians of all nations. Only then will we avoid the worst of climate change and adapt to the impacts we can’t halt.

The authors acknowledge the contributions of Wes Mountain (multimedia), Alicia Egan (editing) and Andrew King (model projection data).

Ben Henley receives funding from an ARC Linkage Project and is an associate investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.

Nerilie Abram receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

The Bloodhound 1,000mph car will conduct some "slow speed" runs at Newquay airport in Cornwall.

Canada’s PM is a counterfeit progressive who champions war-planes, pipelines and privatization - look across the pond for economic and environmental justice

Their depiction in the international media couldn’t be more different.

You know Justin Trudeau from the Buzzfeed photo-spread or the BBC viral video: the feminist Prime Minister of Canada who hugs refugees, pandas, and his yoga-mat. He looks like he canoed straight from the lake to the stage of the nearest TED Talk — an inclusive, nature-loving do-gooder who must assuredly be loved by his people.

Continue reading...

Great Britain is in the top 10% of areas for harbouring alien species, according to a study.

US says it will not join other six nations in reaffirming 2015 Paris pact but will take its own action to reduce carbon footprint

The US has refused to sign up to a G7 pledge that calls the Paris climate accord the “irreversible” global tool to address climate change.

The G7 environment ministers issued a final reportafter their two-day meeting in Bologna, the first since the US announced it was withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement.

Continue reading...

Slowing demand for oil and forecasts of rapid growth in green power pose risk to core business, says analyst

More than a fifth of investment by the largest oil and gas companies could be in wind and solar power in just over a decade, according to analysis of how global changes in energy will reshape the sector.

Slowing demand for oil and forecasts of rapid growth in renewables posed both a threat and and opportunity BP, Shell and Total among others cannot ignore, said research group Wood Mackenzie.

Continue reading...

A wildlife blogger captures unique footage of the endangered mammals living in a Shropshire brook.

Mule deer, pronghorn and other animals rely on unbroken migration routes for food and survival, a necessity now in jeopardy as Trump pushes for development

The life of a Wyoming mule deer is a tough one. In order to survive, thousands of the deer undertake an arduous 150-mile migration twice a year to find food. Manmade and natural hazards abound on this two-month trek.

“It’s not just about getting from point A to B, they have to forage all along the way,” said Matt Kauffman, a University of Wyoming zoologist. “These animals are slowly starving to death all winter. If winter is long enough or they are held up, the animals will die.”

Continue reading...

Collapsing ice shelves will further accelerate global sea level rise

Very soon, a large portion of an ice shelf in Antarctica will break off and collapse into the ocean. The name of the ice shelf is Larsen C; it is a major extension from of the West Antarctic ice sheet, and its health has implications for other ice in the region, and sea levels globally.

How do we know a portion is going to collapse? Well, scientists have been watching a major rift (crack) that has grown in the past few years, carving out a section of floating ice nearly the size of Delaware. The speed of the crack has increased dramatically in the past few months, and it is nearly cracked through.

Continue reading...

The transformation of Singapore into a garden city.

Mayflies live for a day, humans live a century - if we’re lucky - but what is the oldest living organism on the planet?