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Queensland lays out three “cost neutral” paths to 50% renewables
So, you want to buy battery storage?
Space heating and cooling our homes – time for a rethink?
Solar shading, and what to do about it
Largest solar array installed at an Australian winery passes half-way mark
生态保护者谴责津巴布韦出口活大象的计划
尽管津巴布韦国家公园管理方予以否认,但专家相信该国正计划将数十只大象运往中国。(翻译:金艳/chinadialogue)
有人担心,津巴布韦正准备再次将数十只幼年大象送往中国野生动物园。
今年8月,津巴布韦国家公园及野生动植物管理局(ZimParks)开始从万基国家公园捕捉大象,并将它们关在乌特士比野生动物圈养设施内。
Continue reading...Water congress focuses on sustainable water development
Chicxulub 'dinosaur crater' investigation begins in earnest
Underwater photographer captures pristine marine ecosystems around the world
Germany takes steps to roll back renewable energy revolution
Leaked plans show Berlin halving its goal to expand its northern windfarms because its power grid cannot keep pace
Germany is taking steps to curb its booming windfarm sector in what it claims is a necessary move to stop the renewables revolution from undermining its own success.
Critics, however, say the step will deal a blow to the country’s reputation as a leader in green energy.
Continue reading...Coal-fired power stations: Senate committee to examine how best to close them
Greens and Labor to combine forces to push for inquiry looking at ways to meet Australia’s climate change targets
A Senate committee will examine how best to close coal power stations to meet Australia’s climate change targets when the Greens and Labor combine to set up an inquiry on Wednesday.
The Greens and Labor will move a motion to ask the Senate environment and communications references committee to report on mass closures of electricity generators, and expect sufficient crossbench support to set up the inquiry.
Continue reading...Canavan 'bitterly disappointed' in BP's decision to scrap oil and gas drilling program
The world's vanishing wild places are vital for saving species
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In science, it’s rare that a new idea comes along that stops people in their tracks. For ecologists, this has just happened, in a paper that found that species living in wild places have more genetic diversity than the same species living in areas dominated by people.
Why is this big news? For starters, it’s a completely new reason to worry about the decline of wilderness.
My colleagues and I showed recently that wilderness areas have shrunk by a tenth globally in just the past two decades. Large wild areas are now mostly confined to cold, dry or otherwise inhospitable parts of the planet such as the far north and big deserts. Biologically rich rainforests have been destroyed the fastest.
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The traditional reasons for defending wilderness areas are that they store massive stocks of carbon, produce clean drinking water, limit destructive flooding, harbour countless rare species, generate billions of dollars for local communities via ecotourism, and provide a scientific basis for understanding how nature is supposed to function in a rapidly changing world. These are compelling enough.
But this new finding is a game-changer, because it shows that genetic variation, the raw fuel for evolution, relies on wilderness too.
Environmental armageddonThe history of life on Earth has been a lot like what soldiers experience in a war: long periods of relative stability and even boredom punctuated by sudden periods of stark terror. Right now, we are living in one of the scariest times since life arose at least 3.7 billion years ago.
Life on Earth today is being battered by massive habitat disruption, climate change, invasive species, foreign pathogens, pollution, overhunting, species extinctions and the disruption of entire ecological communities. And it’s all down to humankind, which currently dominates three-quarters of the planet, according to our recent estimate.
Faced with this environmental onslaught, which will surely worsen in the coming century as the Earth struggles to support up to 12 billion people, the options for species are frighteningly limited.
Change or dieAs Charles Darwin argued more than a century ago, hidden within most species is a surprisingly large amount of genetic variation. Humans vary in height, weight, body shape, skin colour, physiology and biochemistry.
Wolves, first domesticated around 40,000 years ago, have since been bred into dog varieties ranging from tiny Pekinese to Great Danes.
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For most organisms (except simple bacteria and other organisms that reproduce by cloning), there are two main sources of genetic variation: mutations and sex.
If life were a card game, then mutations create new cards. Most mutations are bad for the individual – such as those that cause the bleeding disease Haemophilia A – or are more or less neutral. But now and then a mutation generates a highly beneficial wild card.
While mutations create new cards, sex shuffles the deck, mixing our genes into new combinations. That’s important too, because by doing so one can discard bad cards. Individuals with bad cards tend to die or fail to reproduce, removing their dud genes from the population. And every once in a while a really good combination of genes pops up, like a Royal Flush, that can then spread rapidly through the population.
The ability of species to change and adapt, or evolve, is vital. We tend to think of evolution as an incremental process, requiring thousands or millions of years, but that’s not always so. When things get rough, species with lots of genetic variation can evolve surprisingly fast.
Evolution in actionConsider what happened when scientists introduced myxomatosis to Australia in 1950 to kill off introduced European rabbits, which were stripping the continent’s vegetation bare. At first, most of the rabbits died. But a few, which by random chance were more resistant to the pathogen, survived and reproduced. Within a few decades rabbits had evolved a far greater capacity to resist the disease.
And just as remarkably, myxomatosis evolved as well. It became less deadly. If you’re a pathogen, you don’t want to kill your host straight away because then you’ll die too.
Instead, you just want to make your host sick, or kill it very slowly. That way, you can spread to lots of other hosts. So while rabbits became more resistant, myxomatosis also became less virulent. And it all happened in just a couple of decades.
Something similar is happening with Tasmanian devils, which are being killed off by a bizarre contagious cancer that spreads when the notoriously scrappy marsupials fight with one another.
Recent studies show that genes which produce greater resistance to the cancer are rapidly increasing in the population. Unfortunately, the devils don’t have a lot of genetic variation but hopefully they’ll have enough variation remaining to get past the killer cancer.
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Things are even scarier for the cheetah, the world’s fastest land animal. While built for speed on the African plains, cheetahs will have a hard time outrunning new environmental challenges. That’s because they have almost zero genetic variation.
Roughly 12,000 years ago, cheetahs went through a severe population bottleneck, eroding most of their genetic variation. The species is paying a price for this today, with reduced sperm quality, kinked tails, and palate deformities among other problems. These maladies arise both from low genetic variation and from inbreeding, which occurs because individual cheetahs are so similar genetically.
Sadly, this could make Cheetahs perilously vulnerable to an “extinction vortex”. The vortex starts with a population crash, perhaps from a newly-introduced disease, habitat loss or climate change. The remaining individuals are already so severely inbred and depleted of genetic variation that they reproduce and survive poorly. Their population dwindles and crashes into oblivion.
We need wildernessThat is why the new study is so significant: it shows that a particular species living in a wild area has more genetic variation than does the same species living in a place where humans abound. The study was based on over 4,500 different species of amphibians and mammals scattered across the planet and was published in one of the world’s best scientific journals. This gives us a lot of confidence in the strength of its conclusions.
The bottom line is that the world’s wilderness areas are under assault. We are not just losing wild places with clean air and water and beautiful vistas. We are losing the raw fuel of evolution and adaptation that has taken life millions of years to accumulate.
Given the breakneck pace at which we are currently changing the planet, eroding the capacity of species to adapt to new challenges is absolutely the last thing we want to be doing.
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![The Conversation](https://counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/66403/count.gif)
Bill Laurance receives funding from the Australian Research Council and other scientific and philanthropic organisations. He is the director of the Centre for Tropical Environmental and Sustainability Science at James Cook University, and founder and director of ALERT--the Alliance of Leading Environmental Researchers & Thinkers.
Southern right whales off the Head of the Bight in South Australia – video
Drone footage of southern right whales in ocean off South Australia will provide new insights into how they survive the yearly migration, monitoring their ongoing health over time in a changing environment. Southern right whales face a number of threats, including shipping traffic, naval activities, oil and gas exploration, unregulated whale watching and the depletion of fisheries
Continue reading...Drones monitor 'dramatic' weight loss of southern right whales during calving season
The changing size of mother whales is being tracked after the southern white whale came back from the brink of extinction
After being hunted to near extinction and threatened with climate change, drones are giving southern right whales in the Great Australian Bight a much-needed health check.
Sponsored by WWF-Australia, researchers at Murdoch University are measuring the size of individual whales and monitoring how that changes during the calving season, with plans to track their weight each year.
Continue reading...US to work with private firms on Mars plan
UK minister dismisses threat of climate court battle
Climate Home: Nick Hurd waved away suggestions the government could be taken to court over a shortfall in policy to meet binding emissions targets
The UK’s world-leading Climate Change Act has been “dangerously neglected”, leaving the government open to lawsuits.
That is the view of environmental lawyers at Client Earth, in a report published on Tuesday.
Continue reading...Christine Howson obituary
My sister Christine Howson, who has died of ovarian cancer aged 61, was a highly respected marine biologist and diver who undertook survey work in the UK and around the world.
Christine was well known in the sports diving world; she was one of the first female divers to attain the First Class grade. She trained divers and other instructors, and organised national events and conferences. Committed to developing swimming for young people, she worked tirelessly at her local swimming club in Tranent, East Lothian, where she was a committee member and coach.
Continue reading...Clinton’s little-known crusade to save Africa’s elephants
Relentless poaching is decimating Africa’s elephants. But the world’s largest land mammal could have a powerful, new champion if Hillary Clinton becomes president of the U.S.
When asked by Ellen DeGeneres what her spirit animal is, Hillary Clinton had a surprising answer: the elephant.
Although the symbol of the GOP, Clinton spoke on the Ellen DeGeneres Show this May with rare passion about the need to protect real elephants from a poaching crisis that has killed at least 110,000 of them over the past decade, pushing the world’s largest land animals – especially forest elephants – closer to extinction.
Continue reading...