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Cancelled flights might be your worst nightmare, but imagine a world with no flights. Flight image from www.shutterstock.com

In Australia, the amount of aviation fuel consumed per head of population has more than doubled since the 1980s. We now use, on average, 2.2 barrels (or 347 litres) of jet fuel per person per year.

This historically unprecedented aeromobility has enormous environmental costs. Aviation is contributing to around 4.9% of current global warming and this is forecast to at least triple by 2050. Domestic aviation in Australia produces around 8.6 million tonnes of greenhouse gases each year.

Offsetting schemes, technology solutions and other attempts to lower the carbon emissions of aviation have failed dismally.

The only solution to these intractable environmental impacts is the dramatic reduction, or complete elimination, of air travel. It might be hard to imagine life without the plane, but the idea is not as crazy as it sounds.

Australian aviation fuel consumption per capita 1985-2015. Sources: Australian Petroleum Statistics and the ABS Estimated Residential Population.

Here are nine common objections to grounding planes, and our counterpoints:

1. There are no fast, cheap and clean transport alternatives to the plane.

So we build them. We construct a national high-speed rail network and more efficient intercity, rural and urban transport systems. These projects would involve Australian steel, thousands of new jobs and large-scale regional planning and infrastructure development.

These programs would ameliorate urban congestion, the most pressing priority of Infrastructure Australia, revitalise regional communities and dramatically reduce our imports of crude and refined petroleum.

The continual development of communications technologies, including fast internet and virtual reality, will make much business travel redundant. Investing in virtual technologies and forcing the political and corporate elite to use other transport modes would hasten political support for, and investment in, the development of transport alternatives.

2. What about the economic value of tourism?

If we abandoned all tourist flights, the economy would be A$14.4 billion better off. International visitors spent A$38.1 billion in Australia in 2015-16. But, Australians travelling overseas spent far more – A$52.4 billion – in the same period.

International tourism, both in and outbound, would continue under a no–aviation scenario. As an island nation we will become reliant on ships. Travel by cruise ship is already booming. While cruise ships are currently highly polluting, their conversion to non-fossil-fuel energy, in contrast to the plane, is more achievable.

3. What about our education export industry?

Transnational education, teaching of students by Australian university offshore programs and via online distance education, is already significant, accounting for 30.2% of all higher education international students in 2015. We would invest more heavily in these educational platforms and technologies.

4. What about the jobs in the aviation industry?

Technological replacement and offshoring have decimated full-time jobs in Australia’s aviation industry. The employment generated by growth in domestic tourism and the construction of high-speed rail, ships and other transport alternatives would more than compensate.

Aviation jobs per 1000 revenue passenger kilometres for domestic flights. Sources: BITRE Australian Domestic Aviation Activity data and the ABS Labour Force Survey statistics on employment in the air and space transport industries. 5. What about the needs of farmers and hospitality industries who rely on backpackers?

We would still have a backpacker labour force under conditions of “slow tourism” that uses alternatives to cars and planes. Particularly for longer-stay tourism, arrival and departures by boat would be a small component of a trip.

We could also start using our own population for these jobs by paying higher wages. This might also reduce unemployment and dependency on social welfare and raise additional tax revenue. In the longer term we would transition to agriculture and hospitality industries that are not reliant on exploited and underpaid holiday-workers.

6. What about medical, military and rescue flights?

We need to keep essential flights for medical, rescue and firefighting purposes, and some military capacity. For essential flights, mitigation strategies like offsets may work as emissions would be low in aggregate.

7. What about sport and culture?

Sport and air travel are closely linked. Our national rugby union team is the Qantas Wallabies. Although teams travel, more spectators than ever are staying put – preferring to watch live sports on TV. Technological improvements will continue to produce a better-than-real home experience. And the eSports teams of the future may not have to leave home either.

8. Prohibition never works!

Banning things like alcohol has proven historically difficult, even in Canberra. But no-fly zones are easier to enforce – you couldn’t smuggle an A380 into the country and fly it around without anyone noticing.

9. It’s too radical a change – it would cause chaos!

Arguably, the controllable outcomes of grounding aircraft will be far less severe than the chaos of uncontrolled global climate change. A transformed, low-emissions transportation system can be planned for and, while there will be significant readjustment, life will go on.

A “business as usual” climate change scenario will unleash destruction unparalleled in human history, including the genuine threat of species extinction.

As an island nation we are more dependent than most on the aeroplane. Rather than giving us special dispensation, this puts us in a position to be world leaders in sustainable transport. Our proposal to ground planes and dramatically reduce emissions would need tremendous action in terms of civic will, and a state apparatus politically capable of taking radical action.

Liberal democracies are capable of such action, as evidenced by Australia’s Snowy Mountains Scheme. And Trump’s mandate to build infrastructure shows nation-building projects still command public support. An aviation-free Australia is a genuine and necessary alternative.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

A gibbon living in the tropical forests of China is a new species of primate, scientists say.

Scientists say they have solved the mystery surrounding a sea creature that lived more than 500 million years ago.

Carbon-rich peatlands in remote Congo basin could store three years’ worth of world’s fossil fuel emissions, say scientists

Scientists have discovered the world’s largest tropical peatland in the remote Congo swamps, estimated to store the equivalent of three year’s worth of the world’s total fossil fuel emissions.

Researchers mapped the Cuvette Centrale peatlands in the central Congo basin and found they cover 145,500 sq km – an area larger than England. The swamps could lock in 30bn tonnes of carbon that was previously not known to exist, making the region one of the most carbon-rich ecosystems on Earth.

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Caroline Lucas criticises proposed sale to Macquarie due to Australian firm’s ‘appalling track record of asset-stripping’

Theresa May has been urged to stop the Green Investment Bank being “killed off” by a sale to private firm Macquarie, amid fears the assets will be stripped and its environmental purpose abandoned.

MPs from across the parties raised concerns about the proposed sale in the House of Commons, after Caroline Lucas, co-leader of the Green party, called a debate arguing the whole process should be stopped.

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Boreholes set up by local conservationists are saving drought-stricken elephants in Hwange national park

As a drought-inducing El Niño settled over southern Africa in 2016, the animals of Hwange national park in Zimbabwe faced desperate water shortages.

During a heatwave in October, conservation worker Prince Sansole spotted an elephant partially submerged in a muddy pool. His movements initially looked no different from the water games routinely played by the giant creatures. Only a closer look revealed that the young bull was in trouble, struggling to get up. His limp trunk kept dropping back into the water, unable to catch a fresh breath.

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Millions of women have no problem with the pill but some find it shatters their mental health. Here The Debrief's Vicky Spratt describes years of depression, anxiety and panic.

A camera attached to the neck of a female polar bear shows two bears breaking through ice sheets to hunt for prey.

Blind mice regain partial vision after stem cell reprogramming

Newly recognised species given the name ‘Skywalker hoolock gibbon’ by the team that proved it was distinct from other Chinese gibbons

Scientists have discovered a new species of gibbon living in south-west China’s rainforests.

Although scientists had been studying the primate for some time, new research has revealed it is in fact a different species.

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Scientists have found a new species of gibbon living in the tropical forests of south west China.

Rising temperatures and crop farming mean birds are disappearing from parts of England, says study, while butterflies and dragonflies are faring better

Climate change has already led to the vanishing of some bird species in parts of England, where intensively farmed land gives them no room to adapt to warming temperatures. The revelation, in a new scientific study, contradicts previous suggestions that birds are tracking global warming by shifting their ranges.

The research found that birds that prefer cooler climes, such as meadow pipits, willow tits and willow warblers, have disappeared from sites in south-east England and East Anglia, where intensive crop growing is common.

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Wenlock Edge, Shropshire In this miniature pool had fallen a gunk of seeds and leaves, and lawns of algae had spread

Something about the fencepost grabbed my attention, and instead of watching the path winding through dark trees against the orchestral sweep of a January sky, I picked out small visual notes: moss, water, tree rings on the post.

I’d passed this way 100 times; each time was different and each time I’d been looking elsewhere. What brought the fencepost into focus this time? Perhaps it was the dissimilitude of small birds in the trees: blue tits, great tits, chaffinches, robins, so different from each other yet similar in their size and movement, their little mutterings under breath made me notice smaller details.

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Wildlife officers warn heavy rains influencing ‘unexpected’ crocodile movements after 1.5 metre reptile initially mistaken for palm frond

Wildlife officers were called to remove a saltwater crocodile near a children’s playground in far north Queensland on Tuesday, amid warnings that heavy rains were seeing the dangerous reptiles turning up in “unexpected places”.

The 1.5 metre crocodile was spotted by residents in a grass area opposite a caravan park playground in Bramston Beach, near Cairns.

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Rusty patched bumble bee population plunged nearly 90% since the late 1990s

The rusty patched bumble bee, a prized but vanishing pollinator once familiar to much of North America, was listed on Tuesday as an endangered species, becoming the first wild bee in the continental United States to gain such federal protection.

One of several species facing sharp declines, the bumble bee known to scientists as Bombus affinis has plunged nearly 90% in abundance and distribution since the late 1990s, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

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Scientists decode "dog-directed speech" - and they find puppies respond but older dogs ignore it.

Lewis Pugh braves below-freezing waters in some of the coldest places on Earth to draw attention to our warming planet.

Lewis Pugh braves below-freezing waters in some of the coldest places on Earth to draw attention to our warming planet.

Australian Power Project launched by former AGL spokesman, with assistance from former Malcolm Turnbull advisor

A ‘clean coal’ advocacy organisation which is opposed to higher renewable energy targets and seeks to give a voice for businesses “being crippled by massive gas and electricity bills” has been launched by a former spokesman for AGL, with apparent assistance from a former advisor to Malcolm Turnbull.

The Australian Power Project, which appears to have launched in late 2016, calls for businesses affected to share their stories and urges government to take a “middle road” in energy policy, and has been quoted in media reports.

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Six years ago on January 11 2011 a catastrophic flood unfolded in the Lockyer Valley in southeast Queensland. Twenty-two people lost their lives.

Floodwaters spilled out across the Brisbane River floodplains, equal to the area of France and Germany combined. The waters inundated the CBD and inner suburbs and brought the state’s capital to a standstill.

The 2011 flood was reported as “biblical” and extreme in its magnitude.

Our research, based on palaeological flood records, suggests floods of this size may be more common than we think. When the next one occurs is a matter of when, not if. So what can we do to plan better?

Brisbane ferry terminal. State Library of Queensland What is a one-in-100-year flood?

Floods are the most expensive type of natural disaster in Australia. The 2011 flood is estimated to have cost the Australian economy around A$30 billion. This does not include the incalculable cost of declining water quality and ecosystem health in offshore ecosystems such as Moreton Bay.

To manage flood risk, we have to understand the chance of different-sized floods occurring. The chance of a flood event can be described using a variety of terms, commonly including the average recurrence interval (ARI). You’ve probably seen this reported in the media as the “one-in-100-year flood”.

However, the preferred method is now annual exceedance probability (AEP). For example, the one-in-100-year flood has a one-in-100 chance or 1% AEP of being exceeded in any year. Currently, this 1% AEP event is designated as having an “acceptable” risk for planning purposes nearly everywhere in Australia.

Initial estimations of the 2011 event, based on 31 years of gauging records in the Upper Lockyer, indicated an AEP of 0.05%, or an ARI of one in 2,000 years.

But another extreme event in 2013, with five more years of data, reduced this to 1.11%, or one in 90 years. This illustrates a major problem with calculating flood risk: flood prediction is extremely dependent on the amount of data. It is worse in countries such as Australia where European settlement occurred relatively recently.

Finding old floods

One way to extend the data is to incorporate palaeoflood records into flood predictions. Palaeoflood records are obtained from a range of techniques that combine different sources of past flood information from the landscape.

These might include markers on old buildings or bridges which extend further back than the river gauging records. Flood sediments stored high in bedrock gorges or in lowland floodplains also provide a long-term record once we’ve dated them.

In our recent Australian Research Council Linkage Project, The Big Flood: will it happen again?, we’ve been looking at these types of flood records.

Flood deposits. Jacky Croke

The project has produced the first-ever palaeoflood record for the Lockyer Valley, extending it back several thousand years. We’ve produced a timeline of past floods using a technique called Optically Stimulated Luminescence, which estimates the age based on how much sunlight (UV light) is stored in a single grain of sand. UV light produces a luminescence signal that gets trapped inside the lattice of the quartz sand. The amount stored can be converted to produce an age since burial.

This record reveals that flood events like 2011 have occurred at least seven times over the past 1,000 years. We also found a period of high flood activity during the 1700s, which exceeded the size of the historical events of the 1890s and 1974 floods. We can also see clusters of floods within short time periods, such as the cluster in the 1800s, which was highlighted again by the floods in 2011 and 2013.

The record indicates that such extreme flood events may occur more frequently than we thought.

Most importantly, when we incorporate palaeoflood records into traditional flood analysis, the uncertainty in predictions is significantly reduced.

Incorporating palaeoflood records reduces the uncertainty in flood forecasts. The Big Flood project What do we need to do with this information?

Palaeoflood records represent a viable, cost-effective solution to the ongoing problem of flood risk management in Australia. To date, the use of palaeoflood records has not been included in traditional flood analysis nor recognised in planning or policy. In spite of two extreme events in 2011 and 2013, many planning and policy guidelines remain unchanged.

The two extreme flood events in 2011 and 2013 indicate that the level of certainty around acceptable limits of flooding is inadequate. Longer records are needed to reduce flood risk in southeast Queensland. Without this critical next step, Australians remain at risk of extreme flood events.

Given the likelihood of increasing rainfall extremes in the future, it is important we start using the information nature has preserved to better prepare for more frequent extreme floods.

Jacky Croke receives funding from the Australian Research Council.