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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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In June 2007, Australia was pummelled by five East Coast Lows. The most significant of them, which struck on June 8-9, is still referred to as the “Pasha Bulker” storm, after the 76,000-tonne bulk carrier that ran aground near Newcastle. The storm caused major flooding, strong winds, high seas and A$1.6 billion in damage, making it Australia’s eighth most expensive disaster in the last 50 years.

East Coast Lows (ECLs) have been important features of the eastern seaboard for centuries, with the first case studies published back in 1954. But by June 2007 it had been ten years since the last serious scientific look at these storms. The damage suffered that month made it clear how much we still didn’t know about these weather systems, let alone about how they might behave in the future.

Instead of a whole bunch of scientists going off and doing their own thing, we formed the Eastern Seaboard Climate Change Initiative, in which local universities and state and federal governments could work together to identify the biggest scientific questions for the eastern seaboard, and start to solve them.

Nine years and a slew of research papers later, we know a lot more about ECLs than we once did. We have built a strong research network that can expand our knowledge still further and put it into practice. Today, a special issue of the Journal of Southern Hemisphere Earth Systems Science highlights some of the things we’ve learned.

What do we know?

There are seven papers in the special issue, covering a broad range of topics.

Danielle Verdon-Kidd and her colleagues look back at the Pasha Bulker storm and reflect on the scale of the impacts, as well as issues for future flood planning, such as improved education about the dangers of entering floodwaters.

A group from the Bureau of Meteorology (including myself) has also developed a new online database of East Coast Lows over the past 60 years, to help emergency managers look back on the impacts of past storms or find out how many of the big events they remember were actually ECLs.

Going back still further, Stuart Browning and Ian Goodwin have looked at what sorts of ocean and atmospheric conditions influence East Coast Lows, as these storms tend not to be as strongly affected by big climate drivers such as La Niña. This research has helped to extend the record of East Coast Lows back to the 19th century and found that the numbers of ECLs can vary quite a lot over decades and longer. Interestingly, the past few decades (up to 2014) have been a period of relatively low activity.

Anthony Kiem and his colleagues have delved into the question of how coastal rainfall patterns and impacts can change, depending on the “type” of ECL that happens. This work, as well as the work by Browning and Goodwin, highlights how important it is to consider the different types of East Coast Lows – a storm that causes heavy rain in the Northern Rivers looks very different to one that brings downpours to Gippsland, and these might also change in different ways over time. This teases out important detail that can be washed out in studies that lump all storms in together.

Before we can use climate models to assess how East Coast Lows and their impacts may change on the eastern seaboard, we need to know whether our models are doing a good job. So Alejandro Di Luca and colleagues have assessed how well the NARCliM regional climate model ensemble is able to represent East Coast Lows. They found that regional models have real benefits over global climate models, particularly for the most extreme events.

Despite these promising results, studies led by Nadeeka Parana Manage and Natalie Lockart found that there is still a way to go before the regional models produce data of the quality needed for simulating river flows and dam levels, and how future changes to storm patterns might affect these.

So what’s next?

We know a lot more than we did nine years ago about things like how the upper atmosphere influences East Coast Lows, and how severe floods and East Coast Lows have changed over the past century. We are also starting to get a handle on how they may change in the future. Climate change is expected to reduce their frequency during the cool months May-October (which is when they currently happen most often), but potentially make them more common during the warmer months.

But there are still a lot of things we don’t know. The papers in this issue are a start, but research continues and our group has many more questions left to answer. These include how ECLs have changed in the more distant past; how sea surface temperatures influence their frequency and impacts; and how changes in ECLs and other climate processes can affect our water security.

A whole bunch of research is also about to start into how ECLs interact with other climate extremes now and into the future, as part of the NSW Government’s Climate Change Impacts and Extreme Climate Events research programs and the Australian government’s National Environmental Science Program.

So read the articles, have a taste and watch this space: there are still many more questions and researchers from around the country are working together to answer them, to help us better understand the special, complex climate of the eastern seaboard of Australia.

Acacia Pepler receives funding from the Australian Research Council. The Eastern Seaboard Climate Change Initiative is spearheaded by the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage, and involves researchers from the Bureau of Meteorology, the University of New South Wales, Macquarie University and the University of Newcastle. The research was funded in part by the NSW Environmental Trust, NSW Department of Finance and Services, Hunter Water, and the Australian Research Council.

We warmly welcome the decision taken last week by the Brazilian environment agency, IBAMA, to stop the huge São Luiz do Tapajós dam that threatened to wipe out a whole swath of pristine rainforest deep in the heart of the Amazon (Report, theguardian.com, 5 August). This was a day of relief and hope not just for the Munduruku indigenous people, who faced having their ancestral lands flooded, but for everyone who cares about protecting one of the world’s great natural wonders.

The Tapajós river and the surrounding rainforest are areas of unparalleled natural beauty and biodiversity, where new animal species are still being discovered to this day.

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Artists, poets, film directors and musicians call on Brazilian government and European companies to recognise the rights of the Munduruku people

Some 48 musicians, poets, chefs, artists, film directors and other celebrities including Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Ranulph Fiennes and Mark Rylance have called on the Brazilian government and European companies to recognise the rights of an Amazonian group whose territory is threatened by a large complex of dams.

In a letter to the Guardian, the group says Brazil’s plan to build four large and many smaller dams on the Tapajós river and its tributaries could destroy thousands of square miles of forest and imperil the Munduruku indigenous people.

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Despite having the world’s highest per-capita penetration of rooftop solar – only a tiny percentage of those PV systems are being monitored for performance. So what are Australian consumers missing? And how can they get out of the shade?

Wenlock Edge These tiny creature spend 30% of their energy producing slime so they can travel on a film of lubricant

At first sight, the brown-lipped snails look like buttons stitched on fence posts and nettle stems in a corner of the field. They appear passive and inanimate, yet they are quietly doing what they’ve done for millions of years – adapting.

The rain has brought them out. Although snails have adapted to dry land and to breathing air, they are still creatures of water. Much of their lives are spent conserving water and they spend 30% of their energy producing slime – a mucus membrane that is hygroscopic; it attracts water, allows them to wear a wetsuit and helps them travel on a film of lubricant.

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Sunverge, the US-based company supplying the “brains” for AGL’s virtual power plant, explains how the project will benefit consumers.

AGL sees potential for more solar and battery storage-based "virtual power plants" across its network in Australia. But its enthusiasm for new technologies is still tempered by its need to protect its incumbent business.

AGL's results were surprisingly soft, but the key for investors this year will be the future of the Portland smelter and the rival Halewood generator.

Partnership extends reach of BuildingIQ predictive control to individual rooms and enables data aggregation at an unprecedented level

Energy market shifting to renewables, why not the workforce? US study finds solar industry could easily absorb coal-industry layoffs over next 15 years.

BatPacC – all you want to know about making EV battery packs

Mark Twidell, Director at Tesla Energy Products & Programs, talks about the present and future of Australia’s renewable energy industry.

With 91 days to go, Trump and Clinton sharpen focus on economic policy in bid to sway voters in battleground states.

AGL finally picks new head of division leading its push into solar, battery storage, electric vehicles and "virtual power plants."

Scientists confirm that wild crows from New Caledonia in the South Pacific can craft tools.

Why scientists are watching killer whales in an effort to understand the mysterious biology behind the menopause.