Feed aggregator

The Halley VI Research Station was moved more than 20km across the ice sheet.

A growth in demand for elephant parts to be used in traditional medicine in Asia means the number of elephants being killed in Myanmar is rising

Case files and laminated photos of poachers spill out of captain Than Naing’s folder. As the chief of police in Okekan township, one of Myanmar’s recent poaching hotspots, he is trying to track down the men who have killed at least three elephants in the area over the past year. So far, he has arrested 11 people suspected of having assisted the poachers. Meanwhile the poachers themselves remain at large.

“These are the two men who we believe killed one of the elephants,” he says, pointing to two photos. “They are still on the run.”

Continue reading...

Mizen Head to Malin Head is a 510-mile trip that takes in the breathtaking Maumturk Mountains, the empty beaches of Cork and Kerry, and the wilderness of the Burren

Send anyone to the west coast of Ireland and they will fall in love with it at some point. For me it was at a junction in Maum, County Galway, where I had stopped to take a photo of a signpost but ended up having my breath taken away by the Maumturk Mountains in all their pastoral, sunlit glory.

Continue reading...

Guardian experts give their view on the main parties’ public service manifesto pledges. Here, our environment editor looks at energy, pollution and recycling

• Denis Campbell on health
• David Brindle on social care
• Patrick Butler on social security
• Dawn Foster on housing
• Anna Bawden on local government
• Frances Ryan on disability
• Alan Travis on criminal justice and immigration
• Jane Dudman on the civil service
• Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland

New support for fracking to extract shale and coal seam gas is the most striking pledge from the Conservatives, with the easing of planning rules, a new dedicated regulator and more of any future tax revenues going directly to communities hosting shale gas sites. Wind power remains ruled out in England, but offshore wind farms are supported. The energy efficiency of all fuel-poor homes would be upgraded to meet energy performance certificate (EPC) band C criteria by 2030. There is no environment section in the manifesto and the UK’s air pollution crisis gets a single sentence: “We will take action against poor air quality in urban areas.” A free vote on repealing the ban on fox hunting with dogs is promised.

Continue reading...

66% spike in captures as bumper wet season connects major river systems in Northern Territory, allowed deadly reptiles to move around more freely

The number of crocodiles caught in the Top End has soared after Territorians endured the third wettest wet season on record.

There’s been a 66% spike in crocodile captures around Darwin and Katherine in the past year, the NT Parks and Wildlife Commission says.

Continue reading...

AGL to replace some ageing Torrens gas units with reciprocating engines, possibly with eye to impending switch to 5-minute settlement.

Wenlock Edge, Shropshire The stripy sun fly joins the summer swarm of insects to the opening of the festival of flowers

The sun fly alights on a bramble leaf and alters its position as if by the clockwise clicks of an invisible dial. Gold on black, black on gold, it radiates. The sun fly is one of the syrphid flies, a hoverfly of rough flowery places such as this verge of a long-abandoned railway line through the woods.

It’s a chunky little fist of bling, folding up a cut-glass wingspan of 25mm. Its thorax is black with three vertical yellow stripes – which has earned it the nickname of the footballer or the common tiger hoverfly. It presents a regal, black-banded backside of an abdomen with crescentic yellow markings like the folded gold of Saxon hoards.

Continue reading...

Trump floats vision of 40-50 feet high Mexico-US border walls, covered with solar panels so they'd be "beautiful structures.”

Last week, Donald Trump entered the White House Rose Garden and announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate accord. In doing so, he fulfilled his campaign promise to “cancel” the Paris deal, a move that calls into question the future of the entire agreement.

In withdrawing, Trump cited the (arguably short-term) sacrifice the agreement requires of the US. This perspective fulfils the famous prediction made by economist Garrett Hardin in the 1960s: the “tragedy of the commons”. Hardin wrote that self-interest drives individuals to exploit collective resources in the short term, even to their long-term detriment.

Hardin and those following him thought the only way to avoid this tragedy was by securing collective agreements. That is why so many people view the Paris Accord as a vital mechanism for addressing climate change. It is also why the US withdrawal is devastating.

But another famous economist, Elinor Ostrom, saw things differently. Writing after the demise of the Kyoto Agreement but before the Paris Accord, Ostrom said that faith in multinational accords to address climate change was misplaced. Ostrom saw the limits of such collective action. Crucially, Ostrom suggested that we should also recognise the potential of localised collective action.

And already there are examples in both the developed and developing world that this is happening right now.

The new global leadership

Ultimately, efforts to reduce global warming are advanced by the pedestrian, daily choices of households, businesses, and sub-national governments. Millions of local choices can have global effects, for good or ill.

It’s clear that Trump is stepping away from global leadership on climate change. But in response, the state governors of Washington, New York and California declared they remain committed to the Paris climate targets. Since then, a further 10 US states have joined the budding Climate Alliance.

In the past two decades, mounting evidence has shown the power of such efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. These efforts have been driven by policy entrepreneurs – people with vision, energy, and the collaborative instincts required to promote collective action. A classic example is provided by the former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, who in 2005 invited mayors from other mega-cities to join him in promoting climate change efforts. That initiative has spurred many more, with transformative effects.

Looking around the world, we can see the diversity of localised initiatives in place to address climate change.

In Sao Paulo, Brazil, traffic congestion and pollution are being addressed by providing better public transport options and more bicycle lanes.

In Ethiopia, the Addis Ababa Light Rail Transport Project aims to reduce significantly the greenhouse gas emissions from cars.

In India, Kolkata has implemented the Solid Waste Management Improvement Project, which is reducing the release of methane emissions, while contributing to improved public sanitation.

Across Europe, cities have started emulating meat-free Thursdays, which originated in Ghent, Belgium. Aside from other benefits, reducing meat consumption can reduce agricultural greenhouse gas emissions.

In the US, leaders in cities and states have done much to reduce greenhouse gas emissions caused by cars and coal-fired power plants, for example through the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

Globally, the Carbon Disclosure Project has significantly influenced actions of businesses and governments alike.

Particularly important for smaller developing countries is the Cartegena Dialogue. It creates opportunities for leaders to share strategies for mitigating climate change and – just as urgently, especially for small Pacific nations – adapting to it.

The Paris Accord is a landmark, multilateral initiative. The withdrawal of the US is appalling, and deserves a strong rebuke. But it does not foreshadow the unravelling of multilateral resolve for addressing climate change.

The backslappers in Washington have had their Rose Garden moment. Elsewhere, energetic policy entrepreneurs are mobilising. Grounded in their communities, they are acting to protect the planet for today’s young people, and for those not yet born. That too, is global leadership.

Michael Mintrom does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

City of Melbourne Environment Portfolio Chair Councillor Cathy Oke urged innovators to submit their ideas on how to make travelling across Melbourne more enjoyable and environmentally friendly.

GPG signs agreement with GE to supply and install 28 wind turbines for 91 MW Crookwell Wind Farm.

The largest-ever state renewable energy solicitation is just one of the moves Cuomo Administration has taken in response to Trump exiting Paris Agreement.

The support from conservative commentators for a low emissions target has quickly ended, just days after they discovered that the costs of wind and solar have fallen so much that an LET might do little to support new coal generation. The Australian’s Judith Sloan wrote on Wednesday that she now viewed a low emissions target […]

Evidence suggests the dinosaur had scales rather than feathers or fluff, as some have speculated.

International Energy Agency says unabated coal generation will have to stop within 14 years if continued at current rates, undermining claims that the Adani coal mine is good for the climate. IEA also says bar for low emissions target needs to be set at a fraction of that contemplated by Canberra.

Falling solar and wind prices have led to new power deals across the world despite investment in renewables falling

Renewable energy capacity around the world was boosted by a record amount in 2016 and delivered at a markedly lower cost, according to new global data – although the total financial investment in renewables actually fell.

The greater “bang-for-buck” resulted from plummeting prices for solar and wind power and led to new power deals in countries including Denmark, Egypt, India, Mexico and the United Arab Emirates all being priced well below fossil fuel or nuclear options.

Continue reading...

The Clean Energy Finance Corporation is back in the spotlight after the Turnbull Government announced plans last week to lift a ban on the green bank investing in carbon capture and storage technologies.

A shark's nose is chemosensory only, and it doesn’t join up to the back of the throat like ours does. Flickr/Leszek Leszczynski, CC BY-SA

This is an article from Curious Kids, a new series for children. The Conversation is asking kids to send in questions they’d like an expert to answer. All questions are welcome – serious, weird or wacky!

Do sharks sneeze? – Desmond, aged 4, Perth.

When an animal sneezes, it’s their way of getting rid of annoying bits and pieces that have floated inside their nose and mouth.

While many animals, including humans, elephants, pandas and even seals, can sneeze, sharks unfortunately cannot. To be able to sneeze, an animal needs to move air (or water) from the lungs through its nose to the outside.

Sharks have two nostrils (called nares) below their snout that are used for smelling, but they don’t join up to the back of the throat like our nose does, so they can’t sneeze like we do. If something floats into their nares, they might try to shake it out.

Shark nostrils are called nares, but they do their breathing through their gills at the back of the mouth. Flickr/Lwp Kommunikáció, CC BY

Sharks breathe through the gills at the back of the mouth. Most of their “smelling” is done using a process called chemoreception, which allows sharks to sense tiny pieces of stuff, called molecules, hiding in the water as they pass through their nares.

Sharks can find and recognise these molecules – like parts of blood – that have been released from wounded animals or other prey, because their sense of smell is much better than ours.

Nares are loaded with powerful sensors. Once a shark has locked onto a smell, it can then work out where it came from by swimming towards it and moving its head slightly from side to side. It’s a bit like us following the smell of a freshly baked cake.

It’s an exaggeration to say a shark can smell a single drop of blood in the ocean. But they might be able to smell tiny drops of blood in the water from up to five kilometres away. Flickr/Elias Levy, CC BY

Legend has it that sharks can smell a single drop of blood in the ocean, but that’s an exaggeration. What they can do is detect blood at one part per million, which is similar to detecting tiny drops of blood in the water from up to five kilometres away!

While some have claimed to capture sightings of sharks sneezing on video, it just isn’t physically possible.

You might think this shark is sneezing, but trust me – it’s not.

The movement people confuse with sneezing is likely the animal’s attempt at getting rid of unwanted objects from their mouth or stomach area.

Sharks can actually make their stomach stick out of their mouth for brief moments to get rid of things they have eaten that they don’t like, such as tyres, licence plates, fish bones and fish hooks. This is called gastric eversion and it’s a very cool trick.

Gastric eversion is where a shark or other animal empties its stomach by making it stick out of their mouth.

Alternatively, a shark stretching its jaws, which they sometimes do after a meal, might be mistaken for a sneeze.

While sharks can’t sneeze like we do, they can smell and they have other great ways of getting rid of unwanted things from inside them.

Hello, curious kids! Have you got a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to us. They can:

* Email your question to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au
* Tell us on Twitter by tagging @ConversationEDU with the hashtag #curiouskids, or
* Tell us on Facebook

CC BY-ND

Please tell us your name, age, and which city you live in. You can send an audio recording of your question too, if you want. Send as many questions as you like! We won’t be able to answer every question but we will do our best.

Jane Williamson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

The famous national park has prepared an environmental assessment to allow Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T to extend coverage, but some aren’t happy about it

They already paved Paradise and put up a parking lot. Now the famous site on the south slope of Mount Rainier National Park’s 14,410ft-tall volcano could be wired for cellular service.

The park, which encompasses 230,000 acres of the Cascades mountain range in Washington state, has prepared an environmental assessment for a proposal to allow Verizon, T-Mobile and AT&T to affix a wireless antenna to the park’s Jackson visitor center.

Continue reading...

Is it nearly the end of the road for coal? Shutterstock.com

Indian mining firm Adani yesterday announced that its board had approved plans to proceed with the controversial Carmichael coal mine in Queensland’s Galilee Basin.

But it is still far from clear whether Adani has actually obtained the finance to proceed with the A$16.5 billion project, or whether it has secured the necessary A$1.1 billion loan from the government’s Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility needed for the mine’s railway.

That hasn’t stopped the state government hailing the announcement as an economic win for Queensland, on the basis of job creation and for the signals it provides to potential investors in the region. But this amounts to little more than short-sighted politics. The government appears to be steadfastly ignoring the realities of the current energy landscape.

Let’s recap: coal mining is not economically viable within the constraints of a global carbon budget, while renewable energy production is rapidly expanding as the world moves to more sustainable investments. The result is that coal projects could become stranded assets, with price tags that may already exceed what would have been the costs of a timely implementation of climate action. Investors and lending institutions are shifting to sustainable projects that limit the risk of catastrophic environmental damage.

The people own the coal

The state government owns the coal resource, but it is a special type of ownership. This is “public resource” ownership, meaning that all decisions made by the state government to exploit it must be in the interest of the public as a whole.

Issuing resource titles that allow Adani to proceed with a vast coal mine – in defiance of the social, economic and environmental impacts of such a project within a carbon-constrained economy – arguably represents a dereliction of the state’s duty to act in the public interest.

It also ignores the fact that in order to have just a 50% chance of keeping global warming within 2℃, a key aim of the Paris climate agreement, 90% of Australia’s current coal reserves must stay in the ground. If the mine proceeds, it will contribute substantially to global warming and accelerate the destruction of one of the world’s greatest natural assets, the Great Barrier Reef. This could have huge knock-on effects for future tourism in the area, which generates A$6 billion a year.

The economics of the Adani coal mine simply do not make sense. While there may be limited short-term employment opportunities and royalty gains for the state should the project actually get financed, the longer-term projections are dire.

The thermal coal market is in decline. What’s more, the Carmichael mine will produce low-ranking thermal coal with a high ash content, making it carbon-intensive even by coal’s standards, and bringing with it considerable health risks.

With this in mind, it seems short-sighted to subsidise an anticipated production of between 25 million and 60 million tonnes of coal a year. Put simply, coal is not a sustainable resource for energy production.

This climate perspective informs the market. India, for example, cannot be relied upon as a guaranteed market for this low-quality coal. This is particularly evident in the recent unveiling of India’s new power plan, which calls for a dramatic increase in renewable energy production. This will have a deleterious impact on all Australian coal markets, and makes the decision to pursue low-quality coal reserves all the more untenable.

The banks know this. Westpac, ANZ, NAB, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citi, BNP Paribas, Société Générale and Crédit Agricole are among the domestic and international banks that have declined to fund the project, while the Commonwealth Bank has quit as the project’s financial adviser.

This is why the question of financing is so fraught. The major banks understand the fact that longer term, the Adani coal mine has no future. They are also concerned about the financial impact of stranded assets. Westpac, for example, made it very clear earlier this year that it aims to shift lending to sustainable economic models, and would increase lending to this sector to A$25 billion by 2030. It also made it clear that any funding for coal projects would henceforth be limited to existing coal projects with high-quality coal. Other major banks have adopted similar stances.

Where next?

So what happens now? The government may decide to fund Adani’s railway, but that does not necessarily mean the mine itself will ever actually move forward.

If and when Adani’s project does fall over, consideration should be given to whether the government should be held accountable for breaching public interest responsibilities in issuing the resource titles in the first place. Of course, this necessarily presumes the financing for the Adani mine will actually proceed.

To reiterate, there is no evidence that this has actually occurred. Getting government approval, and a green light from one’s own board, does not mean that Adani actually has the funding required to go ahead and dig the coal.

In the end, the real question is whether any lending institution will seriously take a risk on this vast and irresponsible project, which ignores both the safety of the Great Barrier Reef and the fundamentals of carbon-constrained economics.

Samantha Hepburn does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.