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Solar Impulse: Zero-fuel plane leaves Seville for Cairo
Leaked TTIP energy proposal could 'sabotage' EU climate policy
EU proposal on a free trade deal with the US could curb energy saving measures and a planned switch to clean energy, say MEPs
The latest draft version of the TTIP agreement could sabotage European efforts to save energy and switch to clean power, according to MEPs.
A 14th round of the troubled negotiations on a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) free trade deal between the EU and US is due to begin on Monday in Brussels.
Continue reading...Is damming Australia's north sustainable?
Will Turnbull’s Coalition stand up to Australia’s energy oligopoly?
Massive mangrove die-off on Gulf of Carpentaria worst in the world, says expert
Climate change and El Niño the culprits, says Norm Duke, an expert in mangrove ecology, after seeing 7,000ha of dead mangroves over 700km
Climate change and El Niño have caused the worst mangrove die-off in recorded history, stretching along 700km of Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria, an expert says.
The mass die-off coincided with the world’s worst global coral bleaching event, as well as the worst bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef, in which almost a quarter of the coral was killed – something also caused by unusually warm water.
Continue reading...It’s a fallacy that all Australians have access to clean water, sanitation and hygiene
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Nations are gathering in New York this week to discuss the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which aim to improve health, wealth and well-being for countries both rich and poor.
As a developed nation, it might be assumed that Australia will easily meet these new goals at home – including goal number 6, to ensure “availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all”. But the unpalatable truth is that many Australians still lack access to clean water and effective sanitation.
The World Bank’s Development Indicators list Australia as having 100% access to clean water and effective sanitation. But a discussion paper we released last week with our colleagues outlines how some remote Aboriginal communities struggle to meet Australian water standards.
Making water safeHigh standards of health and well-being are unattainable without safe, clean drinking water, removal of toilet waste from the local environment, and healthy hygiene behaviours.
The Western Australian government has reported that drinking water in some remote communities is contaminated with uranium, faecal bacteria and nitrates above the recommended levels.
This contamination – combined with problems such as irregular washing of faces, hands and bodies (often without soap), and overcrowding in homes – means that residents in these communities suffer from water- and hygiene-related health problems at a higher rate than the general Australian population.
The health situation in affected communities throws up some sobering facts. Australia is the only developed country that has not eradicated trachoma, a preventable tropical disease that can cause blindness. It persists in remote areas with poor hygiene, where children repeatedly pass on the infection.
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Similarly, glue ear, which is influenced by poor water and hygiene practices and can cause permanent hearing loss and developmental difficulties, is prominent in these communities. The Australian Bureau of Statistics reported that one in eight Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people reported ear and/or hearing problems in 2012-13. This is significantly more than non-Indigenous people.
Installing properly managed community swimming pools can provide a community-wide (and enjoyable) amenity that will also contribute to preventing glue ear, trachoma and other hygiene-related infections.
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In signing up to the SDGs last September, the Australian government stated that this agenda:
…helps Australia in advocating for a strong focus on economic growth and development in the Indo-Pacific region … [and is] well aligned with Australia’s foreign, security and trade interests.
What is glaring about this statement is the lack of any mention of a national focus.
Australia should focus on delivering safe water at home as well as abroad – especially given Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s new role as a member of the United Nations' High-Level Panel on Water.
Our discussion paper sets out how Australia can approach the task of delivering safe water, sanitation services and hygiene practices both at home and in the Asia-Pacific region.
One crucial recommendation is for government departments to avoid addressing the 17 SDGs (which have 169 different targets) as a simple “checklist”, because many of them overlap and intersect in complex ways.
For example, education quality (SDG 4) can affect gender equality (SDG 5), which in turn affects behaviour around water use and hygiene (SDG 6). Similarly, within SDG 6 itself are targets to protect water-based ecosystems, but this obviously influences the accompanying targets of water quality and universal human access to safe water.
The World Health Organisation has estimated that access to clean, safe water and sanitation could reduce the global disease burden by almost 10%. The UN SDGs provide aspirational goals to address this. In Australia, the disease burden is low but persistent. This means that the goal for proper water and sanitation cannot be said to have been satisfactorily met.
This week’s UN talks offer an ideal time to put Australia’s remote communities in the spotlight and draw much-needed attention to the preventable toll of water-related health issues they still experience.
![The Conversation](https://counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/61436/count.gif)
Cindy Shannon is affiliated with AIATSIS as an external appointment.
Nina Lansbury Hall and Paul Jagals do 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.
Second round ACT battery storage auction attracts 17 bids
Cormorants watch for trout beneath the mirror surface of the lake
Watendlath Tarn, Borrowdale At my approach the soot-black, long-necked bird opens its hook-tipped bill, and utters a harsh croak
Watendlath Tarn shines like a burnished mirror. Perfect reflections of the surrounding hills and a Chelsea blue sky are disrupted only by the occasional splash of mallards and greylag geese and jumping trout. Black buzzer flies (chironomids or non-biting midges) on the surface are hatching from the tarn bed.
I think of Judith Paris, the historical novel by Hugh Walpole, which was a bestseller in the 1930s, though little read these days. It is partly set in revolutionary Paris and partly in Watendlath, with tales of passion and murder played out against vivid descriptions of the Cumbrian countryside.
Continue reading...Cutting the cable: Kangaroo Island eyes switch to 100% renewable energy
Australia’s third-biggest island could combine wind, solar, PV and battery storage to fuel own electricity needs – and set a blueprint for the rest of the country
Kangaroo Island is one of the great icons of Australian tourism. As Andrew Boardman, the chief executive of the Kangaroo Island council, says: “You can’t buy a name like that.”
But now the third-biggest island in Australia, which lies just 120kms from Adelaide, wants to make its mark in a different way: by supplying 100% of its electricity needs and much of its transport fuels through locally sourced renewable energy.
Continue reading...Tesla Master Plan, part 2: Musk hints at “top secret” new chapter
7 things NSW solar customers should consider as premium tariffs end
Five indisputable reasons why we need to hit net zero emissions ASAP
Panasonic expects Tesla demand to double sales of auto batteries
Fronius Australia announces new distribution partnership
Know your NEM: Electricity, gas prices sky high despite flat volumes
Australia’s energy efficient market update: VEECs at two year lows
Unfounded fear?
A rich variety of wildlife to be found in the dunes: Country diary 100 years ago
Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 11 July 1916
Close to the sands – indeed, washed by the highest tides – is a small marsh where, amidst a forest of sea club-rush and sea-plantain, both now in flower, young natterjacks, each with its yellow back-stripe, well earn their name of running toad: here a few sea asters, wild Michaelmas daisies, are already out, long before their scheduled date. A few sturdy ragworts grow on the seaward sides of the dunes which back the marsh, but little else can keep its head above the drifting sand; on the sheltered landward side, however, is a rich harvest of flowers, where blown small heaths, coppers, and blues flit from blossom to blossom, sampling their sweets. Until recently bird’s-foot trefoil monopolised the slopes and levels, at any rate in places where the burnet rose and dewberry had failed to spread; now the pink flowers of the rest-harrow mingle with the yellow pea-like flowers of the trefoil, and great pitches are still more yellow with bedstraw and stonecrop. Starting as a downy bud, the crimson flowers of the wild thyme are opening, shedding fragrance, and amongst them are the still softer and silky flowers of the hare’s-foot clover.
A wheatear, showing his white lower back as he flies from us, dodges amongst the dunes, and the meadow pipit ascends with his chittering song: surely he is singing to his mate in view of a second brood, for young titlarks are now strong on the wing. By no means all birds have ceased to sing, silent though the country is; a fine crimson-breasted linnet was in splendid song as he sat, showing off, on a gorse bush, and near by a healthy family, perhaps his own, twittered as they followed a more sombre hen.
Continue reading...How a single word sparked a four-year saga of climate fact-checking and blog backlash
In May 2012, my colleagues and I had a paper accepted for publication in the Journal of Climate, showing that temperatures recorded in Australasia since 1950 were warmer than at any time in the past 1,000 years.
Following the early online release of the paper, as the manuscript was being prepared for the journal’s print edition, one of our team spotted a typo in the methods section of the manuscript.
While the paper said the study had used “detrended” data – temperature data from which the longer-term trends had been removed – the study had in fact used raw data. When we checked the computer code, the DETREND command said “FALSE” when it should have said “TRUE”.
Both raw and detrended data have been used in similar studies, and both are scientifically justifiable approaches. The issue for our team was the fact that what was written in the paper did not match what was actually done in the analysis – an innocent mistake, but a mistake nonetheless.
Instead of taking the easy way out and just correcting the single word in the page proof, we asked the publisher to put our paper on hold and remove the online version while we assessed the influence that the different method had on the results.
Enter the bloggersIt turned out that someone else had spotted the typo too. Two days after we identified the issue, a commenter on the Climate Audit blog also pointed it out.
The website’s author, Stephen McIntyre, proceeded to claim (incorrectly) that there were “fundamental issues” with the study. It was the start of a concerted smear campaign aimed at discrediting our science.
As well as being discussed by bloggers (sometimes with a deeply offensive and sexist tone), the “flaw” was seized upon by sections of the mainstream media.
Meanwhile, our team received a flurry of hate mail and an onslaught of time-consuming Freedom of Information requests for access to our raw data and years of our emails, in search of ammunition to undermine and discredit our team and results. This is part of a range of tactics used in Australia and overseas in an attempt to intimidate scientists and derail our efforts to do our job.
Bloggers began to accuse us of conspiring to reverse-engineer our results to dramatise the warming in our region. Former geologist and prominent climate change sceptic Bob Carter published an opinion piece in The Australian claiming that the peer-review process is faulty and climate science cannot be trusted.
Checking the factsMeanwhile, we set about rigorously checking and rechecking every step of our study in a bid to dispel any doubts about its accuracy. This included extensive reprocessing of the data using independently generated computer code, three additional statistical methods, detrended and non-detrended approaches, and climate model data to further verify the results.
The mammoth process involved three extra rounds of peer-review and four new peer-reviewers. From the original submission on 3 November, 2011, to the paper’s re-acceptance on 26 April, 2016, the manuscript was reviewed by seven reviewers and two editors, underwent nine rounds of revisions, and was assessed a total of 21 times – not to mention the countless rounds of internal revisions made by our research team and data contributors. One reviewer even commented that we had done “a commendable, perhaps bordering on an insane, amount of work”.
Finally, today, we publish our study again with virtually the same conclusion: the recent temperatures experienced over the past three decades in Australia, New Zealand and surrounding oceans are warmer than any other 30-year period over the past 1,000 years.
Our updated analysis also gives extra confidence in our results. For example, as the graph below shows, there were some 30-year periods in our palaeoclimate reconstructions during the 12th century that may have been fractionally (0.03–0.04℃) warmer than the 1961–1990 average. But these results are more uncertain as they are based on sparse network of only two records – and in any event, they are still about 0.3℃ cooler than the most recent 1985–2014 average recorded by our most accurate instrumental climate network available for the region.
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Overall, we are confident that observed temperatures in Australasia have been warmer in the past 30 years than every other 30-year period over the entire millennium (90% confidence based on 12,000 reconstructions, developed using four independent statistical methods and three different data subsets). Importantly, the climate modelling component of our study also shows that only human-caused greenhouse emissions can explain the recent warming recorded in our region.
Our study now joins the vast body of evidence showing that our region, in line with the rest of the planet, has warmed rapidly since 1950, with all the impacts that climate change brings. So far in 2016 we have seen bushfires ravage Tasmania’s ancient World Heritage rainforests, while 93% of the Great Barrier Reef has suffered bleaching amid Australia’s hottest ever sea temperatures – an event made 175 times more likely by climate change. Worldwide, it has never been hotter in our recorded history.
Speed vs accuracyThere are a couple of lessons we can take away from this ordeal. The first is that it takes far more time and effort to do rigorous science than it does to attack it.
In contrast to the instant gratification of publishing a blog post, the scientific process often takes years of meticulous evaluation and independent expert assessment.
Yes, we made a mistake – a single word in a 74-page document. We used the word “detrended” instead of “non-detrended”. Atoning for this error involved spending four extra years on the study, while withstanding a withering barrage of brutal criticism.
This brings us to the second take-home message. Viciously attacking a researcher at one of Australia’s leading universities as a “bimbo” and a “brain-dead retard” doesn’t do much to encourage professional climate scientists to engage with the scores of online amateur enthusiasts. Worse still, gender-based attacks may discourage women from engaging in public debate or pursuing careers in male-dominated careers like science at all.
Although climate change deniers are desperate to be taken seriously by the scientific community, it’s extremely difficult to engage with people who do not display the basic principles of common courtesy, let alone comply with the standard scientific practice of submitting your work to be scrutinised by the world’s leading experts in the field.
Despite the smears, a rummage through hundreds of our emails revealed nothing but a group of colleagues doing their best to resolve an honest mistake under duress. It wasn’t the guilty retreat from a flawed study produced by radical climate activists that the bloggers would have people believe. Instead, it showed the self-correcting nature of science and the steadfast dedication of researchers to work painstakingly around the clock to produce the best science humanly possible.
Rather than take the easy way out, we chose to withdraw our paper and spent years triple-checking every step of our work. After the exhaustive checking, the paper has been published with essentially the same conclusions as before, but now with more confidence in our results.
Like it or not, our story simply highlights the slow and unglamorous process of real science in action. In the end, this saga will be remembered as a footnote in climate science, a storm in a teacup, all played out against the backdrop of a planet that has never been hotter in human history.
![The Conversation](https://counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/62174/count.gif)
Joelle Gergis receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Calls for a new clean air act in the UK
We are still a long way from being able to breathe air that does not harm our health
Last week Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, joined campaigners to call for a new clean air act.
This July marks the 60th anniversary of the original legislation that transformed the air in our cities and saved many lives. The Act followed the deaths of nearly 13,000 Londoners in the 1952 and 1956 smogs. Government finally accepted that regulating factory chimneys was not enough. We had to tackle home fires, too. This was politically difficult, since a cheery fire was seen as the heart of a family home. The Act required smokeless coals and, importantly, provided money to help people to change their fireplaces and boilers to burn cleaner fuels. It worked. Air pollution improved across the UK and the deaths of up to 700 Londoners during the last great coal smog in December 1962 marked the welcome end of an era.
Continue reading...