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Ideology rules as Coalition, One Nation and Xenophon use South Australia blackout as an excuse to launch new attack on wind and solar. Turnbull and Frydenberg repeat call for Labor states to cancel "unrealistic" renewable targets.

Power is gradually returning to South Australia after wild storms blew across the state last night. So, what did cause South Australia’s blackout?

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Power is gradually returning to South Australia after wild storms blew across the state last night, but some areas could be offline for days.

The storm - associated with heavy rain, lightning, and severe winds - damaged transmission lines that carry electricity from power generators to people, causing a state-wide blackout.

South Australian premier Jay Weatherill told ABC radio, “the system operated as it was meant to operate”.

However senator Nick Xenophon, in calling for an independent inquiry, said “there are key questions that need to be asked”. He has also questioned whether more gas-power stations would have prevented the power failure. Deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce pointed the finger squarely at the state’s reliance on renewable energy.

So, what did cause South Australia’s blackout?

Was it because of wind or wind turbines?

Dylan McConnell, Research fellow, Melbourne Energy Institute, University of Melbourne

It has everything to do with wind - because that’s what blew over the transmission lines. But it has nothing to do with South Australia’s wind turbines. Transmission lines are large power lines that take electricity from generators to the smaller distribution lines that bring power to our homes.

South Australia’s energy generation mix is mixture of wind, gas and some solar, and as of this year, zero coal. The state is connected to the rest of eastern Australia’s electricity market through two inter-connectors, one of which is down for service.

Where the transmission lines, managed by ElectraNet, came down is south of Port Augusta. In May this year South Australia closed its last coal-power station at the port. If those coal-power stations were still operating, they still would have dropped offline and seen the cascading failure that tripped the generations. Having those thermal generators there wouldn’t have helped at all.

A lot of generation capacity was lost because of the transmission failure. Because of that there was a voltage drop, which triggered safety protection measures that tripped the Haywood inter-connector that connects South Australia with Victoria. This could have happened in any state or with any generation technology.

Roger Dargaville, Deputy Director, Energy Research Institute, University of Melbourne

These kinds of failures in the National Energy Market (NEM) which covers the five eastern states) are extremely rare. The NEM experiences a range of extreme weather on a regular occurrence and a vast majority of the time copes well.

The system contains multiple levels of redundancy and safety mechanisms, however it is impractical if not impossible to build any complex system that is completely 100% reliable. Providing additional redundancy to insure against such events would be extremely costly, and would still not completely guarantee against further extreme events.

That being said, as we find out more about the incident it may become apparent that there are weaknesses in the grid that need addressing. However it is hard to imagine how the high penetration of renewable energy in the state could be implicated in this incident.

Just under 1,000 megawatts of wind power was dispatching onto the grid at the time of the blackout with another 400 megawatts from gas plant and 300 megawatts supply from the Victorian inter-connector making up the total. Had either of the brown coal generators still been in operation the system would not have been any more resilient to this event.

Why is South Australia vulnerable?

Hugh Saddler, Honorary Associate Professor, Centre for Climate Economics and Policy, Australian National University

Wide-area blackouts like that in South Australia this week are rare, but by no means unknown. For example, between 1998 and 2012 there were no less than six major blackouts in the US, each affecting many more consumers for much longer than the South Australia blackout.

In each case damage caused by extreme weather was the primary cause, exacerbated in some cases by poor management of the unfolding event. Whether that was also the case in South Australia will undoubtedly emerge from the investigations not the event.

Regardless of that, as a generalisation the electricity supply system in South Australia is at higher risk of blackouts occurring than other areas with mature electricity grids such as Europe or North America, Victoria, New South Wales and south east Queensland. This is a simple consequence of geography and population density, not of the quality of the grid per se.

In western Europe if one transmission line is knocked out, as appears to have happened in South Australia, the dense network of nearby transmission lines is usually able to supply demand by alternative pathways without any over-loading.

By contrast, the National Electricity Market grid as a whole is widely-recognised as being amongst the most the most spread-out or “skinny” interconnected electricity grids in the world. This means that there is a much lower density of alternative transmission pathways for electricity to flow, in the event of a failure on one major line.

The consequence is that the few alternative transmission routes are more likely to become over-loaded, and then tripped out, by the automatic protection systems designed to prevent further and more severe damage to the grid as a whole.

South Australia, being at the extreme end of the grid, and north Queensland at the other end, each have a relatively small share of total NEM demand for electricity, and are particularly vulnerable. Generation on one side of the failure event is cut off from customers on the other side of the failure, and customers are blacked out. On this occasion there appears to have been plenty from windfarms operating at the time.

Of course, if there were more alternative transmission lines available, the blackout may have been avoided. Equally obviously, however, transmission lines are very expensive. Whether such redundancy should exist comes down to how much electricity consumers would be prepared to pay to further reduce the risk of another supply disruption as rare, though very severe, as occurred on Wednesday.

Was it climate change?

Andrew King, Climate extremes research fellow, University of Melbourne

The role of climate change in the storm that hit South Australia yesterday is unclear. With these types of storm systems it is much harder to see the human fingerprint than it is for heatwaves for example.

For intense rainfall events like yesterday’s you need two main ingredients: a lot of moisture in the atmosphere and a trigger, such as a deep low pressure system. We know that climate change is increasing the amount of moisture in the air, but the human influence on the frequency of the triggers is far less clear.

In general the storms that track across southern Australia are moving southwards with climate change. For very intense storms like the one that hit South Australia yesterday we don’t have enough data to make a definitive statement on how they’re changing in this region.

We can’t say that climate change was to blame for this storm without a full analysis of the event.

More to come.

Andrew King receives funding from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.

Dylan McConnell has received funding from the AEMC's Consumer Advocacy Panel and Energy Consumers Australia.

Hugh Saddler is a member of the Board of the Climate Institute and Principal Consultant in the Climate Change Business Unit of Pitt & Sherry and also the Managing Director of Sustainability Advice Team

Roger Dargaville has received funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA).

When catastrophic failures occur, people quickly demand explanations and start to point fingers. Sometimes it's best to check the data.

A predictable reaction to blackout in South Australia was that wind energy would be blamed. Who expected the ABC to lead that charge?

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Environment officials tell parliamentary inquiry there is no modelling on how current policies will affect emissions beyond 2020, or when emissions will peak

Government officials have acknowledged that Australia’s 2030 greenhouse gas emissions reductions pledged at Paris in 2015 were made without any modelling to show whether existing policies could achieve those targets.

They also admitted the government did not have any modelling revealing when Australia’s emissions would peak.

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Energy giant BP's plans for oil and gas exploration in the Great Australian Bight were put on hold for the third time yesterday by the national offshore energy regulator, NOPSEMA.

Steady winds produce a pattern on the sea’s surface like parallel furrows in a field

Researchers are still trying to unravel the complex interactions between wind, waves and currents. One of the most visible results of these interactions is Langmuir circulation, which produces a pattern on the water surface like parallel furrows in a field. These lines are known as wind streaks or windrows, and occur only in steady winds of more than 7mph.

Related: The oceans are heating up. That's a big problem on a blue planet | Bill McKibben

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Plants absorb carbon and store it in the land. Blue mountains image from www.shutterstock.com

Just as people pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, the land also absorbs some of those emissions. Plants, as they grow, use carbon dioxide and store it within their bodies.

However, as the Climate Council’s latest report shows, Australia’s fossil fuels (including those burned overseas) are pumping 6.5 times as much carbon into the atmosphere as the land can absorb. This means that, while storing carbon on land is useful for combating climate change, it is no replacement for reducing fossil fuel emissions.

Land carbon is the biggest source of emission reductions in Australia’s climate policy centrepiece – the Emissions Reduction Fund. This is smoke and mirrors: a distraction from the real challenge of cutting fossil fuel emissions.

Land carbon

Land carbon is part of the active carbon cycle at the Earth’s surface. Carbon is continually exchanging between the land, ocean and atmosphere, primarily as carbon dioxide.

In contrast, carbon in fossil fuels has been locked away from the active carbon cycle for millions of years.

Carbon stored on land is vulnerable to being returned to the atmosphere. Natural disturbances such as bushfires, droughts, insect attacks and heatwaves, many of which are being made worse by climate change, can trigger the release of significant amounts of land carbon back to the atmosphere.

Changes in land management, as we’ve seen in Queensland, for example, with the relaxation of land-clearing laws by the previous state government, can also affect the capability of land systems to store carbon.

Burning fossil fuels and releasing CO₂ to the atmosphere thus introduces new and additional carbon into the land-atmosphere-ocean cycle. It does not simply redistribute existing carbon in the cycle.

The ocean and the land absorb some of this extra carbon. In fact, just over half of this additional carbon is removed from the atmosphere, and split roughly equally between the land and the ocean. However, this leaves almost half of the CO₂ emitted from fossil fuel combustion in the atmosphere. It’s this remaining CO₂ that is driving global warming.

Figure 2. Changes in the global carbon cycle from 1850 to 2014. Positive changes (above the horizontal zero line) show carbon added to the atmosphere and negative changes (below the line) show how this carbon is then distributed among the ocean, land and atmosphere. Adapted from Le Quéré et al. 2015, data from CDIAC/NOAA-ESRL/GCP/Joos et al. 2013/Khatiwala et al. 2013.

Although Australia’s land sector has absorbed more carbon than it has emitted over the past decade or two, this has been overshadowed by our domestic fossil fuel emissions and those from our exported fossil fuels. These are roughly 6.5 times greater than the uptake of carbon by Australian landscapes.

Under international carbon accounting protocols, emissions are assigned to the country that burns the fossil fuels. However, many Australians are becoming increasing concerned about the ethics associated with exploiting our fossil fuels, no matter where they are burned.

In short, we’ve got a big problem that requires a global response, which includes a strong commitment from Australia.

Falling short of our commitment

Last December, Australia joined the rest of the world in pledging to do everything possible to limit global warming to no more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and furthermore to pursue efforts to limit the increase to 1.5°C. Yet Australia lacks a robust, credible long-term plan to cut Australia’s CO₂ emissions from fossil fuel combustion.

Current climate change policies and practices in Australia allow for the use of land carbon “offsets” – that is, carbon taken up by land systems can be used to offset or subtract from fossil fuel emissions. For example, the government’s Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF) provides financial incentives for organisations or individuals to adopt new practices or technologies that reduce or sequester greenhouse gas emissions.

Currently, vegetation (land system) projects represent the majority of ERF-accepted projects (185 out of 348). And yet, while storing carbon on land can be useful, it must be additional to, and not instead of, reducing fossil fuel emissions. Moreover, numerous critiques have questioned the effectiveness of the ERF.

Problems of scale

We also have a problem of scale. Reducing emissions through land carbon methods could save up to 38 billion tonnes of carbon globally by 2050 if combined with sustainable land management practices. By comparison, global carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion are currently around 10 billion tonnes per year.

If this rate is continued, total fossil fuel emissions from 2015 to 2050 will be about 360 billion tonnes – nearly 10 times larger than the maximum estimated biological carbon sequestration of 38 billion tonnes over the same period.

It is now virtually certain that the carbon budget (the amount of carbon that can be produced while keeping warming below a certain level) will be exceeded. To meet the Paris 1.5°C aspirational target (and probably to meet the 2°C target) will require the use of negative emission technologies throughout the second half of the century.

However, no proposed negative emission technology has yet been proven to be feasible technologically at large scale and at reasonable cost, so this approach remains an in-principle option only. For effective climate action, the emphasis must remain on reducing emissions from fossil fuel combustion.

Using land carbon to “offset” our fossil fuel emissions is ultimately a smokescreen for real climate action.

Our thanks to Jacqui Fenwick for co-authoring this article and the report.

Les auteurs ne travaillent pas, ne conseillent pas, ne possèdent pas de parts, ne reçoivent pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'ont déclaré aucune autre affiliation que leur poste universitaire.

2016 continues to be a momentous year for Australia’s climate, on track to be the new hottest year on record.

To our south, Antarctica has also just broken a new climate record, with record low winter sea ice. After a peak of 18.5 million square kilometres in late August, sea ice began retreating about a month ahead of schedule and has been setting daily low records through most of September.

It may not seem unusual in a warming world to hear that Antarctica’s sea ice – the ice that forms each winter as the surface layer of the ocean freezes – is reducing. But this year’s record low comes hot on the heels of record high sea ice just two years ago. Overall, Antarctica’s sea ice has been growing, not shrinking.

So how should we interpret this apparent backflip? In our paper published today in Nature Climate Change we review the latest science on Antarctica’s climate, and why it seems so confusing.

Antarctic surprises

First up, Antarctic climate records are seriously short.

The International Geophysical Year in 1957/58 marked the start of many sustained scientific efforts in Antarctica, including regular weather readings at research bases. These bases are mostly found on the more accessible parts of Antarctica’s coast, and so the network – while incredibly valuable – leaves vast areas of the continent and surrounding oceans without any data.

In the end, it took the arrival of satellite monitoring in the 1979 to deliver surface climate information covering all of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. What scientists have observed since has been surprising.

Overall, Antarctica’s sea ice zone has expanded. This is most notable in the Ross Sea, and has brought increasing challenges for ship-based access to Antarctica’s coastal research stations. Even with the record low in Antarctic sea ice this year, the overall trend since 1979 is still towards sea ice expansion.

The surface ocean around Antarctica has also mostly been cooling. This cooling masks a much more ominous change deeper down in the ocean, particularly near the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the Totten glacier in East Antarctica. In these regions, worrying rates of subsurface ocean warming have been detected up against the base of ice sheets. There are real fears that subsurface melting could destabilise ice sheets, accelerating future global sea level rise.

In the atmosphere we see that some parts of the Antarctic Peninsula and West Antarctica are experiencing rapid warming, despite average Antarctic temperatures not changing that much yet.

In a rapidly warming world these Antarctic climate trends are – at face value – counterintuitive. They also go against many of our climate model simulations, which, for example, predict that Antarctica’s sea ice should be in decline.

Winds of change

The problem we face in Antarctica is that the climate varies hugely from year to year, as typified by the enormous swing in Antarctica sea ice over the past two years.

This means 37 years of Antarctic surface measurements are simply not enough to detect the signal of human-caused climate change. Climate models tell us we may need to monitor Antarctica closely until 2100 before we can confidently identify the expected long-term decline of Antarctica’s sea ice.

In short, Antarctica’s climate remains a puzzle, and we are currently trying to see the picture with most of the pieces still missing.

But one piece of the puzzle is clear. Across all lines of evidence a picture of dramatically changing Southern Ocean westerly winds has emerged. Rising greenhouse gases and ozone depletion are forcing the westerlies closer to Antarctica, and robbing southern parts of Australia of vital winter rain.

The changing westerlies may also help explain the seemingly unusual changes happening elsewhere in Antarctica.

The expansion of sea ice, particularly in the Ross Sea, may be due to the strengthened westerlies pushing colder Antarctic surface water northwards. And stronger westerlies may isolate Antarctica from the warmer subtropics, inhibiting continent-scale warming. These plausible explanations remain difficult to prove with the records currently available to scientists.

Australia’s unique climate position

The combination of Antarctica’s dynamic climate system, its short observational records, and its potential to cause costly heatwaves, drought and sea-level rise in Australia, mean that we can’t afford to stifle fundamental research in our own backyard.

Our efforts to better understand, measure and predict Antarctic climate were threatened this year by funding cuts to Australia’s iconic climate research facilities at the CSIRO. CSIRO has provided the backbone of Australia’s Southern Ocean measurements. As our new paper shows, the job is far from done.

A recent move to close Macquarie Island research station to year-round personnel would also have seriously impacted the continuity of weather observations in a region where our records are still far too short. Thankfully, this decision has since been reversed.

But it isn’t all bad news. In 2016, the federal government announced new long-term funding in Antarctic logistics, arresting the persistent decline in funding of Antarctic and Southern Ocean research.

The nearly A$2 billion in new investment includes a new Australian icebreaking ship to replace the ageing Aurora Australis. This will bring a greater capacity for Southern Ocean research and the capability to push further into Antarctica’s sea ice zone.

Whatever the long-term trends in sea ice hold it is certain that the large year-to-year swings of Antarctica’s climate will continue to make this a challenging but critical environment for research.

Nerilie Abram receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Matthew England receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Tessa Vance receives funding from the Australian government through the Cooperative Research Centres Programme.

White sharks are one of the species targeted in shark programs, but are also threatened. White shark image from www.shutterstock.com

Sharks are back in the headlines this week following the attack of 17-year-old Cooper Allen off the coast of New South Wales.

In response there have been renewed calls for culling and even the establishment of a commercial shark fishery. Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk offered to extend her state’s shark control program to include northern New South Wales beaches.

Any unprovoked shark bite is devastating for individuals and communities. Accepting Queensland’s offer of increased culling in New South Wales waters, however, will not automatically reduce the chance of these bites occurring.

So how does Queensland’s program stack up and should it be extended?

How does Queensland’s program work?

Queensland’s Shark Control Program relies on sharks being caught in large mesh fishing nets or drumlines, or a combination of both.

The program uses hundreds of hooked drumlines and tens of shark nets at popular beaches from Cairns to the Gold Coast. Equipment is checked every couple of days by government contractors, and target sharks that have been caught are killed with a firearm. The idea is to prevent sharks reaching the beaches and interacting with people.

The Queensland program has been running since 1962 as a public safety measure to reduce the risk of shark bites and attacks.

New South Wales already uses a similar program, which deploys nets set below the surface roughly 500m from the shoreline on 51 beaches from Wollongong to Newcastle between September and April each year.

The equipment is designed to target sharks of 2m or larger, but in reality indiscriminately kills animals of all sizes and species beyond the targets of white sharks, tiger sharks and bull sharks.

Do shark programs stop shark attacks?

A recent study has shown that unprovoked shark bites appear to have increased in recent years in eastern and southern Australia, but it is difficult to tease apart what environmental conditions are causing the increase, and even more difficult to predict when and where these conditions will next occur.

Important environmental conditions include sea surface temperature, freshwater runoff, turbidity (the cloudiness of water), currents and circulation patterns. While there are correlations between these factors and shark bites, that is all we know so far. Correlation does not mean causation.

The big problem is that there is currently no scientific evidence to link shark nets or drumlines to ocean safety.

It is not a matter of putting humans at the “top of the food chain” as Nationals president Larry Anthony (who represents the north coast in parliament) stated earlier this week.

It is a matter of whether (1) the strategies directly reduce the number of shark-related deaths, and (2) any reductions outweigh the ecological costs of these mitigation strategies.

Interestingly, shark-related fatalities have declined in Queensland since the state’s shark program began, but fatalities have declined in areas with and without shark mitigation equipment. The greatest decline actually occurred before deployment of nets and drumlines began.

And what about the sharks?

The dangers posed by Queensland’s shark program to shark populations are substantial. The vast majority of sharks that are caught by the program are threatened according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. This includes target species such as white sharks and tiger sharks, and non-target species such as grey nurse sharks.

Some of these species are already listed by the New South Wales Fisheries Scientific Committee. The same committee has listed the state’s current program as a threatening process for marine wildlife. These species are in need of increased conservation and management rather than increased slaughter. Removing even a few of these larger predators can have unpredictable and cascading negative impacts on whole ecosystems.

Any removal of sharks are exacerbated by the slow growth and relatively low reproduction rate of these animals, which make them particularly vulnerable.

What Annastacia Palaszczuk is really offering New South Wales is to indiscriminately kill a large portion of species that should be protected by our state legislation.

What we should be doing is tagging and following the movements of these highly migratory species to understand where they go, and why.

Shark experts associated with the New South Wales government are trialling various forms of shark deterrent technology, some of which look are looking promising. Priority has been given to development of personal shark deterrents, such as electrical and magnetic devices, and protective wetsuits.

While things are progressing since the Shark Summit hosted by premier Mike Baird in September 2015, any solution is going to take time.

Jane Williamson has received funding from the Australian Research Council. She is Deputy Chair of the NSW Fisheries Scientific Committee.

Gary Smith of the GMB says that Labour’s fracking ban is “an abdication of our environmental and moral responsibilities” (Report, 27 September). Clearly he hasn’t been reading the Guardian: otherwise he’d know that climate change is so serious that we need to leave most fossil fuel reserves in the ground. He also seems unaware of the Committee on Climate Change’s technical advice that fuels used by 2030 should produce an average of no more than 50g of CO2 per kilowatt hour. Natural gas generates nine times that and, with the risk of fugitive emissions, fracking is likely to produce more. If you want to deliver skilled jobs in an environmentally safe manner, look no further than investment in housing retrofit to deliver massive energy savings in our housing stock, the second leakiest in Europe. There’s also the option of reviving the growth of solar power, where 30,000 skilled jobs disappeared last year when the feed-in tariff was slashed.
John Rigby
Exeter

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Seven hours of legal argument on states’ right to allow carbon pollution may determine the fate of the centerpiece of US efforts to limit climate change

The future of the US’s centerpiece plan to tackle climate change hangs in the balance following nearly seven hours of legal argument over whether it tramples upon the right of states to allow carbon pollution.

Power utilities and business groups have joined 27 states in challenging the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which would be the single largest tool in cutting greenhouse gas emissions to help avoid dangerous climate change.

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New investment policy will end the endowment fund’s exposure to fossil fuels and channel 15% of its £175m into low-carbon alternatives

King’s College London has endorsed a plan that would sink millions of its £179m endowment into clean energy, and drop investments in the most polluting fossil fuels.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a King’s alumni, has previously intervened in the university’s refusal to divest from fossil fuels after a campaign by students.

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World’s most illegally trafficked mammal wins total ban on international trade in all species under the strictest Cites protection possible

Pangolins, the world’s most illegally trafficked mammal, were thrown a lifeline at a global wildlife summit on Wednesday with a total trade ban in all species.

More than a million wild pangolins have been killed in the last decade, to feed the huge and rising appetite in China and Vietnam for its meat and its scales, a supposed medicine. The unique scaly anteaters are fast heading for extinction in Asia and poachers are now plundering Africa.

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A little known species driven to the edge of extinction by poaching, has gained extra protection at the Cites meeting in South Africa.