Feed aggregator

City of Sydney to try again to remove barriers to local generation, as energy rule maker challenged to move its thinking into 21st Century.

Australia's wholesale electricity prices have barely moved for nearly two decades, and renewables will play key role in keeping a lid on them in future.

Two draft savanna fire management methods are now open for informal public consultation. The formal public consultation period will commence on the 21 November until the 19 December 2016.

Two draft savanna fire management methods are now open for informal public consultation. The formal public consultation period will commence on the 21 November until the 19 December 2016.

The Department of the Environment and Energy is seeking comments on the draft Carbon Credits (Carbon Farming Initiative) Amendment Rule 2016 (No.1). The consultation period closes 19 December 2016.

The Department of the Environment and Energy is seeking comments on the draft Carbon Credits (Carbon Farming Initiative) Amendment Rule 2016 (No.1). The consultation period closes 19 December 2016.

Record output from wind and hydro in October nearly matches brown coal for first time, as new data highlights how quickly renewables could reduce emissions.

National Australia Bank updates tally of “financed emissions” from power generation assets, while firming its commitment to a global carbon budget that limits global warming to less than 2°C. But what does this mean for future fossil fuel lending?

ANU method of making semi-transparent perovskite solar cells achieves "one of highest" efficiencies reported for a perovskite-silicon cell.

Bureau of Meteorology says wind gusts of 260km/h knocked down grid in South Australia blackout. It says it issued multiple warnings of destructive winds, raising questions about why AEMO took no action, and instead tried to pass the blame to wind farms.

The journal Climatic Change has published a special edition of review papers discussing major natural hazards in Australia. This article is one of a series looking at those threats in detail.

Storms, wind and hail do a lot of damage to Australians and their property. The 1999 Sydney hailstorm, for instance, cost A$1.7 billion in insured losses. That makes it the biggest single insurance loss in Australian history; in today’s money it would have cost more than A$4 billion.

Our understanding of wind and hail depends on the type of storm that generates them – and this is where it gets complicated. Thunderstorms can generate not just heavy rainfall but also high winds, lightning and hail, albeit in very localised areas. Large-scale storms such as tropical cyclones are a different phenomenon altogether, bringing not just destructive winds, but also storm surges and soaking rains, often over wide areas.

This complexity makes storms difficult to study, because limited research resources are spread across the many different storm types and their associated hazards.

To help address these issues, we collated and reviewed the latest knowledge and understanding of storms in Australia, covering the current scientific literature on the assessment, causes, observed trends and future projected changes of storm hazards, with a specific focus on severe wind and hail. We found that progress has been made in many areas, but also that much remains to be done.

Are we getting more or less storms?

In short - we don’t know with confidence. Despite the severity of the impacts wrought by storms, there is limited observational data for some types of storms and their associated hazards, particularly for the estimation of hail and wind.

Current estimates of the hail hazard in Australia, for example, are available only from the Bureau of Meteorology’s severe storm archive, which suffers from large uncertainties associated with biases and changing reporting practices. This makes it unsuitable for assessing the climatology of hail storms on a national scale.

Similarly, issues such as changes to Automatic Weather Stations (AWS) and limited records of atmospheric pressure observations, have hampered efforts to develop high-quality surface wind datasets across Australia. Bob Dylan might have been right when he told us “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” but then again he didn’t win his Nobel Prize for meteorology.

European researchers have analysed hailstorm trends using networks of devices called “hailpads”. But these records do not exist in Australia, and so there is a significant gap in our knowledge about hailstorm histories and trends.

The projections of future wind hazard in and around Australia are equally limited and differ from region to region. For example, in the tropics, research suggests that extreme wind hazard may decrease in the future, although confidence in this prediction is low. Meanwhile, summer wind increases are possible in those parts of Australia that are subjected to East Coast Lows.

We also don’t really know what to expect from future severe thunderstorms, and while research suggests that they may become more frequent in southeastern Australia, there is a wide range of uncertainty around this projection.

For future trends in hail, again there are only a few studies currently available, but there is at least an indication of increases in hail frequency in southeastern regions.

But while the picture is very uncertain for now, we hope this uncertainty will be reduced with the help of improvements in both the observation and computational modelling of storms and their associated hazards. We are growing more confident in our predictions for tropical cyclone, forecasting that the overall number will decline, but that the strongest storms will grow stronger still.

We also hope to improve our understanding of severe thunderstorms by using remote sensing platforms to record hail and extreme wind events right across Australia. These include the GPATS lightning-detection network, the new Himawari-8 and 9 satellites, and the Bureau of Meteorology’s soon-to-be upgraded radar network. Validation of these techniques, of course, will also require high-quality direct observations of these severe weather conditions – the very thing we currently lack.

Is this where you come in?

Citizen scientists may, however, help to fill some of these gaps. There are exciting prospects for improving severe weather observations, such as the success of the mPING crowdsourced weather reports project in the United States, which allows participants to use a mobile phone app to report severe weather, which then feeds into new research.

This approach could prove to be an excellent way of getting data in such a vast and diverse landscape as Australia, while simultaneously engaging with both the public and the atmospheric science community. We could also enlist the help of scientific study groups, which bring together academics, scientists and industry partners to exchange ideas and develop research techniques.

“The storm is up, and all is on the hazard,” cried Cassius in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. How true that is of storms in Australia.

If we don’t increase our observational and research abilities, we might never fully understand the impacts of severe storms, much less be able to deal with them.

Chris White receives funding from various Tasmanian State Government research funding programs, Wine Australia and the Bushfire and Natural Hazard CRC.

Jason Evans receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the National Environmental Science Programme Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub, Sydney Water, Water Research Australia, and various NSW state government research funding programs.

Kevin Walsh receives funding from the Australian Research Council and other international funding organizations.

Declining US coal consumption played a significant role in keeping down global emissions of carbon dioxide, says a report.

The Threatened Species Scientific Committee is seeking comments on the proposal to list the Eucalyptus ovata forests and woodlands in Tasmania ecological community as a critically endangered. Consultation period closes 27 January 2017.

Hospitality operators are realising sun, wind and water can do more than just attract tourists – they can power the resorts themselves

When it comes to the carbon impact of holidays, the focus has long been on the journey, not the destination.

Yet a growing stable of accommodation providers in Australia are on a mission to change that, switching over en masse to renewable energy in a bid to attract eco-conscious holidaymakers.

Continue reading...

CEFC research has identified South Australia, NSW, ACT, Victoria and Western Australia as states with best policy settings and levies for businesses to recycle waste and reduce operating costs.

China's concerns about air pollution from burning coal is one reason behind the emissions slowdown. China coal image from www.shutterstock.com

For the third year in a row, global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels and industry have barely grown, while the global economy has continued to grow strongly. This level of decoupling of carbon emissions from global economic growth is unprecedented.

Global CO₂ emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels and industry (including cement production) were 36.3 billion tonnes in 2015, the same as in 2014, and are projected to rise by only 0.2% in 2016 to reach 36.4 billion tonnes. This is a remarkable departure from emissions growth rates of 2.3% for the previous decade, and more than 3% during the 2000s.

Given this good news, we have an extraordinary opportunity to extend the changes that have driven the slowdown and spark the great decline in emissions needed to stabilise the world’s climate.

This result is part of the annual carbon assessment released today by the Global Carbon Project, a global consortium of scientists and think tanks under the umbrella of Future Earth and sponsored by institutions from around the world.

Global CO₂ emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels and industry. Emissions in 2016 (red dot) are based on a projection. Fossil fuel and industry emissions

The slowdown in emissions growth has been primarily driven by China. After strong growth since the early 2000s, emissions in China have levelled off and may even be declining. This change is largely due to economic factors, such as the end of the construction boom and weaker global demand for steel. Efforts to reduce air pollution and the growth of solar and wind energy have played a role too, albeit a smaller one.

The United States has also played a role in the global emissions slowdown, largely driven by improvements in energy efficiency, the replacement of coal with natural gas and, to a lesser extent, renewable energy.

What makes the three-year trend most remarkable is the fact that the global economy grew at more than 3% per year during this time. Previously, falling emissions were driven by stagnant or shrinking economies, such as during the global financial crisis of 2008.

Developed countries, together, showed a strong declining trend in emissions, cutting them by 1.7% in 2015. This decline was despite emissions growth of 1.4% in the European Union after more than a decade of declining emissions.

Emissions from emerging economies and developing countries grew by 0.9% with the fourth-highest emitter, India, growing at 5.2% in 2015.

Importantly, the transfer of CO₂ emissions from developed countries to less developed countries (via trade of goods and services produced in places different to where they are consumed) has declined since 2007.

CO₂ emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels and industry for the top 4 global emitters.

Deforestation and other changes in land use added another 4.8 billion tonnes of CO₂ in 2015, on top of the 36.3 billion tonnes of CO₂ emitted from fossil fuels and industry. This is a significant increase by 42% over the average emissions of the previous decade.

This jump in land use change emissions was largely the result of increased fires at the deforestation frontiers, particularly in Southeast Asia, driven by dry conditions brought by a strong El Niño in 2015-16. In general, though, long-term trends for emissions from deforestation and other land use change appear to be lower for the most recent decade than they were in the 1990s and early 2000s.

The carbon quota

When combining emissions from fossil fuels, industry, and land use change, the global economy released another 41 billion tonnes to the atmosphere in 2015, and will add roughly the same amount again this year.

We now need to turn this no-growth to actual declines in emissions as soon as possible. Otherwise, it will be a challenge to keep cumulative emissions below the level that would avoid a 2℃ warming, as required under the Paris Agreement.

As part of our carbon budget assessment, we estimate that cumulative emissions from 1870 (the reference year used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to calculate carbon budgets) to the end of 2016 will be 2,075 billion tonnes of CO₂. The remaining quota to avoid the 2℃ threshold, assuming constant emissions, would be consumed at best in less than 25 years (with remaining quota estimates ranging from 450 to 1,050 billion tonnes of CO₂). Ultimately, we must reduce emissions to net zero to stabilise the climate.

The carbon budget to keep mean global temperature below 2℃ above pre-industrial levels with more than 66% probability, showing used carbon budget (black) and remaining carbon budget (red). Values rounded to nearest 50 billion tonnes of CO₂. The remaining quotas are indicative and vary depending on definition and methodology. Rogelj et al. 2016, Nature Climate Change

Pep Canadell receives funding from the National Environmental Science Program - Earth Systems and Climate Change hub.

Corinne Le Quéré is affiliated with the UK Committee on Climate Change.

Glen Peters receives funding from the Research Council of Norway.

Rob Jackson receives funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation and Departments of Energy and Agriculture. He is a member of Stanford's Natural Gas Initiative, an industry affiliates program, working to reduce methane emissions.

Former staff members face up to five years in prison if convicted of lapses at Queensland coal gasification site

Five former Linc Energy executives have been charged by the Queensland government with breaching environmental law over the operation of its underground coal gasification site in Chinchilla.

In September the former chief executive Peter Bond was charged with three indictable offences and last week was summonsed on two additional charges of failing to ensure the company complied with the state’s Environmental Protection Act.

Continue reading...

Skywatchers are preparing for the 'supermoon' as the moon makes its closest approach since 1948.

The impact of America's new President on clean energy in the US and Australia is difficult to predict. But there are a couple of forces even he can't Trump: physics and economics.

Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 17 November 1916

The bracken is past its best, withered to a dull, uninteresting brown; its crippled stems, stiff and splintering, prick painfully as we wade through the wood where so short a time ago the fronds were breast-high. The ferns vary in autumn beauty according to their kind, some remaining dark green when their tips are curled and dead, grey or almost black; the osmunda, however, rightly named royal, increases in beauty as it ages. It is now a splendid golden orange, a wonderful colour when the sun’s rays, somewhat rarely, light it up.

Amongst the beeches the dappled fallow deer, rustling through the leaf-drifts, slowly approach the carriage-drive through the park, but immediately they reach the gravel bound rapidly across. The bucks, full-antlered, call the does, as if urging haste; their voices are a strange mixture of bleat and grunt. These bucks are still excited by recent nuptial contests, but the successful ones have collected and retain their harems. After racing over the road the herd at once slows down to a walk on feeling grass beneath the feet, and the bucks and does alike pass on with a light, elastic gait. It is curious that semi-domestic animals should be so nervous when crossing a man-trodden pathway, for they pay little attention to passers-by when they are feeding a few yards away.

Continue reading...