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The Tory government in the UK has finally woken up to the fact that solar and wind is cheaper than nuclear. It may mean a big shift in its energy strategy, as it focuses on distributed generation rather than mega projects. Shouldn't Australia be leading on this?

Leaked documents and sources show Natural England will use its legal powers less and seek funding from the private companies it is meant to keep in check

England’s nature watchdog is planning to use its legal powers less and risks becoming a weak regulator forced to raise funding from the private companies it is meant to keep in check, leaked documents and sources reveal.

Natural England is duty-bound to defend rare species and protected areas including national parks and England’s 4,000 sites of special scientific interest from potentially environmentally damaging developments.

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Energy Made Clean, WattWatchers and water cremation company named among 38 semi-finalists short-listed in 2016 Australian Technologies Competition.

Windbacks to solar subsidies may encourage larger systems. Solar panel image from www.shutterstock.com

Solar households in Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales will this year cease to be paid for power they export into the electricity grid. In South Australia, some households will lose 16 cents per kilowatt-hour (c/kWh) from September 31. Some Victorian households will lose 25 c/kWh, and all NSW households will stop receiving payments from December 31.

These “feed-in tariffs” were employed to kick-start the Australian solar photovoltaic (PV) industry. They offered high payments for electricity fed back into the grid from roof-mounted PV systems. These varied from state to state and time to time.

For many householders, these special tariffs are ending. Their feed-in tariffs will fall precipitously to 4-8 c/kWh, which is the typical rate available to new PV systems. In some cases households may lose over A$1,000 in income over a year.

But while the windback may hurt some households, it may ultimately be a good sign for the industry.

What can households do?

At present, householders with high feed-in tariffs are encouraged to export as much electricity to the grid as possible. These people will soon have an incentive to use this electricity and thereby displace expensive grid electricity. This will minimise loss of income.

Reverse-cycle air conditioning (for space heating and cooling) uses a lot of power that can be programmed to operate during daylight hours when solar panels are most likely to be generating electricity. The same applies to heating water, either by direct heating or through use of a heat pump. For heating water, solar PV is now competitive with gas, solar thermal and electricity from the grid.

Batteries, both stationary (for house services) and mobile (for electric cars), will also help control electricity use in the future.

A boost for the industry?

The ending of generous feed-in tariffs is likely to modestly encourage the solar PV industry. This is because many existing systems have a rating of only 1.5 kilowatts (kW), which could not have been increased without loss of the generous feed-in tariff.

Many householders will now choose to increase the size of their PV system to 5-10kW – in effect a new system given the disparity in average PV sizing between then and now.

A new large-scale PV market is also opening on commercial rooftops. Many businesses have daytime electrical needs that are better matched to solar availability than are domestic dwellings.

This allows businesses to consume the large amounts of the power their panels produce and hence minimise high commercial electricity tariffs. The constraining factors in this market are often not technical or economic, and include the fact that many businesses rent from landlords and tend to have short terms for investment. Business models are being developed to circumvent these constraints.

The rooftop PV market also now has large potential in competing with retail electricity prices. The total cost of a domestic 10kW PV system is about A$15,000. Over a 25-year lifetime this would yield an energy cost of 7 c/kWh.

This is about one-quarter of the typical Australian retail electricity tariff, about half of the off-peak electricity tariff, and similar to the typical retail gas tariff. Rooftop PV delivers energy services to the home more cheaply than anything else and has the capacity to drive natural gas out of domestic and commercial markets.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, there are 9 million dwellings in Australia, and the floor area of new residential dwellings averaged 200 square metres over the past 20 years. Some of these dwellings are in multi-storey blocks, others have shaded roofs and, of course, south-facing roofs are less suitable than other orientations for PV.

However, if half the dwellings had one-third of their roofs covered in 20% efficient PV panels then 60 gigawatts (GW) could be accommodated. For perspective, this would cover 40% of Australian electricity demand. Commercial rooftops are a large additional market.

Solar getting big

Virtually all PV systems in Australia are roof-mounted. However, this is about to change because ground-mounted PV systems are becoming competitive with wind energy. We can see the falling cost of solar in the Queensland Solar 120 scheme, the Australian Capital Territory wind and PV reverse auctions and the Australian Renewable Energy Agency Large Scale Solar program , which all point to the declining cost of PV and wind.

Together, wind and PV constitute virtually all new generation capacity in Australia and half of the new generation capacity installed worldwide each year.

The total cost of a 10-50 megawatt PV system (1,000 times bigger than a 10kW system) is in the range A$2,100/kW (AC). A 25-year lifetime yields an energy cost of 8 c/kWh. This is only a little above the cost of wind energy and is fully competitive with new coal or gas generators.

Hundreds of 10-50MW PV systems can be distributed throughout sunny inland Australia close to towns and high-capacity powerlines. Australia’s 2020 renewable energy target is likely to be met with a large PV component, in addition to wind.

Wide distribution of PV and wind from north Queensland to Tasmania minimises the effect of local weather and takes full advantage of the complementary nature of the two leading renewable energy technologies.

The declining cost of PV and wind, coupled with the ready availability of pumped hydro storage, allows a high renewable electricity fraction (70-100%) to be achieved at modest cost by 2030.

Andrew Blakers receives research funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, the Australian Indonesian Centre, the Australian Research Council, Excellerate Australia and private companies.

In an entertaining and somewhat chaotic episode of ABC’s Q&A (Monday 15th August) pitching science superstar Brian Cox against climate contrarian and global conspiracy theorist and now senator Malcolm Roberts, the question of cause and effect and empirical data was raised repeatedly in regard to climate change.

Watching I pondered on a question - what would it take me to change my mind? After all, I should dearly love to be convinced that climate was not changing, or if it were, it were not due to our unrelenting emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. That would make things just so much easier, all round.

So what would make me change my mind?

There are two elements to this question. The first is the observational basis, and the question of empirical data. The second relates to cause and effect, and the question of the greenhouse effect.

On the second, I will only add that the history of our planet is not easily reconciled without recourse to a strong greenhouse effect. If you have any doubt then you simply need to read my former colleague Ian Plimer.
As I have pointed out before, in his 2001 award-winning book “A Short History of Planet Earth”, Ian has numerous references to the greenhouse effect especially in relation to what all young geologists learn as the faint young sun paradox:

“The early sun had a luminosity of some 30 per cent less than now and, over time, luminosity has increased in a steady state.”

“The low luminosity of the early sun was such that the Earth’s average surface temperature would have been below 0C from 4500 to 2000 million years ago. But there is evidence of running water and oceans as far back as 3800 million years ago.”

The question is, what kept the early Earth from freezing over?

Plimer goes on to explain: “This paradox is solved if the Earth had an enhanced greenhouse with an atmosphere of a lot of carbon dioxide and methane.”

With Ian often touted as one of the grand priests of climate contrarians, I doubt that Malcolm would consider him part of the cabal of global climate change conspiracists, though that would be ironic.

As a geologist, I need to be able to reconcile the geological record of a watery planet from time immemorial with the faint young sun hypothesis. And, as Ian points out, with nothing else on the menu, the greenhouse effect is all we have.

If the menu changes, then I will reconsider.

How about the empirical data?

Along with Brian Cox, I find it implausible that an organisation like NASA, with a record of putting a man on the moon, could or would fabricate data to the extent Malcolm Roberts insinuates. It sounds such palpable nonense, it is something you might expect from an anti-vaxer.

However, a clear message from the Q&A episode is there is no way to convince Malcolm Roberts that the meteorological temperature data has not been manipulated to achieve a predetermined outcome. So he simply is not going to accept those data as being empirical.

However, the relevant data does not just include the records taken by meteorological authorities. It also includes the the record preserved beneath our feet in the temperature logs from many thousands of boreholes across all inhabited continents. And the importance of those logs is that they are reproducible. In fact Malcolm can go out an re-measure them himself, if he needs convincing they are “emprical”.

The idea that the subsurface is an effective palaeo-thermometer is a simple one that we use in our every day life, or used to at least prior to refrigeration, as it provides the logic for the cellar.

When we perturb the temperature at the surface of the earth, for example as the air temperature rises during the day, it sends a heat pulse downwards into the earth. The distance the pulse travels is related to its duration. As the day turns to night and the surface cools, a cooling pulse will follow, lagging behind, but eventually cancelling, the daily heating. The diurnal surface temperature perturbations produce a wave like train of heating and cooling that can felt with diminishing amplitude down to a skin depth less than a metre beneath the surface before all information is cancelled out, and the extremes of both day and night are lost.

Surface temperatures also change on a seasonal basis from summer to winter and back again, and those temperatures propagate even further to depths of around 10 metres before completely cancelling [1].

On even longer cycles the temperature anomalies propagate much further, and may reach down to a kilometre or more. For example, we know that over the last million years the temperature on the earth has cycled in an out of numerous ice ages, on a cycle of about 100,000 years. Cycles on that timescale can propagate more than one kilometre into the earth, as we see in deep boreholes, such as the Blanche borehole near the giant Olympic Dam mine in South Australia. From our analysis of the Blanche temperature logs we infer a surface temperature amplitude of around 8°C over the glacial cycle.

So what do we see in the depth range of 20-100 metres that is sensitive to the last 100 years, and most relevant to the question of changing climate?

The image below shows the temperature log from a borehole that we purpose drilled in Gippsland as part of AuScope AGOS program.

Temperature log in the upper 70 metres of the Tynong AGOS borehole drilled and cored to a depth of 500 metres. The temperature logs shown here were obtained by Kate Gordon, as a student at the University of Melbourne.

The temperature profile shows various stages. Above the water table at about 15 metres depth, due to infiltration of groundwater in the vadose zone, the temperatures in the borehole rapidly equilibrate to seasonal surface temperature changes. In the winter, when this temperature log was obtained, the temperatures in this shallow zone trend towards the ambient temperature around 12°C. In summer, they rise to over 20°C. Beneath the vadose zone, the temperature in the borehole responds to the conduction of heat influenced by two dominant factors, the changing surface temperature on time-scales of decades to many hundred of years, and the heat flow from the deeper hot interior of the earth. During a rapid surface warming cycle lasting more than several decades the normal temperature gradient in which temperatures increase with depth can be reversed, so that we get a characteristic rollover (with a minimum here seen at about 30 depth).

Inversion of the Tynong temperature log for surface temperature change over the last 700 years, with uncertainties at the 95% confidence interval. The inversion, which is based on Fourier’s law of heat conduction, shows that we can be confident that the Tynong AGOS borehole temperature record is responding to a long-term heating cycle of 0.3-1.3°C over the last century at the 95% confidence level. The inversion shown here was performed by Kate Gordon.

In geophysics we use the techniques of inversion to identify causative signals, and their uncertainties, in records such as the Tynong borehole log, as well as in the estimation of the value of buried ore bodies and hydrocarbon resources. As shown in the second image, the inversion of the Tynong temperature log for surface temperature change over the last 700 years, with uncertainties at the 95% confidence interval, is compelling. Not surprisingly as we go back in time the uncertainties become larger. However, the inversion, which is based on Fourier’s law of heat conduction, shows that we can be confident that the Tynong AGOS borehole temperature record is responding to a long-term heating cycle of 0.3-1.3°C over the last century at the 95% confidence level.

If there were just one borehole that showed this record, it would not mean much. However the characteristic shallow rollover is present in all the boreholes we have explored, and has been reported in many thousands of boreholes from all around the world.

The only way we know to sensibly interpret such empirical evidence is that ground beneath our feet, down to a depth of around 50 metres or so is now heating from above. The physics that explains these observations dates back to Joseph Fourier, over 200 years ago, so its not exactly new or even contentious. In effect the solid earth below is now absorbing heat from the atmosphere above, counter to the normal process of loosing heat to it. However, if Malcolm can bring to the table an alternative physics to explain these observations, while not falling foul of all the other empirical observations that Fourier’s law of heat conduction admits, then I am happy to consider, and put it to the test. (I suspect Brian Cox would be too, since all good physicists would relish the discovery of a new law of such importance as Fourier’s law).

Perhaps the hyper-skeptical Malcolm thinks that somehow the global cabal of climate scientists has got into all these thousands of boreholes with an electrical heater to propagate the heat signal that artificially simulates surface heating. More fool me.

But, if he does, then I am perfectly happy to arrange to drill a new borehole and, along with him, measure the temperature profile, making sure we don’t let those pesky climate scientists get at the hole with their heating coils before we have done so.

And I’ll bet him we can reproduce the signal from Tynong shown above.

But I’ll only do it on the condition that Malcolm agrees, that when we do (reproduce the signal), he will publicly acknowledge the empirical evidence of a warming world entirely consist with NASA’s surface temperature record.

Malcolm, are you on? Will you take on my bet, and use the Earth’s crust as the arbiter? and perhaps Brian will stream live to the BBC?

Disclosure

Mike Sandiford receives funding from the Australian Research Council to investigate the thermal structure of the Australian crust.

Claxton, Norfolk Surely more than anything else in British nature, swifts symbolise all of life, and it is all here now in the line of that curve

My summer’s highlight, as we sit in the garden most evenings, has been to watch the pre-migration flocking behaviour of our village swifts. No one knows what purpose it serves, though it’s thought to play some role in flock cohesion. Up to 30 birds were involved, all crushed into a ravelling ball of anarchy burning across the heavens. I find it all the more magnificent to know that its whole ecology is based entirely on insects, but converted to swift speed and scream.

Like the flock itself I circle around and around, but no fishing net of words seems to catch it. Could one possibly express it better as a taste? It is like red chilli crushed in a gloop of honey; the essence of all the Americas mingled with that from all Africa and Eurasia; a taste, perhaps, of Pangaea.

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The reign of record hot months in 2016 continues, with last month claiming the title of hottest July on record globally, according to data released by NASA on Monday.

British particle physicist Brian Cox verbally spars with a newly elected Australian politician who believes climate change is a global conspiracy.

We probably have only about a decade before we break through the ambitious 1.5℃ global warming target agreed to by the world’s nations in Paris.

Madagascar's conservationists work in secrecy to protect one of the world's most beautiful tortoises from poachers, writes journalist Martin Vogl.

Nasa’s results, which combine sea-surface temperature and air temperature on land, show July was 10th month in a row to break monthly temperature record

Last month was the hottest month in recorded history, beating the record set just 12 months before and continuing the long string of monthly records, according to the latest Nasa data.

The past nine months have set temperature records for their respective months and the trend continued this month to make 10 in a row, according to Nasa. July broke the absolute record for hottest month since records began in 1880.

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The celebrity physicist Brian Cox holds up a graph to the One Nation senator-elect and climate change denier Malcolm Roberts on the ABC’s Q&A showing the rise in global temperature over time. Roberts had claimed: ‘We’ve had a pause in this so-called warming for now 21 years.’ He later says ‘the data has been corrupted’ and ‘manipulated by Nasa’ – prompting Cox to ask whether he believes ‘we landed men on the moon?’

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Viruses are more dangerous when they infect their victims in the morning, a University of Cambridge study suggests.

Lonnie Johnson had an illustrious career as a nuclear engineer working on the Galileo space programme and the stealth bomber - but he is best known for creating a water pistol

Contrary to the view that the South China Sea disputes are driven by a regional hunger for seabed energy resources, the real and immediate prizes at stake are the region’s fisheries and marine environments that support them.

It is also through the fisheries dimensions to the conflict that the repercussions of the recent ruling of the arbitration tribunal in the Philippines-China case are likely to be most acutely felt.

It seems that oil is sexier than fish, or at least the lure of seabed energy resources has a more powerful motivating effect on policymakers, commentators and the media alike. However, the resources really at stake are the fisheries of the South China Sea and the marine environment that sustains them.

The real resource at stake

For a relatively small (around 3 million square kilometres) patch of the oceans, the South China Sea delivers an astonishing abundance of fish. The area is home to at least 3,365 known species of marine fishes, and in 2012, an estimated 12% of the world’s total fishing catch, worth US$21.8 billion, came from this region.

These living resources are worth more than money; they are fundamental to the food security of coastal populations numbering in the hundreds of millions.

Indeed, a recent study showed that the countries fringing the South China Sea are among the most reliant in the world on fish as source of nutrients. This makes their populations especially susceptible to malnutrition as fish catches decline.

These fisheries also employ at least 3.7 million people (almost certainly an underestimate given the level of unreported and illegal fishing in the region).

This is arguably one of the most important services the South China Sea fisheries provide to the global community – keeping nearly 4 million young global citizens busy, who would otherwise have few employment options.

But these vital resources are under enormous pressure.

A disaster in the making

The South China Sea’s fisheries are seriously over-exploited.

Last year, two of us contributed to a report finding that 55% of global marine fishing vessels operate in the South China Sea. We also found that fish stocks have declined 70% to 95% since the 1950s.

Over the past 30 years, the number of fish caught each hour has declined by a third, meaning fishers are putting in more effort for less fish.

This has been accelerated by destructive fishing practices such as the use of dynamite and cyanide on reefs, coupled with artificial island-building. The coral reefs of the South China Sea have been declining at a rate of 16% per decade.

Even so, the total amount of fish caught has increased. But the proportion of large species has declined while the proportion of smaller species and juvenile fish has increased. This has disastrous implications for the future of fishing in the South China Sea.

We found that, by 2045, under business as usual, each of the species groups studied would suffer stock decreases of a further 9% to 59%.

The ‘maritime militia’

Access to these fisheries is an enduring concern for nations surrounding the South China Sea, and fishing incidents play an enduring role in the dispute.

Chinese/Taiwanese fishing fleets dominate the South China Sea by numbers. This is due to the insatiable domestic demand for fish coupled with heavy state subsidies to enable Chinese fishers build larger vessels with longer range.

Competition between rival fishing fleets for a dwindling resource in a region of overlapping maritime claims inevitably leads to fisheries conflicts. Fishing boats have been apprehended for alleged illegal fishing leading to incidents between rival patrol boats on the water, such as the one in March 2016 between Chinese and Indonesian vessels.

Fishing boats are not just used to catch fish. Fishing vessels have long been used as proxies to assert maritime claims.

China’s fishing fleets have been characterised as a “maritime militia” in this context. Numerous incidents have involved Chinese fishing vessels operating (just) within China’s so-called nine-dashed line claim but in close proximity to other coastal states in areas they consider to be part of their exclusive economic zones (EEZs).

The disputed South China Sea area. Author/American Journal of International Law

The Chinese Coast Guard has increasingly played an important role in providing logistical support such as refueling as well as intervening to protect Chinese vessels from arrest by the maritime enforcement efforts of other South China Sea coastal states.

Fisheries as flashpoint

The July 2016 ruling in the dispute between the Philippines and China demolishes any legal basis to China’s claim to extended maritime zones in the southern South China Sea and any right to resources.

The consequence of this is that the Philippines and, by extension, Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia are free to claim rights over the sea to 200 nautical miles from their coasts as part of their EEZs.

This also creates a pocket of high seas outside any national claim in the central part of the South China Sea.

There are signs that this has emboldened coastal states to take a stronger stance against what they will undoubtedly regard as illegal fishing on China’s part in “their” waters.

Indonesia already has a strong track record of doing so, blowing up and sinking 23 apprehended illegal fishing vessels in April and live-streaming the explosions to maximise publicity. It appears that Malaysia is following suit, threatening to sink illegal fishing vessels and turn them into artificial reefs.

The snag is that China has vociferously rejected the ruling. There is every indication that the Chinese will continue to operate within the nine-dashed line and Chinese maritime forces will seek to protect China’s claims there.

This gloomy view is underscored by the fact that China has recently opened a fishing port on the island of Hainan with space for 800 fishing vessels, a figure projected to rise to 2,000. The new port is predicted to play an important role in “safeguarding China’s fishing rights in the South China Sea”, according to a local official.

On August 2, the Chinese Supreme People’s Court signalled that China had the right to prosecute foreigners “illegally entering Chinese waters” – including areas claimed by China but which, in line with the tribunal’s ruling, are part of the surrounding states' EEZs – and jail them for up to a year.

Ominously, the following day Chinese Defence Minister Chang Wanquan warned that China should prepare for a “people’s war at sea” in order to “safeguard sovereignty”. This sets the scene for increased fisheries conflicts.

Ways forward

The South China Sea is crying out for the creation of a multilateral management, such as through a marine protected area or the revival of a decades-old idea of turning parts of the South China Sea, perhaps the central high seas pocket, into an international marine peace park.

Such options would serve to protect the vulnerable coral reef ecosystems of the region and help to conserve its valuable marine living resources.

A co-operative solution that bypasses the current disputes over the South China Sea may seem far-fetched. Without such action, however, its fisheries face collapse, with dire consequences for the region. Ultimately, the fishers and fishes are going to be the losers if the dispute continues.

Clive Schofield served as an independent expert witness (provided by the Philippines) to the Arbitration Tribunal in the case between the Republic of the Philippines and the People’s Republic of China.

Rashid Sumaila receives funding from research councils in Canada, Belmont, Genome Canada/BC, ADM Capital Foundation, Hong Kong, Pew Charitable Trusts.

William Cheung received funding from ADM Capital Foundation to co-produce the report Boom or Bust - Future Fish in the South China Sea.

New report finds ‘that the energy of 87% of vehicle-days could be met by an existing, affordable electric vehicle’ – but that’s not quite good enough

Electric cars could take over most driving necessities tomorrow, according to a group of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but they’ll need the help of internal combustion engines to do it.

Using travel surveys and global positioning data, the MIT team has evaluated the possible widespread use of electric cars, and has found that grids could easily support today’s cheap electric cars, and that the cars themselves can already meet drivers’ requirements almost nine times out of 10.

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Today’s carbon pollution will have climate consequences for centuries to come. We’re in the midst of a critical decade

While most people accept the reality of human-caused global warming, we tend not to view it as an urgent issue or high priority. That lack of immediate concern may in part stem from a lack of understanding that today’s pollution will heat the planet for centuries to come, as explained in this Denial101x lecture:

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BusinessGreen: Clean 200 list finds world’s greenest large companies are outperforming most polluting counterparts by three to one

Toyota, Tesla, Vestas, DONG Energy and Panasonic are among the top ranked companies in the first ever Carbon Clean 200 list, which claims the world’s greenest large companies are outperforming their more polluting counterparts by as much as three to one.

Published today, the inaugural Clean 200 ranks the largest publicly listed companies worldwide by their total clean energy revenues, as rated by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, with the list dominated by firms from China and the US.

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Traditional owners say the Indigenous community has not been adequately consulted about Vimy Resources’ planned Mulga Rock open-pit mine

Traditional owners have vowed to fight a proposed uranium mine at Mulga Rock, about 240km west of Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, which was given conditional environmental approval on Monday.

The Environmental Protection Authority of WA recommended the Barnett government approve construction of the open-pit mine and uranium processing plant, operated by Perth-based Vimy Resources Limited, after a three-month public environmental review.

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Overgrazing is causing loss of woodland and wildlife as populations of the native breed have risen partly due to taxpayer subsidies, says the naturalist

The New Forest national park is being destroyed by overgrazing by its iconic ponies, driven in part by taxpayer subsidies, according to Chris Packham.

The naturalist and broadcaster claims that overgrazing by the ponies, as well as cattle and deer, is causing loss of woodland and threatening species in one of the UK’s most important biodiversity hotspots.

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