Feed aggregator

UNEP says door will close on 1.5°C warming limit unless countries raise their ambition before 2020.

Move over Elon Musk. Mercedes-Benz Energy Americas has entered the wide-open US EV+storage market.

New ownership models and technological advances will utterly transform the mobility market. And that's bad news for Big Oil.

Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs) appear to be making a comeback, but do they have a chance against the electric vehicle?

Carnegie Wave wins $15.5m from European Regional Development Fund towards first phase of 15MW commercial project at Cornwall Wave Hub.

Melbourne-based company Independent Products wins Company of the Year at ATC for its retrofit ultra-efficient cooling technology.

Generation Y has grown up in a rapidly warming world. According to the US National Climate Data Centre, every month since February 1985 has seen above average global temperatures, compared with the twentieth century. I have no memories of a “normal” month.

2016 is on track to be the hottest year on record, surpassing the previous records set in 2015 and in 2014. These are just a few of the flurry of recent record temperatures, which includes Australia’s hottest day, week, month, season and year.

The question now is what the future will look like. At some point in the decades to come, these record-breaking temperatures will not be rare; they will become normal. But when exactly?

In a new study just released in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, I (together with co-authors Andrew King and Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick) find that on the current greenhouse gas emissions trajectory, global temperatures like 2015 will by normal by 2030, and Australia’s record-breaking 2013 summer will likely be an average summer by 2035.

While we still have time to delay some of these changes, others are already locked in - cutting emissions will make no difference - so we must also adapt to a warmer world. This should be a sobering thought as world leaders gather in Marrakech to begin work on achieving the Paris Agreement which came into force last week.

Today’s extremes, tomorrow’s normal

The recent record-breaking temperatures have often been described as the “new normal”. For example, after the new global temperature record was set in 2016, these high temperatures were described as a new normal.

What is a new normal for our climate? The term has been used broadly in the media and in scientific literature to make sense of climate change. Put simply, we should get used to extremes temperatures, because our future will be extreme.

But without a precise definition, a new normal is limited and difficult to understand. If 2015 was a new normal for global temperatures, what does it mean if 2017, 2018, or 2019 are cooler?

In our study we defined the new normal as the point in time when at least half the following 20 years are warmer than 2015’s record breaking global temperatures.

We examined extreme temperatures in a number of state-of-the-art climate models from an international scientific initiative. We also explored how different future greenhouse gas emissions impact temperatures.

We used four different greenhouse gas scenarios, known as Representative Concentration Pathways, or RCPs. These range from a business-as-usual situation (RCP8.5) to a major cut to emissions (RCP2.6).

It is worth emphasising that real-world emissions are tracking above those covered by these hypothetical storylines.

2015’s record temperatures will likely become normal between 2020 and 2030. Future extremes

Our findings were straightforward. 2015’s record-breaking temperatures will be the new normal between 2020 and 2030 according to most of the climate models we analysed. We expect within a decade or so that 2015’s record temperatures will likely be average or cooler than average.

By 2040, 2015’s temperatures were average or cooler than average in 90% of the models. This result was unaffected by reducing greenhouse gas emissions or not - we are already locked in to a significant amount of further warming.

We also looked at the timing of a new normal for different regions. Australia is a canary in the coal mine. While other regions don’t see extreme temperatures become the new normal until later in the century, Australia’s record-breaking 2013 summer temperatures will be normal by 2035 - according to the majority of the models we looked at.

At smaller spatial scales, such as for state-based based temperature extremes, we can likely delay record-breaking temperatures becoming the new normal by committing to significant greenhouse gas cuts. This would clearly reduce the vulnerability of locations to extreme temperatures.

Living in a warmer world

If you like heading to the beach on hot days, warmer Australian summers seem appealing, not alarming.

But Australia’s position as a hot spot of future extremes will have serious consequences. The 2013 summer, dubbed the “angry summer”, was characterised by extreme heatwaves, widespread bushfires and a strain on infrastructure.

Our results suggest that such a summer will be relatively mild within two decades, and the hottest summers will be much more extreme.

My co-authors, Andrew and Sarah, and I all grew up in a world of above-average temperatures, but our future is in a world were our recent record-breaking temperatures will be mild. Our new research shows this is not a world of more pleasantly hot summer days, but instead of increasingly severe temperature extremes.

These significantly hotter summers present a challenge that we must adapt to. How will we protect ourselves from increases in excess heat deaths and increased fire danger, and our ecosystems from enhanced warming?

While we have already locked ourselves into a future where 2015 will rapidly become a new normal for the globe, we can still act now to reduce our vulnerability to future extreme events occurring in our region, both through cutting emissions and preparing for increased heat.

Sophie Lewis receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Using the hashtags #DelhiSmog and #DelhiChokes, locals are voicing concern over heavy pollution shrouding the city

Residents and visitors to Delhi are struggling to cope with severe levels of toxic air pollution that have prompted authorities to declare and “emergency situation” in the city.

Locals have expressed their concern over the dangerous smog on Twitter, with some saying they have been forced to take their families out of Delhi due to concerns over their health and others noting that they haven’t seen the sunrise in more than a week due to the haze that clogs the sky.

Continue reading...

Australia’s debate about energy costs has been framed around reports that are either ignorant or deliberately pessimistic about the cost of renewable energy alternatives. But a whole series of events is now causing industry to think differently.

Volunteers are tagging turtles off the Pilbara coast, and we check out new-age hoof care for horses. Old fridges and bath tubs get a new lease of life in the Beswick community garden, and we visit an edible flower farm off the coast of Brisbane.

Concerns over a Trump presidency are set to dominate the start of global climate talks in Morocco.

Finding hope and taking positive action can be a tricky thing to do, when it comes to climate change.

Originally published in the Manchester Guardian on 8 November 1916

From Cumberland I hear that the rainfall for October has been heavy, but the corn on the lower lands has been at last got in, and only on the high mountain farms is there any grain still out. This, I am sorry to say, is no new experience for the hill farmers. Here we have had wind and rainstorms, with very little sunshine, and in a journey through the Midlands and into Surrey last week I gathered that this had been the general experience. Yet I found the general condition of the country for autumn was favourable. Even in the Trent Valley the floods were slight, and wherever workers could be obtained in all parts of the country the root crops are being slowly got in. It is, however, disheartening to see the stubbles that ought to have been ploughed and sowed with corn. Surely there are ploughmen in all our camps in England that could be spared for a few weeks, and give us some chance of a crop next year. The time is short, but still some good could be done by immediate action.

Few realise the quantity of food that is grown in the large and small gardens of our suburbs. One gentleman who usually has three workers on his garden cannot even get a boy, so not only greenhouses are left desolate, but tomato-houses and the vegetable garden will be a wilderness. There are no day gardeners, so that many small patches that usually produce heavy crops are out of cultivation. This is work for which good pay can be obtained, but women do not appear to care to tackle it. An American who was passing through Germany tells us it is very different there. Even the railway embankments are planted with potatoes, and every available scrap of land is being utilised. One hopes that the lectures that are being given will incite many to take a hand in a great endeavour to make the most of our opportunities of food production.

Continue reading...

A remarkably fine and dry month, with Shetland recording more than twice the average hours of sunshine, and rainfall less than half the average through most of the UK

October was a remarkably fine and dry month over the whole of the UK. As a result it seemed mild, but temperatures were actually close to average. The settled conditions were caused by a blocked pattern in the atmosphere in which the “normal” westerly winds were held at bay by a blocking high pressure system that lingered for much of the month. This pattern has characterised recent Octobers. Due to the high frequency of easterly winds, the north and west was favoured for sunshine and dryness, in contrast to recent months.

Continue reading...

Rainforests sustain stunning numbers of insect species, such as this Horny Devil Katydid from Ecuador. Copy Morley Read/Shutterstock.

Scientists have described around 1.5 million species on Earth - but how many are still out there to be discovered? This is one of the most heated debates in biology. Discounting microbes, plausible estimates range from about half a million to more than 50 million species of unknown animals, plants and fungi.

This biodiversity matters because it could be used to fight human diseases, produce new crops, and offer innovations to help solve the world’s problems.

Why is there so much uncertainty in the numbers? The biggest reason, I argue, is that a lot of biodiversity is surprisingly hard to find or identify. This has profound implications for nature conservation and for our understanding of life on Earth.

Hidden biodiversity

We find new species every day but the organisms that we’re now discovering are often more hidden and more difficult to catch than ever before.

Not surprisingly, the first species to be described scientifically were big and obvious. The earliest naturalists to visit Africa, for instance, could hardly fail to discover zebras, giraffes and elephants.

But recent discoveries are different. For instance, lizard species found today are generally smaller and more often nocturnal than other species of lizard. The tiniest of them, a thumbnail-sized chameleon from Madagascar, was discovered just a few years ago.

Three newly discovered species: (a) a snake-like amphibian from India; (b) the world’s tiniest lizard, and © the only lungless frog species. B. Scheffers et al. (2014) Trends in Ecology & Evolution

Other unknown species are notoriously difficult to capture. For example, a biologist friend of mine was visiting his mother-in-law in north Queensland when her cat strolled in with an odd-looking animal in its mouth. He wrestled the cat’s dinner away and found that it was a mammal species never before seen in Australia called the prehensile-tailed rat.

Now known to be quite common in the Wet Tropics, this tree-dwelling rat almost never enters conventional wildlife traps. We can thank my mate’s mother-in-law’s cat for the discovery.

Other poorly explored places where new species wait to be discovered include the deep sea, soils and caves. After spending some 1,100 hours digging holes in the ground, biologists stumbled over the first species of Indian caecilian, a primitive, snake-like burrowing amphibian never before seen on the subcontinent.

On a far-flung beach in Alaska, a dead animal that washed ashore just last year turned out to be a completely new species of whale.

A frog species discovered in Borneo is the only frog in the world that completely lacks lungs. It lives in fast-flowing streams that are so oxygen-rich that it can breathe solely through its skin.

And a newly discovered spider in Morocco has evolved to move and escape predators by somersaulting over sand dunes.

The rainforest rooftop

High on the list of places to discover new species include rainforest canopies. In the early 1980s a Smithsonian Institution ecologist, Terry Erwin, used an insecticidal fog on several trees in the Panamanian rainforest and was stunned by his findings. Most of the insects that fell to the ground were entirely new species. Based on quick calculations he estimated that there could be 30 million species of insects residing in the canopies of the world’s rainforests.

Erwin’s conclusions, as it would be expressed today, went viral. In one fell swoop he had increased estimates of global biodiversity at least tenfold. Most biologists today consider his original estimate too high, however some believe he only overestimated a little.

Rainforest canopies are one of the world’s great biological frontiers. William Laurance Cryptic species

Beyond species that are difficult to find or catch, a lot of unknown biodiversity is staring us right in the face but we simply can’t see it. For these species, new discoveries are down to advances in molecular genetics. Around 60% of all new organisms described today are so-called “cryptic species” that are nearly indistinguishable from one another.

In recent years, for example, we’ve discovered that Africa has not just one species of elephant but two. Formerly considered different subspecies, genetic analyses reveal that they’re as dissimilar to one another as the Asian elephant is to the extinct woolly mammoth.

Genetic studies have also revealed hidden variation among Africa’s giraffes. Just last year, researchers revealed that what was once considered a single species of giraffe is actually four.

And in Costa Rica, one putative species of butterfly turned out to be at least ten.

Genetic studies have revealed that one apparent species of giraffe is actually four. William Laurance

Molecular genetics is turning biology on its head in other ways. Organisms we used to think were only distantly related, such as antelopes, dolphins and whales, are practically cousins in evolutionary terms.

Epicentres of unknown species

One last reason why many species are yet to be discovered is that they only live in a small area of the world. Known as “restricted endemics”, these species are geographically concentrated in certain regions such as tropical mountains, islands, and climatically unusual environments.

Most of Earth’s restricted endemics reside in “biodiversity hotspots”, defined by having more than 1,500 locally endemic plant species and less than 30% of their original habitat remaining. Of 35 currently recognised hotspots, half are in the species-rich tropics with the remainder divided among Mediterranean, islands and other ecosystems.

The world’s 35 recognised biodiversity hotspots. Conservation International

Today, the bulk of new species are being discovered in the biodiversity hotspots. The scary thing is that our recent analyses show that more than half of all hotspots have already lost over 90% of their intact habitat.

Further, most hotspots occur in poorer nations with rapidly-growing populations and escalating social and economic challenges, creating even greater pressures on their already beleaguered ecosystems and species.

Scary implications

Taken collectively, these studies suggest that there’s an enormous wealth of biodiversity on Earth left to discover and that much of it is in danger.

Further, our present knowledge is just scratching the surface. Evolution has had billions of years to create biologically active compounds that can combat human diseases, generate genetic diversity that could save our food crops from disastrous pathogens, and spawn ecological innovations that can inspire marvellous new inventions.

What a tragedy it would be to lose this biodiversity before we have ever had the chance to discover and learn from it.

A new species of Anglerfish discovered this year in the Gulf of Mexico. This bizarre fish has bioluminescent algae in the ‘fishing pole’ above its head to attract prey. Theodore W. Pietsch, University of Washington

Bill Laurance receives funding from the Australian Research Council and other scientific and philanthropic organisations. He is the director of the Centre for Tropical Environmental and Sustainability Science at James Cook University and founder and director of ALERT--the Alliance of Leading Environmental Researchers & Thinkers.

A beach in Siberia has been transformed by naturally occurring giant snowballs.

Majority report from 350 residents questions safety, cost and the ability of the government to deliver, run and regulate a nuclear waste storage facility

Pressure is growing on the South Australian government to scrap the idea of building a high-level nuclear waste dump in the state’s north after a citizens’ jury rejected the concept.

After investigating the issue over six sitting days, the jury of 350 South Australian residents refused to back the proposal, with 70% unwilling to support it under any circumstances.

Continue reading...

Is it a conflict of interest to have representatives of coal and oil companies at the climate change discussions?

As the world gathers in Morocco for the historic first meeting under the Paris agreement – called “COP22” but now also “CMA1” – it does so with the unprecedented involvement of corporate interests who have fought climate action around the world, funded climate change denial and whose fundamental interest is in extracting and burning as much fossil fuel as possible.

Earlier this year, desperate moves from countries representing the majority of the world’s population to examine how the UN might identify and minimise conflicts of interest were swept under the carpet by rich countries – especially the US, EU and Australia – who argued they wanted to be as “inclusive” as possible and that the concept of “conflict of interest” was too hard to define.

Continue reading...

New South Wales government is failing to protect koalas by allowing further land clearing, logging and habitat destruction, National Parks Association says

Koalas are “under siege” across NSW, with three separate policies poised to be implemented set to destroy their remaining habitats, according to a briefing paper written by the National Parks Association of NSW.

In light of the increasing threats, the paper calls on the NSW EPA to protect koala habitats.

Continue reading...

Plants help to purify the air and process out pollutants

Breathing is given remarkably little air time. But a comprehensive report on outdoor air quality worldwide emerged from the World Health Organisation recently, linking 3 million deaths a year to air pollution.

It’s enough to keep you indoors. Unfortunately there’s declining air quality inside, too, particularly from concentrations of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). This chemical class includes formaldehyde and toluene and leads to so called “sick building syndrome”. Symptoms include dizziness, asthma and allergies.

Continue reading...