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The week’s top environment news stories and green events. If you are not already receiving this roundup, sign up here to get the briefing delivered to your inbox

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A tiger family drinking at the watering hole, a nightingale and a snake that plays dead are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world

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Do you like pangolins or silky sharks? How about the black-legged kittiwake? Vote for your favourite in the Wildscreen Arkive’s Valentine’s Day campaign to help protect under-appreciated species from poaching and climate change

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As temperatures in New South Wales, South Australia, the ACT, Queensland and Victoria soar, there are predictions of rolling blackouts in some parts of the national electricity grid. However, experts agree there is more than enough generation capacity in the energy market to meet demand, so why are we having power outages? Is it market failure? Are renewables to blame? Or are power companies gaming the system?

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Warblington, Hampshire By associating with large ungulates, these birds can obtain up to 50% more food using two-thirds of the energy required for lone foraging

A loose flock of egrets has gathered by the cattle in the corner of the pasture to the west of the cemetery. Three of the white herons are immediately identifiable as little egrets, their yellow feet beacons in the mizzle. The fourth bird looks dumpy, hunchbacked and stubby-billed next to its elegant, slim-necked, rapier-billed cousins. It is a cattle egret, a species that has had one of the most rapid and wide-ranging natural expansions of any bird, but is still relatively rare in Britain. Two of them were spotted here in mid-December. A few days later, they were joined by a third and, by the new year, five birds were regularly being sighted in the fields surrounding the church.

Related: A solitary little egret is an elegant sentinel on the muddy creek

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Dozens of volunteers form a barrier in Golden Bay in an effort to prevent more whales from stranding themselves after hundreds died on Thursday night. The Department of Conservation (DOC) discovered 416 pilot whales had beached themselves at Farewell Spit at the top of the south island, the largest stranding in decades. Volunteer Peter Wiles said: ‘It is one of the saddest things I have seen.’

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It beggars belief that any government could expect such a vast and heavily subsidised power system as Australia’s to improve or even survive in private hands. We now see the consequences of this misguided folly.

New analysis reveals new "clean coal" power plants are barely cleaner than current coal plants. Meanwhile, Coalition's stunt of bringing lump of coal into parliament in middle of crippling heat wave branded as "idiotic" as their energy policy.

Federal government’s Clean Energy Finance Corporation says coal ‘seriously challenged’ as a commercial investment

The Clean Energy Finance Corporation has said it is “very unlikely” it would invest in new coal-fired generators and poured cold water on the federal government’s push to support “clean coal” technology.

The CEFC’s hostile approach to the sustainability and commercial viability of new coal plants means the government will have to change CEFC’s investment rules or directly subsidise new coal plants if it wants to support them.

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High gas prices have left Adelaide's Pelican Point power station running at less than half its capacity. Peripitus/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Last Wednesday evening, shortly after 6pm local time, around 90,000 homes and businesses in South Australia were deliberately disconnected from the electricity grid for up to an hour. In what is becoming a familiar pattern, this event provoked politicians and political actors to release a stream of claims and counter-claims about what happened and what should be done about it.

So why did it actually happen? At the start of the day, electricity was being supplied by a combination of wind power, the two interconnectors from Victoria, and a modest amount of local gas generation. As the day heated up (the temperature in Adelaide hit a maximum of 42℃), demand grew, wind generation fell away, and the volume of electricity supplied by gas generators increased rapidly.

Half-hourly total state electricity consumption reached its maximum for the day between 5.00pm and 5.30pm, by which time rooftop solar was supplying about 9% of the total. This is a very common pattern on hot days in the state.

As the sun went down, total consumption went down but solar generation went down faster. This is also very common and in theory there is more than enough capacity to meet this level of demand from gas-fired generators plus the interconnectors.

In practice, however, not all of South Australia’s gas generation was available on the day, meaning that it was not sufficient to meet demand. This happened shortly after 6.30pm local time, not helped by the fact that the maximum temperature arrived very late in the day, boosting the demand for after-work air conditioning.

Switched off

To prevent potentially widespread damage to the entire system, which might have triggered even more widespread blackouts, the Australian Energy Market Operator exercised its authority to instruct SA Power Networks (the local “poles-and-wires” distributor) to start a series of rolling disconnections of blocks of consumers – a tactic known as “load-shedding”.

Unfortunately, although the demand was only lowered by 3%, it affected a large number of consumers. It was about 40 minutes before the underlying demand had fallen to the point where available sources of generation could supply all the electricity that was required, at which time all customers were reconnected.

There are two reasons why this was deemed necessary. First, the peak demand for grid electricity was the highest for three years. Second, the amount of gas generation available on Wednesday was about 20% less than the nominally available capacity. Had the full capacity been available, the blackouts would have easily been avoided. It is this fact that has particularly angered the South Australian government, which is once again facing political derision for failing to keep the lights on.

The largest single part of the unavailable capacity is 240 megawatts – roughly 8% of the state’s total gas generation – at Pelican Point power station. Pelican Point is the highest-efficiency, lowest-emission thermal power station in South Australia. But nearly two years ago its owner, the French multinational Engie (which also owns the Hazelwood coal station in Victoria), announced that the rising cost of gas had made it too expensive to run at full capacity. Since then Pelican Point has operated only intermittently, and never at more than half of its nameplate capacity.

What a gas

High gas prices are the direct result of the huge demand for gas by the three export LNG plants at Gladstone, in Queensland. Gas that might notionally have been used to supply electricity for South Australians is instead being shipped to customers in Asia.

Meanwhile, smaller amounts of nominally available gas-fired electricity were also offline in South Australia on Wednesday. We are unlikely to know why until the official reports on the incident are published.

More importantly, however, making more gas generation capacity available is only a short-term fix and does not seriously address the changes needed to maintain, in the words of the National Electricity Objective, a secure, reliable and affordable supply of electricity.

What kinds of changes will be required? A good starting point would be to acknowledge the role that rooftop solar is already playing in reducing peak demand for electricity from the grid. On Wednesday, the peak demand for grid-supplied electricity was about two hours later and 4% lower than it would have been if no one had solar panels.

The need for load-shedding could have been completely avoided with the help of technologies that are already available for power consumers to reduce their own demand. For more than a decade, demand-side participation (which gives consumers more influence over the timing and quantity of their own electricity use) and direct load control (which involves reducing specific customers’ demand at certain times) have both been talked about, reported on, trialled, and instituted in only a desultory way. They have never been taken seriously by either industry participants or their regulators.

Large-scale electricity storage has emerged only recently because of significant cost reductions. These are just some of the likely components of a low-emission, 21st-century electricity supply system.

Almost the only positive action which governments have taken on these matters in recent times has been to establish the review by Chief Scientist Alan Finkel. The real test for the politicians will be whether they understand and act decisively on what Finkel and his colleagues have to say.

Hugh Saddler is a member of the Board of the Climate Institute

International coal markets are at risk as transformation continues, driven by yet more record low prices for solar power, this time in India.

2016 turned out to be record breaking year for solar, in many regards. You'll get all the information you need here, but here are some of the highlights.

Wind energy had a big year in 2016, particularly in the US and Europe  – yet it still faces an unpredictable policy future.

Indigneous Australian artworks have been added to two of the wind towers at Hornsdale wind farm in SA.

As the generation mix changes and the load profiles get peakier, the thinking around demand management must mature.

EU countries should close all of their coal plants by around 2030 if they wants to stick to the Paris Agreement on climate change.

A quarter of Europe's cricket and grasshopper species are being driven to extinction, say experts.

South Australia gas plant finally switched on as NSW faces major threat of outages in heatwave, and power in Queensland also at risk.

Professor Sir Peter Mansfield, who left school at 15 and won the Nobel prize, dies aged 83.

To really understand climate change, we need to look at the way the climate behaves over a long time. We need many years of weather information. But the Bureau of Meteorology’s high-quality instrumental climate record only dates back to the start of the 20th century.

This relatively short period makes it hard to identify what is natural climate change and what is human-induced, particularly when it comes to things like rainfall. We really need data that go further back in time.

Natural records of climate such as tree rings and ice cores can tell us a lot about pre-industrial climate. But they too need to be verified in some way, matched against some other form of data.

So, we went hunting for some. Over two years, we looked through newspapers, manuscripts, government documents and early settlers’ diaries from Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Tasmania. We took thousands of photos of letters, journals, tables and graphs. We rediscovered handwritten observations from farmers, convicts, sailors and reverends across southeastern Australia, stretching all the way back to European settlement in 1788.

Rummaging around in libraries might not seem like the best way to understand what’s been happening with our climate. But weather diaries kept by dedicated observers in the 1800s are proving important for climate research.

While there are still many observations to be rescued, the records we’ve found so far have already called into question the stability of the relationship between El Niño, La Niña and rainfall in southeastern Australia.

The records

We collected 39 different sources of weather data covering 1788–1860, with continuous observations from the mid-1830s. The numbers we’ve found so far paint a dramatic picture of the weather and climate experienced by Australia’s colonial settlers.

For example, Thomas Lempriere, who ran the Port Arthur penal settlement, recorded the harsh Tasmanian winters he suffered in the 1830s. Surgeon William Wyatt in Adelaide noted heatwaves and snowfall during the 1840s. And William Dawes, Australia’s first meteorologist, diligently observed the first drought encountered by Australia’s English settlers in 1790 and 1791.

Weather diaries kept by Reverend William Clarke in Sydney in the 1840s, now at the State Library of New South Wales. Author supplied. Connecting past and present

While the observations taken by these “weather people” are valuable insights into the climate of the past, observations made more than 150 years ago are not quite the same as those taken today. Many of the instruments were not kept in the best locations. John Pascoe Fawkner, one of Melbourne’s early settlers, even stored his thermometer in a cellar!

Differences in exposure, observation techniques and instruments also mean that it’s difficult to use these observations to quantify the exact size of the temperature change since the First Fleet arrived.

However, old weather records can still tell us a lot about year-to-year climate variations. Historical rainfall observations, for example, are less prone to large biases, because rain gauges are less complex than, say, a thermometer or barometer. By using a combination of instrumental and documentary information, we can tell the story of our climate over a much longer time scale than ever before.

Flagstaff Hill in Melbourne 1858, by George Rowe. On the right you can see the weather observer taking his daily observations on the white platform, with a rain gauge behind him. State Library of Victoria

Australia’s climate is almost manic in its ability to swing between droughts and floods. Combining our rescued weather observations with modern data from similar locations means we can see this in southeastern Australia’s rainfall over the past 170 years.

Periods of low rainfall stand out, such as the mid-1840s, the Federation Drought at the turn of the 20th century, the World War II Drought in the early 1940s, and the Millennium Drought from 1997 to 2009. There are also clear times of high rainfall, including the 1870s, 1890s and 1970s.

Rainfall, and prolonged wet and dry periods, in two regions of southeastern Australia from 1840 to 2010. Adapted from Ashcroft et al. 2016.

Most of these periods are associated with El Niño and La Niña events: dry conditions in southeastern Australia are generally linked to El Niño, while wet years often coincide with La Niña. However, this is not always the case. Previous studies have found a breakdown in the relationship in the mid-20th century, and natural palaeoclimate records suggest a similar breakdown in the early 1800s.

Understanding these periods might help us better understand how El Niño and La Niña events might change in the future. But what do the observations from the weather people say?

We compared our historical rainfall data to previous El Niño/La Niña events and found a weakening in the relationship during 1920–1940 and 1835–1850. The breakdown was especially clear in data from the southern part of our study region. This is the first time the 19th-century breakdown has been seen in Australia using instrumental data.

The hunt continues

Of course, the next question is why? Why does the impact of El Niño and La Niña on Australian rainfall change over time? What happened in the mid-1800s? It might be El Niño’s cranky uncle, the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation, or perhaps strange behaviour in the atmosphere around Antarctica.

We’re still not sure. But the weather observations taken by dedicated settlers more than 150 years ago are helping us answer these questions. Until then, the hunt continues.

Linden Ashcroft has received funding from the Australian Research Council.

David Karoly receives funding from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science and an ARC Linkage grant. He is a member of the Climate Change Authority and the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists.

Joelle Gergis receives funding from the Australian Research Council.