Feed aggregator

Lewis Pugh braves below-freezing waters in some of the coldest places on Earth to draw attention to our warming planet.

Lewis Pugh braves below-freezing waters in some of the coldest places on Earth to draw attention to our warming planet.

Australian Power Project launched by former AGL spokesman, with assistance from former Malcolm Turnbull advisor

A ‘clean coal’ advocacy organisation which is opposed to higher renewable energy targets and seeks to give a voice for businesses “being crippled by massive gas and electricity bills” has been launched by a former spokesman for AGL, with apparent assistance from a former advisor to Malcolm Turnbull.

The Australian Power Project, which appears to have launched in late 2016, calls for businesses affected to share their stories and urges government to take a “middle road” in energy policy, and has been quoted in media reports.

Continue reading...

Six years ago on January 11 2011 a catastrophic flood unfolded in the Lockyer Valley in southeast Queensland. Twenty-two people lost their lives.

Floodwaters spilled out across the Brisbane River floodplains, equal to the area of France and Germany combined. The waters inundated the CBD and inner suburbs and brought the state’s capital to a standstill.

The 2011 flood was reported as “biblical” and extreme in its magnitude.

Our research, based on palaeological flood records, suggests floods of this size may be more common than we think. When the next one occurs is a matter of when, not if. So what can we do to plan better?

Brisbane ferry terminal. State Library of Queensland What is a one-in-100-year flood?

Floods are the most expensive type of natural disaster in Australia. The 2011 flood is estimated to have cost the Australian economy around A$30 billion. This does not include the incalculable cost of declining water quality and ecosystem health in offshore ecosystems such as Moreton Bay.

To manage flood risk, we have to understand the chance of different-sized floods occurring. The chance of a flood event can be described using a variety of terms, commonly including the average recurrence interval (ARI). You’ve probably seen this reported in the media as the “one-in-100-year flood”.

However, the preferred method is now annual exceedance probability (AEP). For example, the one-in-100-year flood has a one-in-100 chance or 1% AEP of being exceeded in any year. Currently, this 1% AEP event is designated as having an “acceptable” risk for planning purposes nearly everywhere in Australia.

Initial estimations of the 2011 event, based on 31 years of gauging records in the Upper Lockyer, indicated an AEP of 0.05%, or an ARI of one in 2,000 years.

But another extreme event in 2013, with five more years of data, reduced this to 1.11%, or one in 90 years. This illustrates a major problem with calculating flood risk: flood prediction is extremely dependent on the amount of data. It is worse in countries such as Australia where European settlement occurred relatively recently.

Finding old floods

One way to extend the data is to incorporate palaeoflood records into flood predictions. Palaeoflood records are obtained from a range of techniques that combine different sources of past flood information from the landscape.

These might include markers on old buildings or bridges which extend further back than the river gauging records. Flood sediments stored high in bedrock gorges or in lowland floodplains also provide a long-term record once we’ve dated them.

In our recent Australian Research Council Linkage Project, The Big Flood: will it happen again?, we’ve been looking at these types of flood records.

Flood deposits. Jacky Croke

The project has produced the first-ever palaeoflood record for the Lockyer Valley, extending it back several thousand years. We’ve produced a timeline of past floods using a technique called Optically Stimulated Luminescence, which estimates the age based on how much sunlight (UV light) is stored in a single grain of sand. UV light produces a luminescence signal that gets trapped inside the lattice of the quartz sand. The amount stored can be converted to produce an age since burial.

This record reveals that flood events like 2011 have occurred at least seven times over the past 1,000 years. We also found a period of high flood activity during the 1700s, which exceeded the size of the historical events of the 1890s and 1974 floods. We can also see clusters of floods within short time periods, such as the cluster in the 1800s, which was highlighted again by the floods in 2011 and 2013.

The record indicates that such extreme flood events may occur more frequently than we thought.

Most importantly, when we incorporate palaeoflood records into traditional flood analysis, the uncertainty in predictions is significantly reduced.

Incorporating palaeoflood records reduces the uncertainty in flood forecasts. The Big Flood project What do we need to do with this information?

Palaeoflood records represent a viable, cost-effective solution to the ongoing problem of flood risk management in Australia. To date, the use of palaeoflood records has not been included in traditional flood analysis nor recognised in planning or policy. In spite of two extreme events in 2011 and 2013, many planning and policy guidelines remain unchanged.

The two extreme flood events in 2011 and 2013 indicate that the level of certainty around acceptable limits of flooding is inadequate. Longer records are needed to reduce flood risk in southeast Queensland. Without this critical next step, Australians remain at risk of extreme flood events.

Given the likelihood of increasing rainfall extremes in the future, it is important we start using the information nature has preserved to better prepare for more frequent extreme floods.

Jacky Croke receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Chinadialogue interviews two sociologists who have documented the hidden lives of waste pickers in recycling communities on the outskirts of Beijing

Rarely do we stop and question where our waste goes and who collects and sorts it. Waste pickers work at the margins of our lives, removing things we don’t want to see. In a new book, The Life of Waste, sociologists Wu Ka Ming and Zhang Jieying describe these unknown lives that play out on the outskirts of Beijing. They visit the village of Lengshui, 50km north of Beijing, home to a community of waste pickers.

Part of this world is as one might expect it to be. Piles of rubbish and pools of foul water gather, while pets and children play in the waste. Yet homes are often spotless, as if domestic life becomes more orderly the more chaotic the surroundings. The families from all over China form close-knit communities that extend beyond blood relationships. Chinadialogue (CD) spoke to the authors about life in these recycling communities.

Continue reading...

A male Japanese monkey has been filmed trying to mount and mate with a Sika deer.

Scientists from the US Geological Survey (USGS) attached a camera to a female polar’s neck to study behaviour, hunting and feeding rates. The camera was intended to capture polar bears’ daily activities and help researchers better understand how they respond to declining levels in sea ice. The footage was uploaded to the USGS Facebook page on Monday but was filmed in April 2016

• Thawing Arctic is turning oceans into graveyards
  

Continue reading...

Targets on CO2 will continue despite a climate change sceptic becoming president, a UK minister says.

Imperial College and climate change charity 10:10 to focus on connecting solar panels directly to train lines, reports BusinessGreen

Imperial College London has partnered with the climate change charity 10:10 to investigate the use of track-side solar panels to power trains, the two organisations announced yesterday.

The renewable traction power project will see university researchers look at connecting solar panels directly to the lines that provide power to trains, a move that would bypass the electricity grid in order to more efficiently manage power demand from trains.

Continue reading...

In the Spectator, the GWPF keeps denying facts and reality

Scientists have proven time and time again that global warming continues unabated. Most recently, a study published last week showed that over the past two decades, the oceans have warmed faster than prior estimates. This study affirmed the findings of a 2015 NOAA paper – not surprisingly attacked by deniers – that removed a cool bias in the data, finding there never was a global warming “pause.”

This particular myth has been a favorite of deniers over the past decade for one simple reason – if people can be convinced that global warming stopped, they won’t consider it a threat that we need to urgently address by cutting fossil fuel consumption. It’s thus become one of the most common myths peddled by carbon polluters and their allies.

Continue reading...

Residents in the state of California have been affected by high flood waters over past few days. As a result, many cars and properties are now submerged. Taking a chance between the deluge, many have ventured out in boats and canoes to assess the damage, as residents talk about their experiences

• California storms destroy drive-through tree as east coast thaws

Continue reading...

Snow leopards are showing up on camera traps in places they’d never been seen before – thanks to an innovative programme in Kyrgyzstan.

Sometimes wildlife champions come as high as heads of state. Since taking office in 2011 the current president of Kyrgyzstan, Almazbek Atambayev, has turned the former Soviet Republic into a centre point for snow leopard conservation and research. Perhaps the best symbol of Atambayev’s commitment to snow leopards are recent camera trap photos showing the elusive, high-altitude predator roaming Shamshy Wildlife Reserve. Just two years ago, Shamshy was a concession for high-paying trophy hunters looking to bag an ibex. Today, it’s protecting those prey animals that snow leopards depend on.

“We are certain about the presence of at least one, perhaps two snow leopards,” Koustubh Sharma, the Senior Regional Ecologist at the Snow Leopard Trust, said. “The second snow leopard we are not sure about given a slightly blurry image.”

Continue reading...

Indigenous groups and river dwellers are battling the government and big corporations over the huge dams being built to meet Brazil's energy needs.

Danny Henricks was spear fishing off the north Queensland coast when a bull shark shot out of the depths towards him. Luckily, he had the presence of mind to thrust the spear towards the charging shark, which became impaled. Henricks said of the terrifying encounter, which occurred in December: ‘I lunged forward with the gun a little bit just before he got there but most of it was his force.’ Henricks told the ABC he held on to the spear – which was driven through the shark’s mouth – before abandoning it and swimming to the surface

Continue reading...

£1.3bn plan is seen as ‘pathfinder’ for six bigger plants, which could generate more than 10% of UK’s electricity

Plans for a pioneering tidal power lagoon in Swansea Bay are expected to be supported by a government-commissioned report this week, potentially unlocking a multibillion-pound series of projects harnessing electricity from the rise and fall of the tide around the UK.

When ministers last year ordered a review to see if the technology could affordably provide green energy to the UK, it was widely seen as a way to kill off an ambitious project at Swansea proposed by Tidal Lagoon Power.

Continue reading...

Credit card bill was $2.2m last year, and was also used to spend $347 at a jewellery store, $898 at a bike shop and $5,000 at JB Hi-Fi

Parks Victoria staff have justified the use of their taxpayer-funded credit cards on hundreds of dollars worth of KFC because it is an effective bait for luring feral cats.

On Monday Victoria’s environment minister, Lily D’Ambrosio, announced an external auditor would undertake an independent review of Parks Victoria’s credit card transactions over the past four years.

Continue reading...

Challenge by Western Downs Alliance prompts environment minister Josh Frydenberg to revamp approval of development

Legal action by a Queensland community group has forced the federal government to stop Santos freely dumping coal seam gas waste water in Surat Basin rivers and streams.

A federal court challenge by the Western Downs Alliance has prompted the minister for environment and energy, Josh Frydenberg, to revamp his approval of the Santos gasfield development, in what has been hailed as a victory in protecting the Dawson river.

Continue reading...

A warming world is harming insects ability to reproduce, which could have long-term consequences, scientists warn.

Critically endangered chimpanzees in Ivory Coast craft extra-absorbent drinking sticks, researchers observe.

Small birds were observed travelling to as many as 24 different breeding sites in Alaska within six weeks, further than flying from Paris to Moscow

A bird smaller than a city pigeon has been recorded flying 13,000km (8,000 miles) in just one month to have sex with as many females as possible

In behaviour never witnessed before, male pectoral sandpipers were observed travelling to as many as 24 different “breeding sites” in northern Alaska within a single season, a team of scientists wrote in the journal Nature.

Continue reading...