Life after coal: the South Australian city leading the way

The largest solar farm in the southern hemisphere lies on arid land at the foot of the Flinders Ranges, more than 300km north of Adelaide. If that sounds remote, it doesn’t do justice to how removed nearby locals feel from the energy debate in Canberra.

A worker, Andrew Bartsch, surveys the Bungala
solar power plant, which will be the size of the
Melbourne CBD. 

As government MPs and national newspapers have thundered in recent days over whether taxpayers should support coal-fired power, occasionally mauling advice from government agencies as they went, residents of South Australia’s Upper Spencer Gulf region have been left to ponder why decision-makers are not paying more attention to what is happening in their backyard.

Read the story from The Guardian by Adam Morton - “Life after coal: the South Australian city leading the way.”

Warming oceans are changing Australia’s fishing industry

A new United Nations report on fisheries and climate change shows that Australian marine systems are undergoing rapid environmental change, with some of the largest climate-driven changes in the Southern Hemisphere.

Ocean fish are changing where they live due to climate change.

Reports from around the world have found that many fish species are changing their distribution. This movement threatens to disrupt fishing as we know it.

While rapid change is predicted to continue, researchers and managers are working with fishers to ensure a sustainable industry.

Read the story from The Conversation - “Warming oceans are changing Australia’s fishing industry.”

Nation’s biggest wind farm could be built between Geelong and Ballarat

The biggest wind farm in the southern hemisphere will be built about 130 kilometres west of Melbourne, powering an estimated half a million homes a year by 2025, if the Andrews government gives the project the green light.

Graphic: Stephen Kiprillis

The proposed wind farm would sprawl across 167 square kilometres of farmland near the small town of Rokewood in south-west Victoria, about 40 kilometres south of Ballarat.

It would have 228 wind turbines, each 230 metres tall at their highest point. By way of comparison, just four skyscrapers in Melbourne are taller.

Read Adam Carey’s story from The Age - “Nation’s biggest wind farm could be built between Geelong and Ballarat.”

What a 2-mile ice tube tells us about wind

A freshly extracted section of the
two-mile-deep West Antarctic Ice Sheet
Divide core, drilled from 2006 to 2011. 

A dramatic pattern in our planet’s climate history involves paroxysms in Arctic temperatures. During the last ice age, tens of thousands of years ago, Greenland repeatedly warmed by about 10 degrees Celsius over just a few decades and then gradually cooled. Meanwhile the Southern Hemisphere climate stayed fairly stable, with only weak and long-delayed echoes of the temperature chaos up north.

But new research shows the fierce winds circling Antarctica—an important lever on the global climate—shifted quickly in response to the Northern Hemisphere temperature spikes.

“It’s most surprising that we can see these really abrupt changes in the Northern Hemisphere making it very quickly to the Southern Hemisphere,” says first author Bradley Markle, a doctoral student in earth and space sciences at the University of Washington. “The atmospheric circulation is tightly connected across the globe during these events.”

Read the Futurity story - “What a 2-mile ice tube tells us about wind.”

Keeping watch on temperature and rainfall with ClimateWatch

ClimateWatch was developed by Earthwatch with the Bureau of Meteorology and The University of Melbourne to understand how changes in temperature and rainfall are affecting the seasonal behaviour of Australia's plants and animals.

The first continental phenology project in the Southern Hemisphere, ClimateWatch enables every Australian to be involved in collecting and recording data that will help shape the country’s scientific response to climate change.

Check out the ClimateWatch website.

Earth's oceans absorbing most of the globe's excess heat

Record High Annual Mean
 Surface Temperatures, 2015.

Ocean temperatures have been consistently rising for at least three decades. Scientists believe that global sea surface temperatures will continue to increase over the next decade as greenhouse gases build up in the atmosphere.

According to a report by the International Union for Conservation of Nature released last week, the Southern Hemisphere has experienced intense warming over the past decade, with strong heat accumulation in the midlatitude regions of the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

Natural patterns such as El Niño and La Niña can have year-to-year effects on temperatures. Individual storms can also influence ocean temperatures for months or longer. But the overall temperature trends by decade reveal a backdrop of human-caused warming.

Read Tim Wallace’s story in The New York Times - “Oceans Are Absorbing Almost All of the Globe’s Excess Heat.”

A Cape Grim milestone to focus our attention

Principal research scientist with
the CSIRO, David Etheridge.

News that Tasmania's Cape Grim weather site had recorded its first baseline reading of 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide sparked some debate over the meaning of the milestone.

As we noted ahead of the declaration of the first recording of 400ppm in the southern hemisphere, the primary greenhouse gas increase carried not much more global warming significance than, say, 399 or 401 ppm.

But as with other markers - such as Australia's foreign debt passing a $1 trillion - the 400 ppm tally helps focus our attention.

"People react to these things when they see thresholds crossed," David Etheridge, a CSIRO principal research scientist, told us. Even more upbeat was Paul Fraser, the CSIRO scientist who had helped set up Cape Grim 40 years ago. He told 9news.com.au that passing the landmark would be a "psychological tipping point".

Read Peter Hannam’s story in the Melbourne Age - “When should we worry about climate change?”

Sulfur injections into atmosphere raise debates

Use of solar shades is a proposed approach to the mitigation of global warming. By intentionally changing the Earth's reflectivity scientists propose that we could reflect more heat back out into space. But every coin has a reverse side.

Recent studies showed that injecting sulfur compounds into the atmosphere – one of the main ways to cool off the planet – can destroy the Arctic ozone layer and hinder recovery of the Antarctic ozone hole by about 70 years.

On the other hand, it is not so bad as it painted. Another study suggests that recovery of the ozone hole over Antarctica will modify climate in the Southern Hemisphere and even worsen Antarctic warming. While the world faces rising temperatures, there has been cooling in the interior of Antarctica in summer, which is ascribed to the depletion of ozone overhead.

Read the Pravda.ru story - “Sulfur injections into atmosphere raise debates.”

(It’s distressing that geoengineering is even a subject attracting serious discussion – its consequences are unknown; we don’t truly understand the science of many proposed ideas; and who decides what will be done, where and to what extent.

Maybe, we should first try living a more restrained life; consume less; cut our energy use; and opt for de-growth, all matters that can only happen with hitherto unseen leadership and dramatic changes to the governance processes of the world community, changes that unquestionably demand that we step back from the prevailing ideology of capitalism – Robert McLean.)

3000 scientists condemn decimation of CSIRO

Almost 3000 scientists from more than 60 countries have condemned Australia’s key government science agency over plans that would “decimate” its climate change research capabilities.

The open letter, delivered to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his ministers on Thursday evening, warns the cuts would leave the Southern Hemisphere “with no sustainable, world-class climate modelling capability.”

Since news of the cuts at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) emerged last week, leading scientists and institutions from across the world have attacked the plans.

CSIRO chief executive Larry Marshall told staff in an email that the agency wanted to shift the focus of its Oceans and Atmosphere division away from climate change monitoring and modelling because the science of climate change was now “proved.”

Read the Desmogblog story - “Scientists from 60 Countries Condemn Cuts To Vital Climate Research at Australia's CSIRO Agency.”

WCRP laments changes to Australian body

Recent news from Canberra - that Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) intends “substantial reductions in headcount” targeted at “Oceans & Atmosphere, Land & Water” (and two other units) - sent shock waves into the international climate research community.

The numbers listed - 350 reductions over two years - compared to the known sizes of those groups portend an end to CSIRO’s climate programmes. These cuts will sever vital linkages with Australian colleagues and to essential Southern Hemisphere data sources, linkages that connect Australia to the UK, the USA, New Zealand, Japan, China and beyond. Australia will find itself isolated from the community of nations and researchers devoting serious attention to climate change.

Read the World Climate Research Programme report - “Recent news from Canberra.”