2018 was Australia’s third hottest year on record

If you thought it was hotter than usual last year, you weren’t wrong. Climate experts have confirmed it was Australia’s third-warmest year on record, with every state and territory recording above average temperatures in 2018.

According to the Bureau of Meteorology’s (BOM) annual climate statement, the nation’s average temperature last year was 1.14C above the average for 1961-1990, making 2018 slightly warmer than 2017.

“When we look across all of Australia in 2018, we can see that every single state and territory had above average day and night-time temperatures,” the Bureau’s senior climatologist Lynette Bettio said in a statement on Thursday.

Read the story from news.com.au by AAP and Benedict Brook - “2018 was Australia’s third hottest year on record.”

How one woman reduced her waste to a jar a week

Tippi Thole recycled. She composted. She thought she was doing a pretty good job environmentally. Then she heard a talk on plastics, and the container of trash she and her eight-year-old son emptied out every week began to look irresponsible.

Tippi Thole with a week's worth of household waste.

Thole replaced her 10-gallon (38-litre) can with a small wastebasket that had been under her bathroom sink and started to change the way she shopped and lived. Within 14 weeks, the family's weekly trash fitted into a six-centimetre-tall Mason jar. With room to spare.

Read the comment by Fiona Adams Fogg from The Age - “How one woman reduced her waste to a jar a week.”

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch counts 1.8 trillion pieces of trash, mostly plastic

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is getting greater. Twice the size of Texas, the floating mass of about 79,000 metric tons of plastic is up to 16 times larger than previously thought, according to scientists who performed an aerial survey.

The results, published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, reveal that this plastic blight in the Pacific Ocean is still growing at what the researchers called an "exponential" pace.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, or GPGP for short, is an accumulation of junk that has collected in the waters between California and Hawaii. The concentration of floating plastic in the patch ranges from tens to hundreds of kilograms per square kilometer. But much of it is hidden from the naked eye, partly because some of the plastic has been broken down into smaller and smaller bits over time. (It is not, as its name may suggest, an island.)

Read Amina Khan’s story from The Los Angeles Times - “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch counts 1.8 trillion pieces of trash, mostly plastic.”

(The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is analogous with climate change - we can’t see it and therefore we do nought about it, nor do we care - Robert McLean)

Microplastic pollution in oceans is far worse than feared, say scientists

The number of tiny plastic pieces polluting the world’s oceans is vastly greater than thought, new research indicates.

Plastic pollution is known to harm marine life and can
enter the human food chain via our food and water.

The work reveals the highest microplastic pollution yet discovered anywhere in the world in a river near Manchester in the UK. It also shows that the major floods in the area in 2015-16 flushed more than 40bn pieces of microplastic into the sea.

The surge of such a vast amount of microplastic from one small river catchment in a single event led the scientists to conclude that the current estimate for the number of particles in the ocean – five trillion – is a major underestimate.

Read Damian Carrington’s story from The Guardian - “Microplastic pollution in oceans is far worse than feared, say scientists.”

New science suggests the ocean could rise more — and faster — than we thought

Climate change could lead to sea level rises that are larger, and happen more rapidly, than previously thought, according to a trio of new studies that reflect mounting concerns about the stability of polar ice.

The Pine Island Glacier ice front.

In one case, the research suggests that previous high-end projections for sea level rise by the year 2100 — a little over three feet — could be too low, substituting numbers as high as six feet at the extreme if the world continues to burn large volumes of fossil fuels throughout the century.

“We have the potential to have much more sea level rise under high emissions scenarios,” said Alexander Nauels, a researcher at the University of Melbourne in Australia who led one of the three studies. His work, co-authored with researchers at institutions in Austria, Switzerland, and Germany, was published Thursday in Environmental Research Letters.

Read Chris Mooney’s story from The Washington Post - “New science suggests the ocean could rise more — and faster — than we thought.”

How Six Americans Changed Their Minds About Global Warming

The Rev. Richard Cizik used to believe climate change was a myth. The science had to be rigged, he thought; those who believed in it were just tree-huggers. But in 2002, a friend convinced Mr. Cizik to go to a conference about climate change, and there, he said, “the scales came off my eyes.”

Nearly 70 percent of Americans now say that climate change is caused mainly by human activity, the highest percentage since Gallup began tracking it two decades ago. The number of Americans who say they worry “a great deal” about climate change has risen by about 20 percentage points.

But people don’t change their minds easily about controversial issues. So what is behind this trend?

Read The New York Times story - “How Six Americans Changed Their Minds About Global Warming.”

Rise of the eco-cup enterprises as war on waste steps up

When Simon Karlik saw rubbish bins overflowing with water bottles, coffee cups and takeaway food containers, he thought the amount of waste was “just insane”.

The backlash against takeaway coffee cups is growing.

“I thought, can’t we go back to, in my terms, grandma's day, where you didn't rely on this very lazy option of just using something once and throwing it away,” says Karlik.

That prompted Karlik to start Cheeki, the Sydney-based company which makes vacuum-insulated stainless steel coffee cups you can carry to your cafe.

Today, his company, which produces a range of eco-friendly food and drink containers, turns over between $3 million to $4 million.

Read Christine D’Mello’s story in The Sydney Morning Herald - “Rise of the eco-cup enterprises as war on waste steps up.”