Pittwater Online News

Australia contains some of the world’s most biologically diverse and carbon-dense native forests. Eucalypts in wet temperate forests are the tallest flowering plants in the world and home to an array of unique tree-dwelling marsupials, rare birds, insects, mosses, fungi and lichen, many of which have not even been catalogued by scientists. Yet our country remains in the top ten list globally for tree cover loss, with almost half of the original forested areas in eastern Australia cleared.

This loss has been devastating for Australia’s native plants and animals and contributes to global warming through vast amounts of carbon emissions. The global biodiversity and climate change crises are inextricably linked – we cannot solve one without the other.

Earth’s ecosystems, such as forests, coastal wetlands and tundra, contain enormous amounts of carbon. But deforestation and degradation by humans is likely to send global warming past 1.5°C, even if we achieve net-zero fossil fuel emissions. Protecting native forests is a critical way to prevent emissions, which must be achieved in parallel with a rapid transition to clean energy.

What is being overlooked in current international climate policy under the Paris Agreement is the crucial role of biodiversity in maintaining healthy ecosystems and their integrity, which keeps carbon stored in forests, not the atmosphere. Healthy ecosystems are more stable and resilient, with a lower risk of trees dying and lower rates of carbon emissions.

The way we currently count carbon stores risk creating incentives to plant new trees rather than protect existing forests. Yet old-growth forests store vastly more carbon than young saplings, which will take decades or even centuries to reach the same size.

On January 1 this year, both Victoria and Western Australia ended native forest logging in state forests. This is a good start. But the rest of Australia is still logging native forests. Extensive land clearing continues for agriculture and urban development, as well as native forest harvesting on private land.

Two States Down, More To Go

The end of native timber logging in two states is a chance for new approaches to our forests, which recognise the contribution of biodiversity to healthy forest ecosystems, as well as endangered species protection and clean water supplies.

Ending native forest logging isn’t entirely simple. In Victoria, consultation on the future of state forests is ongoing. The Victorian Environmental Assessment Council is due to release its final recommendations in July.

The Victorian government has also put in place a Forestry Transition Program to help forest contractors find alternative work in forest and land management. Some of these transition programs are proving controversial.

In Western Australia, around 2.5 million hectares of the state’s south-west forests will be protected under a new Forest Management Plan. Protection of these landscapes is critical, as they have been hit by another die-back event due to drought and record heat.

These forests hold significant cultural and ecological value. Known in Noongar as “djarilmari”, they are vital habitats for diverse plants and animals, including endemic species such as the ngwayir (western ringtail possum) and the giant jarrah trees.

What About Other States And Territories?

In New South Wales, the government is looking into proposals for a Great Koala National Park, which would bring together state forests from the Clarence Valley to south of Coffs Harbour. But with no decision yet made, logging continues along both the north and south coasts, which were also hard hit by the Black Summer bushfires of 2019-20.

In Tasmania, native forest logging fell sharply between 2012 and 2019. This cut emissions by around 22 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, equivalent to almost a quarter of Australia’s transport emissions.

Recent policy changes protecting giant trees will help protect some patches of forests. But native forest logging is set to expand in other areas, including clear felling of old-growth rainforest and tall wet eucalypt forest.

Native forest logging is slated to end in 70,000 hectares of south-east Queensland state forests at the end of this year, under a longstanding Native Timber Action Plan. But logging and widespread land clearing continues elsewhere in the state, ensuring Australia’s place in the top 10 deforestation hotspots.

Can Ending Native Forest Logging Help The Climate?

We’ll need to go further and ban logging in all native forests in Australia to help meet our net-zero emissions target, while meeting timber demand from better-managed and increased plantations.

Stopping native forest logging avoids the emissions released when forests are cut and burned. It would also allow continued forest growth and regrowth of previously logged areas, which draws down carbon from the atmosphere and increases the amount held in the forest ecosystem.

The natural biodiversity of our native forests makes them more resilient to external disturbances such as climate change. These forests have larger and more stable carbon stocks than logged areas, newly planted forests and plantations.

If we compare forests protected for conservation with those harvested for commodity production in the Victorian Central Highlands, research shows conservation delivers the greatest climate benefits through continued forest growth and accumulating carbon stocks.

There are growing calls to create the Great Forests National Park to the north and east of Melbourne, which would protect a further 355,000 hectares and more than double protected forests in the Central Highlands.

Net Zero: Deep, Rapid, Sustained Cuts Needed

The world’s nations are aiming to reach “net zero” by mid-century. Meeting this target will require deep and rapid cuts in carbon dioxide emissions as well as pulling carbon out of the atmosphere into land sinks, especially forests.

The land sector is unique in that it can be both a source (logging, agriculture) and a sink (forest regrowth, for instance) for carbon. The natural way forests take up carbon can be increased through natural regrowth or plantations.

Unfortunately, the current approach, based on IPCC guidelines, to counting this type of natural carbon storage can lead to perverse outcomes.

The carbon sink from forest regrowth only counts towards the “removals” part of net zero when it results from changes we make, such as ending native forest logging. It doesn’t count if it’s regrowth after a natural event such as a bushfire. It’s important to count only human-induced changes in our climate targets.

Tree planting, on the other hand, can be counted towards net-zero targets, despite the fact that newly planted trees will take centuries to sequester as much carbon as found in an old-growth forest.

This type of accounting – known as flow-based accounting – can mean a premium is placed on planting and maintaining young forests with high carbon uptake rates, overlooking the substantial benefits of protecting larger trees in native forests.

That is, this approach favours carbon sequestration (the process of taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it in wood) over carbon storage (the total carbon stocks already contained in a forest).

A comprehensive approach to forest carbon accounting would recognise both flows of carbon (as sequestration) and carbon stocks (as storage) contribute to the benefits that native forests offer for reducing emissions.

Carbon Accounting Needs More Clarity

This becomes a problem when forests and fossil fuels are included in a net accounting framework, such as the one used in Australia’s national greenhouse gas inventory.

In net accounts, emissions (from fossil fuel and land sectors) within a year are added to removals, which includes the sequestration of carbon into forests and other ecosystems.

Because this type of accounting only counts the flows of carbon – not existing stocks – it omits the climate benefits of protecting existing forests, whose stored carbon dwarfs the amount Australia emits from fossil fuels each year.

But if we separated out targets for the fossil fuel and land sectors, we could properly treat forest carbon stocks as an asset, giving us incentives to protect them.

Another problem with net accounting is it treats all carbon as equivalent, meaning a tonne of carbon sequestered in trees compensates for a tonne of carbon from burned fossil fuels. This has no scientific basis. Carbon dioxide emissions are effectively permanent, as the buried carbon we dig up and burn stays in the atmosphere for millennia, while carbon in trees is temporary in comparison.

As trees grow, their carbon storage compensates for earlier logging and clearing emissions, which is an important climate benefit. But we’re not comparing apples and apples – forest carbon doesn’t compensate for fossil fuel emissions.

Logging Bans Are Important – But No Substitute For Ending Oil And Gas

While ending the clearing and logging of native vegetation is vital for both climate and biodiversity, it’s no substitute for preventing emissions from fossil fuels.

To make this clearer, we must urgently set separate targets for emissions cuts for fossil fuels and increased carbon removal in the land sector. This will ensure phasing out fossil fuel use is not delayed by planting trees, and that the carbon stocks of biodiverse and carbon-dense native forests are protected.

Kate Dooley, Research Fellow, School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

CSIRO’s latest annual GenCost update, released last month, was billed as Australia’s “most comprehensive electricity generation cost report”.

GenCost has proven to be highly controversial. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton previously levelled robust criticism at the report, specifically the high costs attributed to building nuclear power in Australia, and called for a rerun of the numbers. In turn, CSIRO’s chief made a similarly robust defence of the report and of his agency.

This debate speaks to a key problem with GenCost and similar reports that strive to nail down numbers for the cost of new power sources.

The problem is, these numbers depend on many, many variables. We can’t simply say one type of power is cheaper than another.

Seeking Impossible Certainty

In 2018, Australia’s energy market operator (AEMO) asked CSIRO to help provide costings as it developed its Integrated System Plan, a blueprint for the development of the electricity system in Australia’s southern and eastern states.

This is where GenCost comes from. Every year, CSIRO experts work to compare the average cost of electricity from different sources, by reporting the capital (construction) and operating costs of electricity generation of different types of power sources.

It also estimates a measure of average costs, formally known as the “levelised cost of electricity”.

Trouble is, CSIRO is trying to do the impossible. We simply cannot know for sure how the economics of specific plants compare. There are many reasons for this.

1. Upfront cost

The cost of renewables is concentrated up front in construction; they cost very little to run. By contrast, the cost of nuclear, fossil fuel and biomass plants is spread out over their lifespan, because they have large fuel costs and cost much more to operate and maintain. Comparing these two groups requires many subjective assumptions on lifetime, fuel costs, closure costs and the operating regime. Different assumptions give radically different results.

2. Technical characteristics

Wind, solar and run-of-river hydro generators produce electricity at rates which vary with the weather, while those with stored fuels (nuclear, coal, biomass, hydro and gas) can produce electricity on demand. Weather-dependent generation is often cheaper than stored-fuel generation but to fairly compare it to stored-fuel generation it requires storage. How much storage you need is heavily contested. Power systems depending only on renewable electricity and storage will be prohibitively expensive with current technologies, according to our research. In South Australia, our modelling shows the first 5 GWh of storage displaces substantially more stored fuel power than the next 15 GWh, which displaces about as much as the next 180 GWh of storage.

3. New transmission

Some solar and wind farms might need new transmission lines to connect their power to the grid, while others can tap into existing transmission lines. Blanket calculations – such as those in GenCost of transmission costs associated with new wind and solar – are not meaningful.

4. Upstream infrastructure

A coal power plant needs a coal mine, a gas plant needs gas fields and pipelines. These costs are often (but not always) fully accounted for in the calculation of stored-fuel generator operating costs.

5. Local environment

Both weather-dependent and stored-fuel generators can damage the local environment and affect local communities through air, land and water pollution and loss of amenity. These are real economic costs, though sometimes called social costs, and impacts vary greatly from one generator to another.

6. Fossil fuels differ

Fossil-fuel generators are worsening global warming, but there are significant differences among different generators. CSIRO has not accounted for greenhouse gas emissions in its comparisons.

7. Substitute or complement?

Generators, storage and transmission can be substitutes, meaning building one avoids building another (locating generators close to cities might avoid building transmission lines), while at other times they can complement (building renewables creates incentives to build batteries). A realistic comparison must account for this. Again, blanket generalisations are not possible – it has to be case by case.

8. Convention

Conventions on the allocation of costs greatly affect comparison. For example, the way transmission costs (or access rights) are allocated between new entrants and incumbents affects comparison of generators. Different approaches produce quite different costs.

9. Assumptions versus reality

There’s often a wide gap between how generators are assumed to operate, and how they actually operate. Once built, generators respond not just to the availability of wind, sun, coal, water, gas and so on, but also to the physical system and market prices. Most coal plants in the National Electricity Market no longer produce electricity consistently, due to being pushed out by renewable generators which cost almost nothing to operate. Similarly, wind farm operators respond to abundant solar by cutting generation during the middle of the day.

GenCost does not account for this. But it can be very significant. Our analysis suggests market prices and transmission could push average costs for solar power in Victoria’s Murray region 62% higher than the market operators is modelling.

Known Unknowns

Of these nine factors, GenCost ignores the last five. While the report takes the other factors into account, different approaches for each of these would give very different answers.

Comparing the average costs of wind, solar, nuclear, hydro and coal power sounds like a simple thing to do. But the only plausible answer is: “it depends on many barely known and many unknown things”.

It would be constructive to seek to identify those things and their relationships to each other, rather than attempting to provide certainty.

Our energy market operator and chief scientific agency have got themselves into the position of providing supposedly definitive, objective answers to questions that do not lend themselves to definitive, objective answers.

In response to the claims made in this article, a CSIRO spokesperson said:

GenCost reports are updated annually to provide cost range estimates for new build electricity generation technologies using the best available data and modelling common in the industry.

Open to transparent public consultation and industry input, Gencost is policy- and technology-neutral and provides representative cost range estimates. Specific projects are not in scope for GenCost and investors must do their own deeper studies and analysis to determine all potential costs to a specific project.

What Should We Do?

In place of commissioning grand plans, our governments should instead broadly indicate their desired direction, consistent with the legislated economy-wide emission reduction targets.

If our government finds it politically unviable to price greenhouse gas pollution, it must provide financial support for clean generation expansion consistent with the legislated emission reduction policy and the governments’ broad direction.

Beyond that, policymakers, CSIRO and the market operator, AEMO, should get out of the way and leave it to the industry, customers and other interested parties to find agreement.

This is roughly how things worked before GenCost and the ISP. We can move forward by winding the clock back.

Bruce Mountain, Director, Victoria Energy Policy Centre, Victoria University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Without funding from Japan, many of Australia’s gas projects wouldn’t have gone ahead. Massive public loans from Japanese taxpayers are propping up Australia’s now-enormous fossil gas industry. Japan is also becoming a major gas trader and today exports more gas to other countries than it imports from Australia.

Even as the world rapidly shifts to a clean energy future, Japan is emerging as a fossil fuel holdout. The world’s fourth biggest economy, Japan has long been dependent on foreign sources of fossil fuels. Even as China has filled its deserts with solar farms, Japan has focused on gas.

These projects make it harder for Australia to achieve its climate goals and undermine the shift to clean energy industries. New gas projects threaten to divert workforce and investment away from these export industries.

But this can change. As Australia spends big on green power, green manufacturing and green exports – as part of the government’s Future Made in Australia policies – the enduring partnership between the two nations could go green.

Developing new clean energy partnerships with energy-hungry Asian nations such as Japan, China and South Korea could boost climate cooperation, grow new clean energy exports and promote investment.

Japanese Funding, Australian Gas

Worried about energy security, Japan is subsidising new offshore gas projects in Australia which probably wouldn’t go ahead otherwise.

Japan is the world’s largest provider of international public finance for gas production. While other nations – including Australia – have pledged to end international finance for fossil fuels, Japan has kept the money flowing.

For example, last month, the Japan Bank for International Cooperation provided Australia’s biggest gas corporation, Woodside, with A$1.5 billion in loans to develop the Scarborough gas field offshore from Western Australia. Japanese power utility JERA also received $1.2billion from the Japanese bank to acquire a 15% stake in the project, gaining rights to a share of the liquefied natural gas (LNG) produced.

Without this kind of financial support, new gas projects would be less likely to proceed.

It is not certain other funders would step in. Gas production in Australia is relatively expensive, due to remote locations and high operating costs. Over the past decade, Australian gas projects have typically been delivered late and over budget and have delivered poor returns for investors.

In the years ahead, Australian gas projects will struggle to deliver gas at internationally competitive prices. In 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggered a surge in demand for LNG. Now, the world is facing a massive oversupply of gas.

In two years time, large new LNG volumes will come online from lower-cost producers in the Middle East – mainly Qatar – and in North America, just as demand for gas falls in key markets. The Australian government’s own analysis projects a much lower price of LNG from these producers than the cost of production in Australia.

If we left it up to the market, Australia’s increasingly uncompetitive gas exports would lose market share. But it’s not being left up to the market. Japan is underwriting new gas projects to make money-losing projects seem viable. And that makes it much harder for Australia to shift to a lucrative green economy.

Tokyo’s Neon Lights Will Keep Glowing

Last year, Japanese ambassador Yamagami Shingo claimed Australian gas exports were crucial to keeping the neon lights of Tokyo glowing.

In reality, Japan is now reselling more LNG to other Asian nations than it imports from Australia. Japanese gas corporations are contracted to buy more gas over the next decade than Japan will use at home, and are planning to sell excess gas in other markets in Asia.

This is a direct result of official policy, which aims to create new demand for gas in Southeast Asia by offering financial support for gas import terminals and gas-fired power plants and supporting Japanese corporations to supply that demand.

This is not hidden. It’s an open goal. By 2030, the Japanese government wants its corporations to “handle” 100 million tonnes of LNG each year – far more than Japan will use to meet its own energy needs.

Why? Japan’s government sees maintaining influence in the region’s LNG market as important to its own energy security.

Renewables Offer Japan True Energy Security

The gas industry has tried to brand gas as cleaner than coal or a transition fuel. In reality, gas is a dangerous fossil fuel. It’s largely methane, 80 times more potent in heating the planet than carbon dioxide. Methane has added almost a third (30%) of the extra heat building up since the industrial revolution.

Woodside chief Meg O’Neill claims Australian gas exports “can help Asia to decarbonise by replacing coal”. But gas can be just as polluting as coal. Methane leaks are very common across the gas supply chain. You only need a very low amount of leakage for gas to be on par with coal for pollution.

While Japan buys and resells Australian gas, it’s own power grid is greening. The government now plans to double the role of renewables – rising from 18% of power generation in 2019 to 37% by 2030 – while gas-fired power shrinks.

Japan’s demand for gas at home is already falling. It fell 18% in the decade to 2022. In 2023 alone, demand for gas fell by 8%.

Shifting to renewables even faster would improve Japan’s energy security by reducing dependence on imported gas. Recent analysis suggests Japan could achieve a 90% clean energy system by 2035.

Without Japanese Funds, Australian Gas Would Be Dwindling

In the five years to 2017, Australia’s gas industry grew enormously. By 2019 Australia became the world’s largest LNG exporter. Analysis from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis points out this is remarkable given how remote and relatively small Australia’s gas reserves are.

International subsidies – including Japan’s largesse – helped turn Australia into a fossil fuel giant. But these subsidies will not serve our interests long term. Continuing to allow subsidised investment in new gas projects diverts investment, workforce, and supply-chain capacity away from the green industries the government wants to grow for the future.

This doesn’t mean turning our back on Japan. Japan has a huge need for energy. But it can get it without resorting to fossil fuels. Japan could partner with Australia to supply critical minerals and green metals for batteries and renewables, green ammonia for fertilisers and industry, and green hydrogen for transport and industry.

Acknowledgements: Ben McLeod (Quantitative analyst, Climate Council) and Josh Runciman (Lead analyst, Australian Gas, IEEFA) provided data used in the article.

Wesley Morgan, Research Fellow, Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton on Tuesday reiterated the Coalition’s support for the Paris climate agreement, following suggestions he might walk away from the deal. But he fuelled speculation the Coalition plans to scrap Australia’s current 2030 emissions target and confirmed he won’t announce the Coalition’s proposed target before the election.

Dutton’s comments follow days of confusion about where the Coalition stands on Australia’s emissions reduction goals. Nationals MPs Barnaby Joyce and Keith Pitt reportedly want the Coalition to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. And over the weekend, Dutton said the Albanese government “just have no hope of achieving the [2030] targets and there’s no sense signing up to targets you don’t have any prospect of achieving”.

Speaking on Tuesday, Dutton said of the Coalition’s climate policy:

we’re not going to send the economy into freefall, and families bankrupt, through an ideologically based approach, which is what Anthony Albanese is doing at the moment.

So what would happen if a Dutton government weakened Australia’s 2030 targets – a 43% cut on 2005 levels – or if the Coalition’s more conservative elements succeeded and the Coalition abandoned Australia’s Paris commitment altogether?

At this stage, it’s virtually impossible to imagine Australia walking away from the Paris deal. But even watering down our 2030 targets would have significant diplomatic and economic repercussions. Either way, climate policy is looming as a major issue heading into the next election.

The 2030 Targets Must Stay

Let’s say a Coalition government decided to drop Australia’s 2030 targets, but remain signed up to the Paris agreement, and the broader goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.

This would technically be possible. However, it is clearly inconsistent with the spirit of the Paris agreement, which asks that nations ratchet-up their emissions reduction commitments over time.

And abandoning the 2030 goal would make it incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for Australia to reach net-zero by 2050. As others have noted, the 43% target already falls short of what is needed for Australia to do its share on emissions reduction under the Paris Agreement, and is less ambitious than the targets adopted by our international peers.

This brings us to Coalition suggestions that Australia has no prospect of meeting the 43% target, and so should not be signed up to it. This is a ridiculous argument.

First, the 43% target is not unachievable. The latest forecasts suggest Australia is on track to cutting emissions by 42% by 2030.

Emissions targets signal that a government is working towards something. They encourage aspiration and action. They incentivise investment in some areas – such as renewable energy – and disincentivise investment elsewhere, such as in fossil fuels. A target’s legitimacy isn’t determined by whether it is wholly met.

Having said that, the Coalition’s line of attack should be a wake-up call to the Albanese government to make sure the 43% target is achieved.

What About Nuclear?

The Coalition’s climate and energy policy hinges, controversially, on the introduction of a nuclear power industry in Australia.

Nationals leader David Littleproud on Monday said the Coalition remains committed to the goal of net-zero by 2050, but most emissions reduction would occur towards the end of that period when nuclear power is up and running. He said the Coalition would have interim targets out to 2050 “but we won’t have a linear pathway” to net-zero.

The idea that nuclear could be part of the solution to Australia’s energy transition is nonsense. Evidence abounds to support this, including a report by the CSIRO last month which found a nuclear plant would cost at least A$8.6 billion, and electricity from nuclear power in Australia would be at least 50% more expensive than solar and wind.

Establishing a nuclear energy capacity in Australia would be prohibitively expensive and just not feasible. What’s more, the long-term economic costs would be huge. Not least are the eye-watering costs of dealing with the effects of climate change should the world, including Australia, not reduce emissions dramatically.

Australia On The Global Stage

Increasingly around the world, nations that fail to act on climate change risk being penalised economically in the form of carbon tariffs. These are taxes applied to imports, according to the volume of greenhouse gas emissions released in their production.

The policy is designed to ensure manufacturers operating in nations with strict emissions policies in place, such as a carbon price, are not undercut by manufacturers in higher-emitting countries. The European Union introduced such a policy in 2023. The US is also considering a version of the policy.

Australian exporters risk significant economic costs if our federal government does not adopt a serious emissions reduction strategy.

Then there is the question of Australia’s international reputation. Stepping back on climate change goals does not align with the image we have of ourselves: as a good international citizen that helps advance responses to challenging transnational problems.

More directly, it would badly undermine Australia’s relationships with its Pacific neighbours, for whom climate change is an existential threat – perhaps even pushing those countries closer to China.

The results of the next presidential election in the United States, however, pose a danger. There, conservatives have reportedly drafted a plan for a future Trump administration to leave the Paris agreement, as it did in 2020.

If a major global power, and Australia’s biggest ally, withdraws from the deal, it may provide cover for a future Australian government to do the same.

The Climate Wars Continue

From a domestic political point of view, it’s unclear what the Coalition hopes to achieve by raising the prospect of a walk-back on climate action. Such a policy would, for example, make it acutely difficult for the Coalition to win back teal seats it lost at the last election.

A recent Lowy poll found 57% of Australians think global warming “is a serious and pressing problem and that we should begin taking steps now, even if it involves significant costs”.

Following the last election, hopes were high that Australia’s frustrating climate wars may be over. The results suggested the Coalition’s only pathway back to power would have to involve a legitimate climate policy. The Coalition’s latest rhetoric suggests it does not agree.

Matt McDonald, Professor of International Relations, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This week’s announcement of the government’s plans to reopen New Zealand’s territorial waters to oil drilling comes as no surprise. All three coalition parties campaigned on reversing the 2018 ban on offshore oil exploration.

But it flies in the face of projections that demand for oil could peak as early as this decade.

Minister for Resources Shane Jones has confirmed the government plans to reverse the ban later this year and seeks to incentivise oil investors by paying them a bond in case their drilling rights are cancelled by future governments.

The government is also considering weakening a law that requires oil and gas permit holders to pay for the decommissioning and clean-up of wells. This law was passed in 2021 in response to taxpayers having to pick up a NZ$400 million bill for decommissioning the Tui oil field after the financial collapse of the oil company.

The government’s decisions go against projections by many sources, including the International Energy Agency, that demand for oil will decline soon as we electrify the global transport fleet. Consequently, investment in oil exploration is projected to decline too.

Peak Oil Demand

The use of fossil fuels is due to decline this decade, according to several major oil companies. A 2023 report by Shell projects fossil fuel use dropping rapidly in coming decades, while BP thinks oil demand for combustion has already peaked.

Many large organisations think peak oil demand will happen this decade or the 2030s. This includes the International Energy Agency (IEA), which has predicted demand for oil will peak before 2030.

The Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and Exxon Mobil are bullishly stating they see oil growth continuing, albeit at a slower rate, into the 2040s. But at the same time, Exxon Mobil is investing significantly in renewable energy, lithium mining and carbon capture technology.

Even if oil demand peaks later than forecast, the progression from prospecting to exploration and mining can take decades. Projects prospected now may not yield fuel until demand is already in decline.

We Have Enough Oil To Make The Energy Transition

We’ve known for some time that remaining fossil fuels must stay in the ground to meet the Paris Agreement goal of keeping the world below 2°C above pre-industrial temperatures.

The last UN climate summit – COP28 held late last year – agreed to “transition away from fossil fuels” and signalled the “beginning of the end” of the fossil fuel era.

But further to this, the IEA has stated we don’t need any new fossil fuel exploration or development, with enough projects already in existence or planned to meet global energy demand forecasts to 2050. New research agrees, saying governments around the world should stop issuing new oil, gas and coal licences.

In line with decreasing oil demand, BP also projects declining investment in new oil and gas infrastructure globally in coming decades. The IEA’s World Energy Investment report notes an ongoing hesitancy about oil and gas investment comes partly from concerns about downward long-term demand projections.

New Zealand does not import natural gas, but our gas fields have been yielding less than forecast for some years. Therefore, to remain independent, some more maintenance drilling or limited new expansion may be needed to see us through the energy transition. But using taxpayer dollars to pay international oil companies to come to New Zealand doesn’t make economic or environmental sense.

The Momentum For The Energy Transition Is Unstoppable

The good news is that the world’s energy sector, which produces almost 75% of global emissions, is now transitioning at an ever increasing rate. Significant amounts of renewable electricity generation (which is now far cheaper than fossil fuel generation) are being built, with global renewable capacity set to double this decade.

New Zealand’s electricity system is already 85% renewable. Significant investment in renewable generation is under way ($42 billion by 2030) to supply the approximate doubling of electricity needed for the expected mass electrification of transport and industrial heat by 2050.

Renewables are also being built to replace retiring coal plant. Global coal consumption peaked in 2013 and has flatlined since. In 2021, the COP26 global climate meeting in Glasgow agreed to phase down coal, and 60 national (and 51 sub-national) governments have joined the Powering Past Coal Alliance, committing them to phasing out all coal-fired power plants and not building new ones.

Other uses of fossil fuels are in industrial heat and transport. Electric vehicle demand is skyrocketing globally, with the global fleet growing from 300,000 vehicles in 2013 to 41 million in 2023. With prices falling, electric vehicles are expected to reach price parity with internal combustion engine cars as early as 2025.

Most large global vehicle manufacturers have pledged to produce only electric vehicles by 2030 or 2040. And 30 countries, including New Zealand, have signed the Zero Emissions Vehicle declaration to ban new petrol or diesel vehicle sales entirely by 2040.

New Zealand Should Be Enabling The Energy Transition

The world is moving very rapidly away from coal and oil, and eventually all fossil fuels. A growing number of countries require adherence to Paris Agreement pledges by their trading partners. The recently signed free trade deal between New Zealand and the EU imposes trade sanctions if Paris pledges are not met.

New Zealand’s current emissions reduction policies take us on a track that is much less than our per capita global fair share to limit warming.

New Zealand should be moving away from oil drilling and instead invest in the energy transition, including decarbonisation of industrial heat, subsidising low-emitting vehicles and charging high emitters, better public transport and bike lanes, increased EV charging infrastructure, and “urban mining” (recycling) of batteries and other technology currently filling rubbish dumps.

Jen Purdie, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Sustainability, University of Otago

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In parts of South Australia, long stretches of beach are often blanketed in large patches of pink sand. Strong swells can dump drifts of reddish grains of garnet along the shore – but the origin of these colourful crystals has until now been a mystery.

Garnet is rare in beach sand, as it is destroyed by prolonged exposure to the waves and currents of the ocean. If we find large amounts of garnet in beach sand, it means there must be a local source of garnet-bearing rock. But where is this rock?

The hunt for the source of South Australia’s pink sand took us thousands of kilometres and half a billion years back in time, to a previously undiscovered mountain range we believe is now buried deep beneath the Antarctic ice sheet. Our new study is published in Communications Earth & Environment.

A Local Source?

Geologists get excited when we find garnet in beach sand or other sediments, because these minerals grow deep in Earth’s crust, in the same kind of conditions in which diamonds are formed.

One way diamonds or garnets can reach the surface is via carrot-shaped volcanic structures called kimberlite pipes. There are kimberlites (and diamonds) to be found in South Australia – at Eurelia, for example. However, these deposits are far from the coast, are not very abundant, and are only around 170–190 million years old – so they are unlikely to be the source of our beach garnets.

Another way garnet can reach the surface is via prolonged erosion.

Garnet typically forms in greater volumes in places where the crust is thick, such as under mountains. As the mountains erode, the garnet may be revealed as a record of the former mountain belt.

So another possible origin for the beach garnets is the erosion of the Adelaide Fold Belt. This mountain belt, which stretched north from Adelaide for hundreds of kilometres, developed between 514 million and 490 million years ago.

A third possible source is the Gawler Craton, a huge slab of ancient rock beneath South Australia with outcrops in the Adelaide Fold Belt. The Gawler Craton contains plenty of garnet, which formed in several episodes between 3.3 billion and 1.4 billion years ago.

To find the source of our beach sand garnets, we set out to find their ages. Very old garnets could be from the Gawler Craton, while younger ones would have the Adelaide Fold Belt as a more likely origin.

A Timing Mismatch

We analysed several hundred grains of coastal garnet, and found the majority of them formed around 590 million years ago. Far from answering our questions, this result only raised more.

The beach sand garnets were far too young to have come from the Gawler Craton, but too old to have come from the eroding Adelaide Fold Belt. In fact, this time around 590 million years ago is thought to have been a tectonically quiet period in the region, where we would not expect garnet to grow.

Our dating results effectively ruled out a local source for the garnets. So what was left?

Long-Distance Travellers

If the garnets did not come from a local source, we can say two things about them. First, they must have travelled in a way that would not grind them to smithereens. Second, they must have been stored locally in a protected environment before finding their way onto the beaches.

A possible solution that meets both these criteria can be found at Hallet Cove Conservation Park, located on the South Australian coast around 20 kilometres south of Adelaide.

Here we find exposed sedimentary rocks that were formed around 280 million years ago, during a very icy phase of Earth’s history. The ice is important, because glaciers and icebergs can transport large volumes of rock over long distances without damaging their internal structure.

Furthermore, garnets found in glacial sediments on Kangaroo Island, which were deposited around the same time as the Hallet Cove sediments, were dated to around 590 million years as well. The garnets were not born in these deposits, but were transported into them by ice flow.

A Former Land Bridge

So, if the beach garnets were stored in sedimentary glacial deposits along the South Australian coast since the Late Palaeozoic Ice Age, before being washed onto the shore, where did they come from originally?

During the Late Palaeozoic Ice Age around 280 million years ago, Australia was connected to Antarctica in a large landmass called Gondwana, covered by a massive ice sheet.

Reconstructions of ice flow at this time suggest glaciers would have brought ice northwest from what are now the Transantarctic Mountains in East Antarctica.

The Transantarctic Mountains are the expression of an older mountain belt, the Ross Orogen, which started developing around 550 million years ago but was not experiencing any peak garnet-forming conditions until around 520 million years ago – 60 million years after the garnet in the pink sands. So we are getting warmer, but the Transantarctic Mountains are not a suitable source either.

A Hidden Treasure

There is one outcrop of rock in East Antarctica where garnets of the right age have been found, near the Skelton Glacier in Southern Victoria Land. However, such a small outcrop could not have produced the large volume of garnet we see on Australian shores.

This outcrop sits at the edge of a colossal area of some 2 million square kilometres buried beneath a thick ice sheet. We postulate that this area contains abundant garnet that grew in an unknown mountain belt around 590 million years ago.

It is currently not possible to sample the rock under this ice sheet to confirm our theory. But it is conceivable that millions of years of ice transport eroded the bedrock beneath, and transported the ground-up rock – including garnets – northeastwards towards the area that has now split into the coastlines of Antarctica and Australia.

The transported rock was then delivered to the South Australian coast some 280 million years ago and stored in sedimentary deposits such as Hallet Cove. Here it sat undisturbed until erosion eventually released the garnets into the sea – and then, finally, onto South Australia’s beaches.

Stijn Glorie, Associate Professor of Geology, University of Adelaide; Jack Mulder, Lecturer in Geology, University of Adelaide, and Sharmaine Verhaert, PhD Candidate, Geology, University of Adelaide

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

As humans, we grow up playing with other children. Animals of many species likewise play with their peers. But why?

Play has its costs, especially for young animals. It uses energy that could help them grow, and it can make them more vulnerable to predators.

Of course, play is fun and highly rewarding. However, it’s not clear that these immediate benefits are worth the potentially great costs.

In a new study, my colleagues and I shed light on why play is so important – at least for the male Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphins of Shark Bay in Western Australia. Among these famously frisky cetaceans, those who spend more time playing as juveniles end up siring more offspring as adults. The research is published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

What’s The Point Of Play?

One possible explanation for juvenile play is that it serves as practice of adult behaviours, such as mating and fighting. If this is correct, we would expect it ultimately makes individuals better able to survive or reproduce as adults.

It’s not unusual for juvenile animals to engage in sexual or combat-like play behaviours. However, there is little evidence to link play to long-term reproductive benefits. In some species (such as yellow-bellied marmots) this kind of play may lead to having more offspring, but in others (such as meerkats) it appears to have no effect.

Dolphins have a reputation for being playful, but we know very little about how and why dolphins play.

How Young Dolphins Play

Our study was conducted on dolphins in Shark Bay in WA. At this site, more than 40 years of research has revealed lifelong friendships among adult males, who repeatedly cooperate in alliances to find mates and compete for them against rival alliances. Two to three males work together to keep an individual female with them for hours to weeks using joint action, in which they synchronise their physical and vocal behaviour.

In Shark Bay, juvenile play resembles these adult events, termed consortships. In small same- or mixed-sex groups, juveniles take turns playing the adult “female” and “male” roles. As in adult mating, the “males” contact the “female’s” genital slit with their beaks or genitals. Sometimes, the “males” take turns, but other times they synchronise their actions.

We examined whether male juvenile play occurred in ways that make sense if playing together is practice for key adult reproductive behaviours. We also wanted to find out whether play is associated with greater success at siring offspring years later in adulthood.

Play Roles, Allies And Pops

To study patterns of play, we observed specific juvenile males for hours at a time to record details of their behaviour and that of their groupmates. We observed each male several times over a period of two years, and also recorded the dolphins’ vocalisations using underwater microphones.

We found juvenile males spent more time in the “male” role during play than females. Juvenile males with strong social bonds, who are likely to form an alliance as adults, were more likely to synchronise their play behaviour. If play is practice of synchronised adult behaviour, it makes sense for males to practice with their future allies.

During play, juvenile males also produced pops, a coercive vocal signal used by adult males to tell females to stay close. As in consortships, juvenile males specifically produced pops when females were present and both sexes were in their adult roles. Compared to the regular rhythm of adult male pops, juvenile male pops were erratic, suggesting they need practice to achieve the adult rhythm.

More Time Playing Linked To Siring More Offspring

Juvenile male dolphins play in ways that appear to be practice of future adult mating behaviour. The final test of this was to see whether spending more time playing in the “male” role as juveniles led to siring more offspring in adulthood.

For this analysis, we leveraged past observations of juvenile male play from 1998 to 2003, along with up to 22 years of genetic paternity data for each male.

Dolphins in this population can live well into their 40s, and undergo an extended juvenile period where males do not sexually mature until between the ages of 12 and 15 years. We therefore needed decades of data on individual males to look at long-term benefits of social play.

Males who spent more time as juveniles playing at their future adult roles sired more offspring as adults.

This tells us social play is more than just fun. It’s an important behaviour for male dolphins that gives them time to practice critical reproductive skills several years before they are needed, and, it appears to make them more successful as adults.

As this practice is happening, the young males are also strengthening friendships that will mature into lifelong alliances. Does play also help them choose their friends? In future research, we plan to find out.

Kathryn Holmes, Staff Scientist, Sarasota Dolphin Research Program, Brookfield Zoo Chicago, and PhD Researcher, The University of Western Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

When people think about the risks of climate change, the idea of abrupt changes is pretty scary. Movies like “The Day After Tomorrow” feed that fear, with visions of unimaginable storms and populations fleeing to escape rapidly changing temperatures.

While Hollywood clearly takes liberties with the speed and magnitude of disasters, several recent studies have raised real-world alarms that a crucial ocean current that circulates heat to northern countries might shut down this century, with potentially disastrous consequences.

That scenario has happened in the past, most recently more than 16,000 years ago. However, it relies on Greenland shedding a lot of ice into the ocean.

Our new research, published in the journal Science, suggests that while Greenland is indeed losing huge and worrisome volumes of ice right now, that might not continue for long enough to shut down the current on its own. A closer look at evidence from the past shows why.

Blood And Water

The Atlantic current system distributes heat and nutrients on a global scale, much like the human circulatory system distributes heat and nutrients around the body.

Warm water from the tropics circulates northward along the U.S. Atlantic coast before crossing the Atlantic. As some of the warm water evaporates and the surface water cools, it becomes saltier and denser. Denser water sinks, and this colder, denser water circulates back south at depth. The variations in heat and salinity fuel the pumping heart of the system.

If the Atlantic circulation system weakened, it could lead to a world of climate chaos.

Ice sheets are made of fresh water, so the rapid release of icebergs into the Atlantic Ocean can lower the ocean’s salinity and slow the pumping heart. If the surface water is no longer able to sink deep and the circulation collapses, dramatic cooling would likely occur across Europe and North America. Both the Amazon rain forest and Africa’s Sahel region would become dryer, and Antarctica’s warming and melting would accelerate, all in a matter of years to decades.

Today, the Greenland ice sheet is melting rapidly, and some scientists worry that the Atlantic current system may be headed for a climate tipping point this century. But is that worry warranted?

To answer that, we need to look back in time.

A Radioactive Discovery

In the 1980s, a junior scientist named Hartmut Heinrich and his colleagues extracted a series of deep-sea sediment cores from the ocean floor to study whether nuclear waste could be safely buried in the deep North Atlantic.

Sediment cores contain a history of everything that accumulated on that part of the ocean floor over hundreds of thousands of years. Heinrich found several layers with lots of mineral grains and rock fragments from land.

The sediment grains were too large to have been carried to the middle of the ocean by the wind or ocean currents alone. Heinrich realized they must have been brought there by icebergs, which had picked up the rock and mineral when the icebergs were still part of glaciers on land.

The layers with the most rock and mineral debris, from a time when the icebergs must have come out in force, coincided with severe weakening of the Atlantic current system. Those periods are now known as Heinrich events.

As paleoclimate scientists, we use natural records such as sediment cores to understand the past. By measuring uranium isotopes in the sediments, we were able to determine the deposition rate of sediments dropped by icebergs. The amount of debris allowed us to estimate how much fresh water those icebergs added to the ocean and compare it with today to assess whether history might repeat itself in the near future.

Why A Shutdown Isn’t Likely Soon

So, is the Atlantic current system headed for a climate tipping point because of Greenland melting? We think it’s unlikely in the coming decades.

While Greenland is losing huge volumes of ice right now – worryingly comparable to a midrange Heinrich event – the ice loss will likely not continue for long enough to shut down the current on its own.

Icebergs are much more effective at disrupting the current than meltwater from land, in part because icebergs can carry fresh water directly out to the locations where the current sinks. Future warming, however, will force the Greenland ice sheet to recede away from the coast too soon to deliver enough fresh water by iceberg.

The strength of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, is projected to decline 24% to 39% by 2100. By then, Greenland’s iceberg formation will be closer to the weakest Heinrich events of the past. Heinrich events, in contrast, lasted 200 years or so.

Instead of icebergs, meltwater pouring into the Atlantic at the island’s edge is projected to become the leading cause of Greenland’s thinning. Meltwater still sends fresh water into the ocean, but it mixes with seawater and tends to move along the coast rather than directly freshening the open ocean as drifting icebergs do.

That Doesn’t Mean The Current Isn’t At Risk

The future trajectory of the Atlantic current system will likely be determined by a combination of the decelerating but more effective icebergs and the accelerating but less influential surface runoff. That will be compounded by rising ocean surface temperatures that could further slow the current.

So, the Earth’s pumping heart could still be at risk, but history suggests that the risk is not as imminent as some people fear.

In “The Day After Tomorrow,” a slowdown of the Atlantic current system froze New York City. Based on our research, we may take some comfort in knowing that such a scenario is unlikely in our lifetimes. Nevertheless, robust efforts to stop climate change remain necessary to ensure the protection of future generations.

Yuxin Zhou, Postdoctoral Scholar in Earth Science, University of California, Santa Barbara and Jerry McManus, Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Columbia University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

High-profile legal disputes, such as the current case between coal giant Adani and the Queensland government, show Australia’s approach to managing large mining projects is flawed.

Many projects are allowed to go ahead even though the environmental impacts are uncertain. The idea is any damage to the environment can be managed along the way. This has been the norm for large coal mines and gas developments in Australia since 2013. That’s when legislation known as the Water Trigger came into effect – ironically, to protect water resources from these industries.

But our research shows this approach – known as “adaptive management” – often creates more problems than it solves. This is particularly true when it comes to groundwater, where impacts are difficult to predict in advance, and monitoring may only detect problems when it is too late to act.

These problems include depleting or contaminating groundwater, drying up springs of major cultural and ecological significance, altering river flows and reducing water quality. There are worrying signs the Adani mine is putting the Doongmabulla springs at risk.

What Is Adaptive Management?

Adaptive management seeks to address uncertainty in environmental impact assessments. The approach can be broadly summarised as “learning by doing”.

The original intention was to allow decisions to be made about development proposals without full certainty about the environmental impacts. Ongoing monitoring and continuously updated modelling is then supposed to improve the knowledge base over time. This should help identify new or improved management strategies.

Environmental objectives are supposed to be clearly outlined at the outset. Objectives may include the protection of a key habitat, water resource or region of high ecological significance.

Establishing these objectives is a lengthy process of consultation with groups who have a stake in the project, such as people who live nearby and Traditional Owners with deep connections to the land. These discussions are meant to continue throughout the project as new data and knowledge come to light.

However our research shows adaptive management is often poorly suited to managing impacts on groundwater. This is especially true in cases where:

• there are long lag times between project activity (such as groundwater extraction lowering the water table before pit excavation) and the full effects on the groundwater system

• the impacts could be irreversible, meaning actions taken to address a change in the condition of the environment may come too late to stop permanent damage.

Protecting Doongmabulla Springs

The Adani coal mine was embroiled in many years of controversy about potential impacts on water, climate and endangered animals. When it began operating, scientists warned it was too close to the sacred Doongabulla Springs and risked permanently drying them up.

Our analysis published in 2020 found problems with the miner’s reported understanding of the groundwater system supporting the Doongmabulla Springs. Little effort was made to plan specific actions to protect the springs if monitoring later showed such action was required.

We argue Adani’s use of adaptive management, which the environment minister accepted in approving the mine, was not fit for the agreed purpose of protecting the springs.

The Queensland Department of Environment, Science and Innovation appeared to echo these views in the Supreme Court last month.

The legal action was brought by Adani in 2023, after the Department refused to accept updated groundwater modelling the company had to submit within two years of opening the mine. Instead, the Department issued an Environment Protection Order, which prevents any underground mining until the company:

can demonstrate to the satisfaction of the department that the activity can be conducted in a way that does not exceed the approved impacts

This followed a review by CSIRO and Geoscience Australia. The review found the company’s groundwater model was “unable to support a robust uncertainty analysis and therefore confidence in the range of predicted impacts is low”.

In court, Department staff testified that deficiencies in modelling and gaps in groundwater monitoring mean the “risk of potential impacts (which are potentially irreversible) to the [Doongmabulla] springs is increased while [mining] continues”.

This echoes similar warnings by groundwater researchers prior to the initial approval of the mine.

These springs are vital to the cultural life of the Wangan and Jagalingou people, who testified to the United Nations that the loss of these springs would decimate their culture.

A Way Forward

Protracted reform of Australia’s environmental laws provides an opportunity to establish clear criteria for when adaptive management can be used.

We argue alternative, more precautionary approaches should be adopted when there is a long interval between the mining activity and potentially irreversible damage.

For example, limits should be placed on the mine’s location, size and water extraction rates. This should be informed by detailed upfront research into the site’s water systems, geology and the ecosystem’s tolerance for changes in water levels and quality.

If adaptive management is to be used in mining projects, there must be a reasonable prospect (and a clear mechanism) to detect and prevent environmental harm. There must also be clarity around when project activities must cease. In line with best practice adaptive management, guidance should be provided to ensure miners clearly outline:

• how monitoring data will be used, in an ongoing process of revising both impact predictions and management strategies
• what specific actions will be taken, and at what point in time if data show unpredicted greater than expected impacts
• how stakeholders will be involved throughout the process of setting and reviewing environmental objectives and monitoring criteria.

Unless these issues are urgently addressed, the “learning by doing” approach will continue to put Australian ecosystems and water resources at risk.

Matthew Currell, Professor of Environmental Engineering, School of Engineering, Griffith University and Adrian Werner, Professor of Hydrogeology, Flinders University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

South Australian oil and gas company Santos has been hit with a A$2.75 million fine for breaching its record-keeping obligations.

The Federal Court ordered the fine for Santos Direct, a wholly owned subsidiary, for over 4,700 breaches of the National Gas Rules. The fine follows proceedings brought by the Australian Energy Regulator.

It’s not the first energy company the regulator has pursued recently for breaches to the gas rules. Last year, energy retailer EnergyAustralia and chemical company Incitec Pivot paid $406,000 and $223,000, respectively, for alleged infringements. Energy distributor Jemena also paid an infringement.

So what are these rules? Why do the breaches matter?

Of Gas Rules And Record-Keeping

The breaches themselves sound dense. They concerned the non-reporting of what are known as “renominations” for uncontracted gas in day ahead auctions, which are conducted to determine if there’s excess capacity in pipelines which can be sold.

The fossil gas used in homes and industries is transported around Australia largely by pipeline. To boost competition in the east coast gas market, Australian state and federal governments introduced the day ahead auction in 2019 to let companies bid for access to unused capacity in these pipelines.

Day-ahead nominations determine the transportation capacity available in gas pipelines available for auction. To make this auction possible, companies that have existing entitlements to capacity have to make a nomination a day in advance of when they intend to move gas from one location to another, specifying how much capacity they intend to use the next day. Any spare capacity is then made available in the auction.

Renominations occur after the cut-off times on a gas day and they vary an earlier nomination for the use of transportation capacity.

Renominations can only be made in limited circumstances for specific reasons. Recording renominations is important because variations can affect auction prices if, for example, there ends up being less capacity so that participants pay more than they needed to.

Santos admitted it failed to make contemporaneous records for material gas renominations across six different gas auction facilities in breach of the National Gas Rules.

The Federal Court held that while the breach was not intentional and arose from inadequate internal compliance mechanisms, the significant penalty was necessary. It took account of the multiple reporting breaches, as well as the size and financial position of Santos, whose net profit from 2019 to 2022 ranged between $720 and $894 million per year.

Justice Penelope Neskovcin noted compliant record keeping is a critical part of ensuring the integrity and capacity of the auction. Proper records allow the regulator to understand the nature and frequency of renominations, and in so doing, ensure it is able to properly monitor the market.

While no actual loss occurred, the court focused on the potential damage that could have occurred given this action could have meant participants paid more in the auction.

Why Did The AER Pursue This?

As the regulator states in its media release:

timely and accurate record keeping is crucial in allowing the AER to effectively monitor the compliance of participants in the capacity auction.

In particular, the AER’s role of investigating and enforcing provisions […] [prohibiting] participants from making false or misleading day ahead nominations may be significantly hampered without the benefit of compliant records of material renominations.

In her judgement, Neskovcin said the penalty should be a “deterrent” against such conduct. She separately stated:

[t]he failure to comply with [the rule], which has a substantive role in protecting the proper functioning of the capacity auction, heightens the need for deterrence in respect of this conduct

The court emphasised the public interest underpinning clear, transparent and compliant reporting in accordance with the requirements of the National Gas Laws. It noted that Santos, as a major Australian gas and oil exploration and production company making hundreds of millions of dollars in profits over the relevant period, had to take full responsibility for its contraventions.

Samantha Hepburn, Professor, Deakin Law School, Deakin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The vast majority of Australians (87%) live within 50 kilometres of a coastline. The coast offers scenery, swimming and cooling from the sea.

But the problem is, coastlines as we know them are going to change. Sea-level rise is accelerating. As seas inch higher, storm surges can reach further inland and coastal erosion intensifies. Australia’s coasts are not immune.

Low-lying areas are particularly vulnerable, such as towns around Western Port Bay in Victoria.

So why aren’t we planning for what will happen? In this year’s federal budget funds were allocated to many long-term needs, such as submarines for defence (around a 20-year timeframe), the Inland Rail project for freight (around 15 years), Sunshine Coast rail link for transport (at least 10 years) and long term policies for green manufacturing. State budgets also make long-term commitments.

But there was nothing to prepare our coastal communities for the water. Sea level rise and storm surge are problems which get steadily worse. If we spend to avoid A$1 billion of damage in 2040, that’s the same as avoiding $4 billion in 2070 and $10 billion by 2100, according to the Kompas report released last year by co-author Tom Kompas and colleagues.

The Economic Costs Are Known

If we don’t prepare, we risk damage to housing, the environment, towns and fast-growing coastal and marine industries.

What does sea-level rise cost? The Kompas report found within 75 years, the projected sea-level rise of 0.82 metres coupled with 19% more storm surges would cause staggering economic loss in Victoria, to the tune of $442 billion, flooding 45,000 hectares of inhabited land and affecting almost every coastal community.

Overseas, the scale of the problem is staggering. Estimates for damage to coastal towns and cities in the European Union and United Kingdom are up to $1.4 trillion.

Why Aren’t We Taking This Seriously?

It is good practice to strategically plan for known risks and needs. And we do make long-term plans in many areas. But so far, coastal adaptation is not one of them.

Because greenhouse gas emissions aren’t dropping as needed, we have already locked in a certain level of sea-level rise. That’s because there’s a lag time between emitting gases, warming the atmosphere and oceans, and melting ice flowing into seas.

What does adaptation look like? We have six options:

1. Non-intervention: authorities deliberately let impacts occur. You might use this strategy if it would be too expensive or impossible to protect a coastal area, or if there are no people living there.

2. Avoid: make sure new houses, infrastructure and human uses for coastline are moved away from the area to be affected.

In Australia, local or state-wide sea-level planning benchmarks are used to denote areas where permanent development needs justification. Benchmarks and assessments differ markedly around the nation.

3. Nature-based methods: boost or restore natural systems able to reduce damage.

This method involves working to bring back or improve natural habitats such as coral reefs, sand, shellfish reefs, mangroves, wetlands, saltmarshes, or seagrasses to build up sediment, adding height and natural ways to absorb some of the force of higher seas.

Many Australian states already have examples up and running. In the EU, the REST-COAST program is working on many nature-based restoration projects, while the United States has many examples, such as oyster reef restoration.

4. Managed retreat: relocate away from the danger.

The community of Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana was the first community globally to retreat inland in a planned way. In Vietnam, farms and villages in Hue province have had to relocate away from the sea.

While no Australian community has gone through a managed retreat due to sea level, the Summerlands estate on Phillip Island was relocated to protect Australia’s most famous penguin colony.

5. Accommodate: rebuild to reduce risk.

When disaster strikes, it makes sense to rebuild to reduce future risk. Australian authorities often use this technique after river floods. But there are no known examples of similar work on our coasts. In the US, areas of New Orleans were rebuilt to let future floodwaters escape rather than stay trapped for weeks, as they did after Hurricane Katrina.

6. Protect: build hard physical barriers to stop the water getting through.

Historically, building seawalls and dikes has been the first response authorities reach for. The problem is, these barriers are expensive to build and maintain, especially at the scale that will be needed.

Where To From Here?

What will nudge authorities to start preparing in earnest? Time, for one. As sea-level rise accelerates, authorities will have to act.

But acting late is much more expensive than acting early. We need to avoid the Tragedy of the Horizon, where catastrophe seems far enough away in time that we can delay acting.

What our policymakers need is the social license to act. The planned retreat of the Welsh town of Fairbourne became controversial because when the council’s plans became public, house values plummeted.

To be able to focus on coastal adaptation means decoupling from the political cycle so politicians are supported to make hard but necessary decisions in the interests of the next generation.

A national approach would help. Not everywhere can be protected. It makes sense to focus our efforts on places where many people live, or the special habitats we want to keep.

If we keep putting our heads in the sand, we’ll get soaked.

Acknowledgement: Alan Stokes of the Australian Coastal Councils Association contributed to this article

Anthony Boxshall, Enterprise Fellow, The University of Melbourne; Anna Grage, Visiting Research Fellow, University of Adelaide, and Tom Kompas, Professor of Environmental Economics and Biosecurity, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In announcing Australia’s support for fossil gas all the way to 2050 and beyond, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has pushed his government’s commitment to net zero even further out of reach.

When we published our analysis in December on Climate Action Tracker, a global assessment of government climate action, we warned Australia was unlikely to achieve its net zero target, and rated its efforts as “poor.”

That’s because Australia’s long-term emissions reduction plan – released under the Morrison Coalition government and not yet revised by the Albanese Labor government – resorts to unrealistic technological fixes and emissions offsets.

But it’s also because Labor’s legislated target of a 43% emission cut by 2030 is not aligned with a 1.5°C pathway to net zero by 2050. Studies now show we need around a 70% reduction in net emissions – including the land use, land-use change and forestry sector – by 2030 to put Australia on track to net zero by 2050.

Why is this? Emissions from fossil fuel use, industry, agriculture and waste (for brevity, fossil fuel and industry) are the main driver of global warming. Most studies show these emissions (excluding land use) need about 50% reduction below 2005 levels by 2030 to be on path to net zero by 2050.

But when we take the government’s projections for how much carbon the land use sector will soak up by 2030 into account, the cuts required for fossil fuel and industry emissions are even sharper: around a 70% fall in net emissions by 2030 to give us any chance of reaching net zero by 2050.

Policies designed to increase gas use and production for domestic use and export will make this harder still. Emissions from gas in Australia, including domestic use and the emissions from liquefying natural gas so it can be exported as LNG totalled about 24% of emissions in 2022. Processing gas into LNG accounted for about 9% of national emissions.

Gas Cannot Be Green

Since our assessment, several huge gas projects have moved forward, including the carbon-intensive Barossa Pipeline and the development of the Beetaloo Basin fracking project to supply gas for domestic use in the Northern Territory and for export.

These projects will add between 3.5% and 15% to Australia’s emissions, depending upon the scale of development. Our LNG export industry is by far the largest user of gas, accounting for 84% of all gas production.

Despite what Madeleine King, the federal minister for resources, might say, fossil gas is not a “transition fuel”.

In the last decade it was the leading driver of the global increase in carbon dioxide emissions, contributing to close to half of their growth. In Australia coal and oil domestic emissions fell over the last decade but gas emissions increased by at least 16%.

At present, the only really effective climate action in the Australian economy is the decarbonisation of the power sector. By 2023, renewable energy had reached around 37% of generation.

The states are responsible for the majority of this action, with the exception of Western Australia. While the latest federal budget spent on long-overdue climate measures such as green hydrogen, it’s still far outweighed by spending on fossil fuels.

The government has allocated $22.7 billion over the next decade to the new “Future Made in Australia” policy, which is significant but outweighed by the $14.5 billion per year spent subsidising fossil fuel use.

The policy’s main incentive for hydrogen production is $6.7 billion over ten years, which does not start until 2027-28.

A Paucity Of Policies

In March last year, the Labor government passed its flagship climate policy, the revised Safeguard Mechanism, which it claimed would address industry emissions, including gas production.

But by allowing almost unlimited offsets, this mechanism in fact enables more LNG export and development, with gas producers openly stating the mechanism will not change their plans.

And it hasn’t.

A clear example is the NT government’s recent contract with Tamboran Resources to take gas from the fracking of the Beetaloo basin.

Tamboran is also planning a massive new LNG export facility in Darwin at Middle Arm Point. Not only is this unimpeded by the safeguard mechanism, the federal government intends to support the Middle Arm hub with $1.5 billion. If this plant goes ahead at the scale Tamboran proposes, it would produce emissions equivalent to 11-14% of Australia’s total emissions in 2022 due to upstream development of the gas, as well as energy and gas used in LNG manufacture.

The government’s future gas strategy appears to offer an open door for Woodside Energy to extend the life of its massive North West Shelf gas plant until 2070, decades after when the world should be at net zero.

The Land Sleight Of Hand

Because we have very few real emissions policies, our emissions in many sectors are actually rising. The best way to understand this trend is to remove the energy and land use sectors, so we can clearly see how much other areas are rising.

When you do, the data shows Australia’s emissions jumped by 3% from 2022 to 2023 and are now 11% above 2005 levels, with the largest growth from transport.

Yet just as the Coalition did, our current government says emissions are dropping. How can this be?

Yes, energy emissions are dropping. But the real rub is in the famously malleable land use change and forestry sector.

This area is the only sector which can act as either a carbon sink or carbon source. If forests are regrowing fast, the sector acts as a sink, offsetting emissions from elsewhere.

If we include land and energy, emissions have now fallen 25% below 2005 levels as of 2023.

But if you exclude land use change, it’s only a 1% decline in emissions.

Our own calculations show that successive governments have kept increasing their projections for how much carbon they believe the land use sector is storing. That’s happened every year since 2018.

If you keep changing how big a carbon sink land use is, you seem to make the task of cutting emissions a lot easier. The topline figure of a 25% fall in emissions sounds great. But in reality, there’s been very little change, if we avoid land use.

The Albanese government has now repeatedly changed how it calculates how much carbon the land sector is storing, as well as future projections. Between the end of 2021 and 2023, the government’s figures changed markedly. Land use as a way to capture carbon soared, from 16 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent a year to a whopping 88 megatonnes a year as of 2022.

This is a staggering 17% of Australia’s 2022 fossil fuel and industry emissions. By changing these projections, our national emissions over 2022-23 magically appear to have fallen 6% in a year.

Every time the government recalculates how much carbon the land use sector is storing, the less work it has to do on actually cutting emissions from fossil fuels and industry sectors. That means it only needs emissions from fossil fuel use, industry, agriculture and waste to fall 24% by 2030, rather than 32%.

These changes to land use accounting may sound arcane, but they have very real consequences.

Offsets Now In Question

The Albanese government came to power promising action on climate and action on the environment. In the Government’s Future Gas Strategy we are seeing clear avoidance of the scientific evidence on the need to rapidly reduce fossil gas use to limit warming 1.5C, and on how rubbery and questionable carbon offsets are. Its net zero target strategy includes 10% of offsets.

Scientists have recently published work showing that of 143 projects registered under the government’s “Human Induced Regeneration” (HIR) offset program, the vast majority had seen minimal increases in carbon storage of less than 20%.

Most of these revegetation schemes had given us little or no real, additional and long-term increase in carbon storage, although the offsets have allowed real, additional carbon dioxide emissions to be pumped into the atmosphere, where they will remain for thousands of years.

No Credible Pathway

The only pathway we have left to limit warming to 1.5°C is political. Leaders must take up their responsibility to actually act and develop measures to rapidly cut carbon emissions.

Cutting emissions means not emitting them. Relying on offsets or changing how much we think the land is absorbing is not enough.

Sadly, our current government seems set on a sleight of hand. Rather than cutting fossil fuel and industry emissions 50% or more by 2030, as it should, the Australian government’s changes to land use accounting mean it has to do much less.

This is not a credible pathway towards net zero.

Bill Hare, Adjunct Professor of Energy, Murdoch University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Under your feet lies the world’s biggest reservoir. Groundwater makes up a whopping 97% of all usable freshwater. Where is it? In the voids between grains and cracks within rocks. We see it when it rises to the surface in springs, in caves, or when we pump it up for use.

While groundwater is often hidden, it underpins ecosystems around the world and is a vital resource for people.

You might think groundwater would be protected from climate change, given it’s underground. But this is no longer the case. As the atmosphere continues to heat up, more and more heat is penetrating underground. There is already considerable evidence that the subsurface is warming. The heat shows up in temperature measurements taken in boreholes around the world.

Our team of international scientists have combined our knowledge to model how groundwater will heat up in the future. Under a realistic middle of the road greenhouse gas emission scenario, with a projected mean global atmospheric temperature rise of 2.7°C, groundwater will warm by an average of 2.1°C by 2100, compared to 2000.

This warming varies by region and is delayed by decades compared to the surface, because it takes time to heat up the underground mass. Our results can be accessed by everyone globally.

Why Does It Matter?

You might wonder what the consequences of hotter groundwater will be.

First, the good news. Warming beneath the land’s surface is trapping 25 times less energy than the ocean, but it is still significant. This heat is stored in layers down to tens of metres deep, making it easier to access. We could use this extra heat to sustainably warm our homes by tapping into it just a few meters below the surface.

The heat can be extracted using heat pumps, powered by electricity from renewable energies. Geothermal heat pumps are surging in popularity for space heating across Europe.

Unfortunately, the bad news is likely to far outweigh the good. Warmer groundwater is harmful for the rich array of life found underground – and for the many plants and animals who depend on groundwater for their survival. Any changes in temperature can seriously disrupt the niche they have adapted to.

To date, the highest groundwater temperature increases are in parts of Russia, where surface temperatures have risen by more than 1.5°C since 2000. In Australia, significant variations in groundwater temperatures are expected within the shallowest layers.

Groundwater regularly flows out to feed lakes and rivers around the world, as well as the ocean, supporting a range of groundwater dependent ecosystems.

If warmer groundwater flows into your favourite river or lake, it will add to the extra heat from the sun. This could mean fish and other species will find it too warm to survive. Warm waters also hold less oxygen. Lack of oxygen in rivers and lakes have already become a major cause of mass fish deaths, as we’ve seen recently in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin.

Cold water species such as Atlantic salmon have adapted to a water temperature window provided by continuous cool groundwater discharge. As these thermal refuges heat up, it will upend their breeding cycle.

Groundwater Is Vital

In many parts of the world, people rely on groundwater as their main source of drinking water. But groundwater warming can worsen the quality of the water we drink. Temperature influences everything from chemical reactions to microbial activity. Warmer water could, for instance, trigger more harmful reactions, where metals leach out into the water. This is especially concerning in areas where access to clean drinking water is already limited.

Industries such as farming, manufacturing and energy production often rely on groundwater for their operations. If the groundwater they depend on becomes too warm or more contaminated, it can disrupt their activities.

Our study is global, but we have to find out more about how groundwater is warming and what impact this could have locally. By studying how groundwater temperatures are changing over time and across different regions, we can better predict future trends and find strategies to adapt or reduce the effects.

Global groundwater warming is a hidden but very significant consequence of climate change. While the impacts will be delayed, they stretch far and wide. They will affect ecosystems, drinking water supplies and industries around the world.

Gabriel C Rau, Lecturer in Hydrogeology, School of Environmental and Life Sciences, University of Newcastle; Barret Kurylyk, Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Coastal Water Resources, Dalhousie University; Dylan Irvine, Outstanding Future Researcher - Northern Water Futures, Charles Darwin University, and Susanne Benz, Freigeist Fellow, Institute of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (IPF), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Last week, the Albanese government introduced legislation to create a new statutory body called Environment Information Australia. The bill is due for debate in parliament today. The government clearly expects the bill will pass, because the new body has already been allocated A$54 million over four years in the May budget.

Why do we need it? Australia’s natural world is in steep decline – based on what we know. But there’s much we don’t know.

Australia has a fairly poor track record of effectively monitoring biodiversity. It’s hard to care for and restore nature if we don’t know how we are tracking, where to invest our efforts and into which activities.

The proposed agency will make environmental data more accessible by creating a platform where data from multiple sources can be pooled. These sources include: federal, state and territory governments, universities, research infrastructure platforms such as the Atlas of Living Australia and the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network, industry and citizen scientist data.

Increased access to relevant data would enable governments to better report on how well our environment is being managed.

The agency fills a gap in our environmental management regime. But by itself, it won’t improve outcomes for nature.

The most important actions needed to reduce Australia’s rapid losses of nature are the long-promised stronger environmental protection laws, which have been delayed indefinitely and a many-fold increase in funding for on-ground conservation programs.

Why Do We Need This?

In 2018, a national review of how Australia monitors its threatened species found 33% had never been monitored, while many others were only poorly monitored.

Without robust information, we can’t focus our efforts where there is most need. We need to know where threatened plants and animals are still surviving, whether their populations are rising or falling, and what threatens them.

While some of this data already exists, it is owned by hundreds of different organisations.

Many of these monitoring activities are already undertaken inside the federal environment department. But there are some notable steps forward in what is being proposed in the new legislation.

Firstly, efforts to increase the public sharing of data should be applauded.

One of the three objects of the proposed act is to “improve the availability and accessibility of high quality national environmental information and data,” though the detail is yet to be released.

Another good change is requiring the important State of the Environment snapshot reports to be produced every two years, rather than every five.

The legislation also mandates the production of comprehensive and ongoing national environmental economic accounts by law.

These accounts – also called “natural capital accounts” – are useful to track the health of different environmental assets at all scales, from the habitat of a single threatened species to the entire continent.

While this is a positive step, it could be better. As the laws stand, these accounts would be narrowly focused on describing the condition of the environment and its relationship with the economy.

Because environmental accounts are standardised and ongoing, they offer an ideal platform for measuring changes in environmental conditions. They could support a major expansion of our small set of useful environmental indicators, such as the Threatened Species Index.

Ideally we should have annual robust indices for a wide range of national environmental assets such as soil, water, plants, animals, ecosystems, and nature’s contribution to people at all scales.

Measuring Progress Against Targets

One of the goals of the proposed agency will be to measure our progress toward becoming “nature positive”.

The nature positive concept has been embraced internationally. The goal is ambitious: halt biodiversity decline by 2030 against a 2020 baseline and achieve recovery by 2050.

Unfortunately, the government is proposing to embed a watered-down version of nature positive, leaving out the target dates and leaving the baseline open.

In response many Australian environmental scientists are urging the government to align with the international definition.

In November 2023, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek talked proudly of the leading role Australia played in securing an ambitious Global Biodiversity Framework. This agreement has 23 targets which signatory nations have agreed to in an effort to stop the loss of species and nature.

To measure progress toward the target of protecting 30% of lands and seas by 2030, we will need data on what areas are protected, how they’re managed and which bioregions and plant communities they represent. That’s a job for the new agency.

Towards True Nature Positive Development

Despite the recent deferral, the government has committed to reform our national environmental laws. These reforms need to include strong protections for habitat crucial to the survival and recovery of threatened species and ecological communities.

Here, too, the proposed agency should have a role, by modelling and mapping these critical habitats, which will help mark important areas as off limits to development. This could actually help accelerate building approvals by avoiding developers spending time on proposals unlikely to meet approvals.

If the agency is to be truly independent, as the government has promised, it will need to tackle tricky issues governments tend to shy away from, including a fully transparent account of environmental expenditures.

That covers not just the tiny amount the federal government spends on biodiversity protection, which languishes below 0.1% of total government spending, but total investment across all levels of government and different sectors.

If we want to tackle Australia’s biodiversity crisis we have to be absolutely clear about the problems we are seeking to solve and get the basics right. 

Hugh Possingham, Professor of Conservation Biology, The University of Queensland; Jaana Dielenberg, University Fellow in Biodiversity, Charles Darwin University; Michelle Ward, Lecturer, School of Environment and Science, Griffith University, and Peter Burnett, Honorary Associate Professor, ANU College of Law, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Earth is facing a human-driven climate crisis, which demands a rapid transition to low-carbon energy sources such as wind and solar power. But we’re also living through a mass extinction event. Never before in human history have there been such high such rates of species loss and ecosystem collapse.

The biodiversity crisis is not just distressing, it’s a major threat to the global economy. More than half of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) directly depends on nature. The World Economic Forum rates biodiversity loss in the top risks to the global economy over the next decade, after climate change and natural disasters.

Human-driven climate change damages nature – and loss of nature exacerbates climate change. So if humanity’s efforts to mitigate climate change end up damaging nature, we shoot ourselves in the foot.

Australia, however, must face up to an uncomfortable truth: we are putting renewable energy projects in places that damage the species and ecosystems on which we depend.

Renewables On The Run

Renewable energy projects are being developed that damage nature and culturally significant sites. Others are resented by communities, or fail at regulatory hurdles.

Environmentally damaging projects put another nail in the coffin of species and ecosystems already under immense pressure. Even those that affect a relatively small area contribute to nature’s “death by a thousand cuts”.

Take, for example, the proposed Euston wind farm in southwest New South Wales. It would entail 96 turbines built near the Willandra Lakes World Heritage area, potentially affecting threatened birds.

And in North Queensland, the Upper Burdekin wind farm proposal will remove 769 hectares of endangered species habitat relied on by Sharman’s wallabies, koalas and northern greater gliders. The cleared area would be almost 200 times bigger than the Melbourne Cricket Ground.

The simple overlay below, which we prepared, illustrates the problem in Queensland. The analysis, part of a research project funded by Boundless Earth, shows in stark detail the crossover between energy projects, transmission lines and nationally listed threatened species habitats and ecosystems.

The ‘Fast-Track’ Can Also Be The Good Track

In their understandable haste to get more clean energy projects built, state and federal governments are promising to “streamline” approvals processes. Fast-tracked approvals will only provide net social benefit if they are based on good data, sound analysis and genuine community engagement.

Two successive reviews of our national environmental laws, most recently by Graeme Samuel, identified what’s needed to improve the efficiency of development approvals and get better outcomes for nature. The answer? Good planning at the regional scale, underpinned by good data.

At a minimum, we need to know the locations of threatened or culturally significant species and places, high-value agriculture and valuable natural areas. A proposed new federal body, Environmental Information Australia, would seek to centralise existing biodiversity data. But significantly more data are required to fill important knowledge gaps.

Good planning can create shared purpose and bring positive environmental and social outcomes, including certainty to developers and conservationists. In Queensland, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park has enjoyed strong planning support based on good data and high community participation for more than 30 years, with some conservation success.

In contrast, poor planning polarises stakeholders and communities. It erodes trust between stakeholders, developers and government by reducing the integrity and quality of planning decisions. This leads to ongoing conflict over land use, as has been observed in Queensland.

A proposal to build a renewable energy microgrid in Queensland’s Daintree rainforest is a case in point. It is causing pain for local communities, pitting renewable energy advocates against conservation organisations.

When projects fail to gain community support and necessary approvals, the proponent’s money is wasted, and we lose precious time in the urgent transition to renewables.

Renewables Projects Should Enhance Nature

It’s surprising and disappointing how few proponents of Australian renewables projects actively seek to enhance the habitat values of the land their projects occupy.

In part, this is because planning regulations are still firmly focused on avoiding impacts to nature, and offsetting damage when it occurs.

Instead, we need policies and laws that compel nature-positive approaches that regenerate biodiversity.

In California, for example, a test project to grow native plants under solar panels is restoring prairie land and pollinator habitat at the site of a decommissioned nuclear power station. In Australia, there are occasional signs we may move in a similar direction.

It’s not hard to envisage a renewables rollout that prioritises projects on degraded, ex-agricultural land, avoiding damage to critical habitats and benefiting nature. Wind turbines should be built away from natural vegetation and migratory routes for birds and bats.

Our mapping for potential wind and solar projects in southern Queensland shows strong potential west of the Great Dividing Range for energy generation without the same level of land-use conflict with natural values and productive agriculture.

A major challenge to energy project development in Queensland, as in some other parts of Australia, is a lack of transmission infrastructure, or “poles and wires”, in the places where renewable energy and nature could most happily coexist. This infrastructure should urgently be developed in a way that does not impact natural vegetation and species habitats.

Rapidly reaching net zero is not negotiable to avoiding the worst ravages of climate change. But doing so in a way that damages nature is self-defeating. We have the planning tools and data needed to create a nature-positive climate transition. Now we need adequate state and Commonwealth government investment, leadership and political will.

Brendan Wintle, Professor in Conservation Science, School of Ecosystem and Forest Science, The University of Melbourne; Andrew Rogers, Biodiversity lead analyst, School of Agriculture, Food and Ecosystem Sciences, The University of Melbourne; James Watson, Professor in Conservation Science, School of the Environment, The University of Queensland; Michelle Ward, Postdoctoral research fellow, The University of Queensland, and Sarah Bekessy, Professor in Sustainability and Urban Planning, Leader, Interdisciplinary Conservation Science Research Group (ICON Science), RMIT University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How do new species arise? And why are there so many of them? One possible reason is the arms race between animals such as predators and parasites, and the victims they exploit.

Many predators and parasites have evolved specialised strategies to avoid detection, such as mimicking their prey or host. In these cases, when the exploiter adopts a new victim, it needs to mimic the new victim to succeed.

As a result, the exploiter can diverge from its original population and ultimately become a new species. Charles Darwin proposed this process more than 160 years ago, but it has been difficult to observe in practice.

In new research published in Science, we show how this process drives the creation of new species of cuckoos. These birds lay their eggs in the nests of other species, and their chicks mimic the appearance of their host’s chicks to avoid detection.

An Escalating Arms Race

The deceptive behaviour of bronze-cuckoos imposes heavy costs on their hosts. They lay their eggs in the nests of small songbirds, such as fairy wrens and gerygones, and abandon their young to the care of the host.

Soon after hatching, the cuckoo evicts the host eggs or chicks from the nest to become the sole occupant. The host parents not only lose all their own offspring, but also invest several weeks rearing the cuckoo, which eventually grows to around twice the size of its foster parents.

Not surprisingly, given these high costs, hosts have evolved the ability to recognise and reject odd-looking chicks from their nests.

Only the cuckoo chicks that most closely resemble the host’s chicks will evade detection, and so with each generation, the cuckoo chicks become a closer and closer match to the host chicks. This is why the chicks of each species of bronze-cuckoo look almost identical to their hosts’ chicks.

Divergence Between Populations That Exploit Different Hosts

This exquisite mimicry has evolved to an even more fine-tuned level. Within a single species of bronze-cuckoo that exploits several different hosts, the appearance of the chicks tracks that of their hosts.

In response to chick rejection by hosts, both the little bronze-cuckoo and the shining bronze-cuckoo have diverged into several separate subspecies. Each subspecies exploits a different host and produces a chick that matches that of the host.

This divergence can happen even when two hosts live in the same geographic area. In northern Queensland, the little bronze-cuckoo exploits both the large-billed gerygone and the fairy gerygone. The cuckoos have undergone selection to match the chicks of their respective hosts, leading to genetic divergence into two separate subspecies.

This shows the split into subspecies cannot be explained by geographic separation.

A Higher Cost For Hosts Leads To More New Species

It was difficult to find out exactly what was happening with these birds, because we couldn’t easily find cuckoo chicks in host nests in the wild. So we developed a non-destructive method for extracting DNA from the shells of tiny cuckoo eggs (2.5cm long), which allowed us to sample museum egg specimens that have been collected over many decades.

Our results also suggest that the evolution of cuckoos and their hosts is most likely to drive the creation of new species when the cuckoos impose a high cost on their hosts – such as by killing off all the host’s own offspring. This leads to an “evolutionary arms race” between the host’s defences and the cuckoo’s counter-adaptations.

This finding was supported by our broad analysis using evolutionary modelling across all cuckoo species. We found lineages that are most costly to their hosts split into new species more often than less costly cuckoo species (those that live alongside their host’s chicks) and their non-parasitic relatives.

Interactions between exploiters and their victims may be one of the main drivers of biodiversity. The process of speciation we described, in which the exploiter shows very specialised adaptations to their victim, may occur in other parasites and hosts, and in predators and prey. These tightly coupled interactions might even explain why there are millions, rather than thousands, of uniquely specialised species across the globe.

Naomi Langmore, Professor, Australian National University; Alicia Grealy, Research Projects Officer, CSIRO; Clare Holleley, Senior Research Scientist, Australian National Wildlife Collection, CSIRO, and Iliana Medina, Lecturer in Ecology, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In awarding this year’s Archibald Prize to Laura Jones’ portrait of the writer Tim Winton, the Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales are doing what they do best: catapulting a relatively unknown artist to instant fame and possible fortune.

Her portrait of Winton is a study of a man in emotional pain, as he contemplates the possible futures of the world around him.

One of the great disadvantages of being a writer or an artist is that they can see what politicians do not: the long-term consequences of abusing the environment. Both Winton the subject and Jones the artist see our planet is on a path to environmental doom.

Jones met Winton when she was undertaking a residency to study the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, so it is appropriate the tones she has chosen as the background to his portrait are dull and muted like a degraded world.

Most of the painting is thinly painted with the exception of his face. This gives the portrait an extra impact.

Although Laura Jones has been a finalist in four previous Archibald Prize exhibitions and has exhibited widely, her profile indicates the only significant collection to hold her work is Artbank, the collection of the Australian government.

That is all about to change.

In what may be a coincidence, another exhibition on the same floor is a solo exhibition by a previous Archibald winner, Wendy Sharpe, whose painterly approach is similar to Jones.

Sharpe’s work not only relates to Jones’ painting in style, but also the circumstance of her winning the prize. In 1996, Sharpe was a relatively unknown artist when she too was awarded the Archibald Prize. The prize was the trigger for a career that has included a stint of being a Gallery Trustee.

The Archibald really does sprinkle fairy dust.

Djakaŋu Yunupiŋu Wins The Wynne Prize

When the board president of the trustees, David Gonski, announced the Wynne Prize he took great joy in noting this year the majority of the entrants selected for hanging were Aboriginal artists.

Awarded to “the best landscape painting of Australian scenery in oils or watercolours or for the best example of figure sculpture by Australian artists”, this oldest of all Australian art prizes has come a long way from when it was dominated by paintings of gum trees in pastoral landscapes.

Djakaŋu Yunupiŋu’s painting, Nyalala gurmilili, is a celebration of sunrise in Miḏawarr (the harvest season following the wet) when sudden showers surprise during the day.

It is probably the largest bark painting to be exhibited in the gallery, a glorious undulating pattern of rhythms and shapes.

There is a special significance in this artist being awarded the prize for this work at this gallery.

Many years ago her father, Muŋgurrawuy Yunupiŋu, was one of a group of Yolngu elders who sat with the gallery’s assistant director, Tony Tuckson, and showed him the connection between painting and lore. Muŋgurrawuy Yunupiŋu’s bark paintings are among the treasures of the Art Gallery of NSW’s collection.

Naomi Kantjuriny Wins The Sulman Prize

Unlike the Archibald and Wynne Prizes, which are judged by the trustees, the Sulman Prize for best subject painting, genre painting or mural project has a single judge, usually an artist.

This means every year the exhibition has a different flavour, reflecting the judge’s taste. This year’s judge, Tom Polo, selected an exhibition ranging from the traditional formalism of David Eastwood to the conceptual humour of Kenny Pittock.

He has awarded the prize to Naomi Kantjuriny for her painting Minyma mamu tjuta, from the Tjala Arts Centre. She has described her painting as being about the stories told and her culture.

It is a lively painting of spirits, good and bad, dancing in the land, gathering around people, always present.

The Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes 2024 are on display at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, until September 8.

Joanna Mendelssohn, Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Internet of Animals is a clever, tempting book title and author Martin Wikelski draws us in with the promise of “discovering the collective intelligence of life on earth”. This book reflects on decades of work tracking animals, offering a vision of future technologies.

Wikelski is director of Germany’s Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior where he and his colleagues investigate global animal migrations. They have pioneered a system for continuously remotely tracking thousands of animals, called ICARUS, short for International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space. Their aim is to create an intelligent sensor network of animals (dubbed the “internet of animals”) and protect animals worldwide.

Review: The Internet of Animals – Martin Wikelski (Scribe)

Wikelski’s core research team has mounted an antenna on a satellite, enabling it to track various species, including vultures and toucans, with small, solar-powered trackers.

Its current ICARUS project began collecting data in September 2020. This 18-year journey depended on interactions with the European Space Agency, the European Research Council and Roscosmos (the Russian space agency).

The team’s ultimate goal is to have little GPS devices on representative samples of numerous species to reveal what decisions they make in the world, what knowledge they accumulate over their lifetimes and all the places they have been. The ambition is totally worthy even if the returns on investment so far may seem elusive to some.

Animal gatherings may catch the human eye but their biological functions can be complex. For instance, starlings may learn, from observing each other during their balletic evening murmurations, to identify individuals who have found the best feeding sites.

The ICARUS project has an impressive vision of anticipated data streams and future studies. These are largely intended to study the movements of birds and insects and may well reveal how natural hazards and human interactions affect animal populations. They should also provide data on the possible spread of plant seeds and pathogens.

Rats, Cats And Storks

Wikelski’s work has taken him all over the world, especially to isolated places. Time spent in isolation has clearly given him the opportunity to reflect on lessons learned from observing animals. The account of his academic journey is peppered with charming anecdotes intended to remind us what we do not yet know about animal behaviour.

These include the tale of a domestic cat he encountered, which responded to human pointing gestures, and a wild fox that spontaneously retrieved thrown sticks.

Wikelski gives names to individual animals whose behaviour lies outside the species norm. Thus we meet Hanzi, the European white stork who took a series of detours and survived a Bavarian winter only because he was cared for by a farming family, and Baby Caruso, a delightfully vocal young, male sea lion.

Details of his time spent in the Galapagos Islands are truly remarkable, allowing rice rats with negligible experience of predators to take a starring role. The author developed a fondness for these rodents. He makes a gallant attempt to remediate the profile of rats in general although he had to accept these rats would merrily eat through his tent and occasionally bite his buttocks.

A secondary purpose of this tale is to illustrate the rats’ extraordinary homing ability. When one annoying rice rat was relocated a 20-minute walk away from Wikelski’s campsite, it turned up within a couple of hours of departure.

Homing behaviour in various species lends itself to tracking because of its predictability. It has provided an excellent test-bed for telemetry – the remote collection and automatic transmission of data to receiving equipment for monitoring.

The conclusions Wikelski draws from these fascinating observations may alarm those who have been sensitised to anthropomorphism, but they have merit. In keeping with its call for humility on the part of conventional scientists, his book also acknowledges how many First Nations people have drawn on the behaviour of animals to inform strategies for their survival.

Technical Questions

Wikelski has developed transmitters small enough to be carried by dragonflies. This deserves praise from a technological perspective but leaves the reader wondering how many animals were impacted by being captured and fitted with prototypes.

We are told birds adjust their own body-weight to accommodate the centre of mass of the tiny transmitters used by Wikelski’s team. In a similar vein, 6-inch (15 cm) long antennae were used on blackbirds even though they projected beyond the tail-feathers. This specification was required for transmission to the satellite but one wonders how authentic the resultant data are when birds are moving with the burden of a foreign body occupying space immediately around them.

Also, Wikelski and many other telemetrists’ use of collars limits research to adult animals because radio collars sized for young wearers become too tight as the animal grows.

Furthermore, as it ages, the epoxy above the solar panel on a tracker can become cracked and grey. This can mean charging is compromised. Meanwhile, the base of the housing touching the back of the animal may be too rough and may damage the pelage or plumage or even the skin of the wearer.

The Sixth Sense?

Wikelski anticipates the next waves of wearable tracking technology will reveal the sixth sense animals are often said to have. For instance, in apparent anticipation of earthquakes, elephants will travel to higher ground.

In animal behaviour circles, revealing this sixth sense and its true nature is akin to the search in physics for gravitational waves or the Higgs boson particle.

We are introduced to Move Bank, an open source archive of the movement of animals across the planet. Resources such as this help to reveal the costs of migration in songbirds (for example, how much energy is being used or the risk of being eaten by predators, or being exposed to dangerous weather systems) and how migrations trend over time. Move Bank was established 25 years ago to help animal tracking researchers manage, share, protect, analyse and archive their data.

Since then Move Bank has been the source of hundreds of research articles but Wikelski gives us a sense of how vulnerable “blue-sky” science projects are to the whims of government and the global economy. Who knew pandemics and wars could also disrupt the best laid plans for international research collaborations?

In a twist of fate, the ICARUS project eventually went live on 20th March 2020 at almost the same time the global COVID pandemic started. This meant human activity on the globe shut down – the so-called anthropause. Fortuitously it meant animal movements could be studied with a minimum amount of human impact.

In the wake of the pandemic, the prospects of using animals’ GPS locations to monitor the spread of zoonotic disease is truly beguiling. For instance, all countries should be interested in the migration of wild birds given its clear relationship to the spread of avian flu.

The collegiality and tenacity multidisciplinary teams require for intercontinental tracking of animals are celebrated in this book and the author demonstrates great humility in listening to technicians and senior authors from related disciplines. The call for greater collaboration among competing research groups is loud and clear.

But Wikelski leaves us in no doubt his discipline’s dependence on satellite tracking has been characterised by serial frustrations. The war on Ukraine has meant the International Space Station is no longer available to host the key tracking satellite involved in the ICARUS Project. (We are told only one receiving device could be made – and mounted – on the satellite.)

Instead, from late 2024, the transmitters fitted to the animals will transmit their position and other data to a receiver on a mini satellite (a CubeSat). From there, the data will be sent to a ground station and published in the Movebank database, which is freely accessible.

A great deal of research work thus hinges on single items of technology. Nevertheless, Wikelski’s book ends with a veritable shopping list of anticipated research projects.

We are reminded that the “internet of animals” is still in its infancy. But this doesn’t stop the author envisioning what he calls a daily life-cast (not weather forecast) about our planet and the animals in it. He even foresees modern technology allowing a representative online “parliamentary gathering of animals” in which thousands of species can be monitored in the wild by individuals all over the world.

This process of witnessing endangered animals in the wild, he suggests, would be linked to an animal protection payout system levied on the world’s wealthiest people, ensuring their habitats were cared for by local peoples. This, we are assured, would mean animals were no longer persecuted by humans or disadvantaged by decisions we make to further our own lives.

Paul McGreevy, Professor of Animal Behaviour and Welfare, University of Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

One hundred million years ago, during the Cretaceous period, much of northeastern Australia was underwater. The inland Eromanga Sea was home to a myriad of marine creatures, from turtles and dolphin-like ichthyosaurs to the bus-sized predator Kronosaurus queenslandicus and other plesiosaurs.

The forested outskirts of the sea were home to dinosaurs and the skies above were filled with birds. But all of them would have been shaded by the largest flying creatures of the age – the pterosaurs.

In November 2021, an avocado farmer turned museum curator named Kevin Petersen discovered a fossilised skeleton near Richmond in Queensland. The previously unknown species turned out to be the most complete pterosaur fossil found in Australia. It comprises around 22% of the skeleton of an animal with a wingspan of some 4.6 metres.

My colleagues and I have now described the fossil in the journal Scientific Reports. It represents a new species of pterosaur, and we’ve named it Haliskia peterseni, meaning Petersen’s sea phantom.

Pterosaur Fossils Are Rare

Pterosaur fossils have been found on every continent. However, they are far less common than fossils of dinosaurs or ancient marine reptiles.

Pterosaurs had hollow, thin-walled bones. This was a great evolutionary adaptation for life in the air, but the lightweight skeletons are not easily fossilised.

Few complete pterosaur skeletons are known worldwide, and most come from a handful of sites with unusually excellent conditions for fossil preservation. When pterosaur bones have been found at other sites, they are often crushed and distorted.

As a result, many pterosaur fossils are the only one of their kind. This includes the oldest flying reptile fossils ever found in Australia.

What The Skeleton Tells Us About How Haliskia Lived

The newly described fossil is only the second partial pterosaur skeleton ever found in Australia. It preserves twice as many bones as Ferrodraco lentoni.

Haliskia preserves a complete lower jaw, the tip of the upper jaw, 43 teeth, vertebrae, ribs, bones from both wings, and a partial leg. Also preserved are delicate, spaghetti-thin hyoid bones which would have helped support a strong muscular tongue.

We can tell Haliskia was fully grown when it died because its shoulder bones, and others in the skeleton, have fused.

Almost all pterosaur fossils described from Australia (including Haliskia’s contemporaries Mythunga camara, Aussiedraco molnari and Thapunngaka shawi) have been placed in the same family. These species, collectively known as Anhangueria, have long been viewed as fish-eaters.

Although fish fossils are often found in rocks laid down in the Eromanga Sea, squid-like cephalopods called belemnites are even more common. Based on Haliskia‘s long hyoid bones and conical, interlocking teeth, it would have eaten a diet of fish and squid.

A Labour Of Love

The Haliskia specimen was prepared by fossil enthusiast Kevin Petersen using a combination of pneumatic tools, the paleontological equivalent to a dentist’s drill, and a hand-wielded metal pin. The pterosaur bones are flattened, and although one surface has been exposed, they remain encased in rock to provide stability and support to the fossil.

Kevin spent many hours preparing the pterosaur fossil. However, when we asked if he would like to join the team of researchers studying this specimen, he politely declined, stating he was happy to simply be acknowledged for his efforts.

Without Kevin, this specimen wouldn’t be on public display or known to science. It seemed only fitting that this new species Haliskia peterseni be named in honour of its discoverer.

More Fossils To Be Found

This was not the first pterosaur fossil Kevin had found. He uncovered his first flying reptile fossil a few years earlier, when he visited Richmond in Queensland as a tourist.

Since the discovery of the Haliskia specimen in 2021, even more pterosaur fossils have been found at the public dig pits outside Richmond.

Kevin is proof you do not need a degree to make significant contributions to science and the field of palaeontology. It takes dedication and determination – and it helps to be in the right spot at the right time.

It requires some imagination to visualise pterosaurs at sea, hunting fish and squid-like creatures alongside massive marine reptiles millions of years ago, in what is now the dry Australian outback. But the process is made easier with the fossils in front of you.

Haliskia provides a tantalising glimpse into an ancient ecosystem, and provides hope we might find more complete skeletons of these winged reptiles.

Adele Pentland, PhD candidate, Curtin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

We need two ingredients for life to start on a planet: dry land and (fresh) water. Strictly, the water doesn’t have to be fresh, but fresh water can only occur on dry land.

Only with those two conditions met can you convert the building blocks of life, amino acids and nucleic acids into tangible bacterial life that heralds the start of the evolutionary cycle.

The oldest life on Earth left in our fragmented rock record is 3.5 billion years old, with some chemical data showing it may even be as old as 3.8 billion years. Scientists have hypothesised life might be even older, but we have no records of that being the case.

Our new study published in Nature Geoscience provides the first evidence of fresh water and dry land on Earth by 4 billion years ago. Knowing when the cradle of life – water and land – first appeared on Earth ultimately provides clues as to how we came to be.

Water And Land: The Essences Of Life

Imagine you’ve stepped into a time machine and gone back 4 billion years ago. As the dials whirr to a halt, you look out and see a vast ocean all around you. Not blue as you know it, but brown with iron and other dissolved minerals. You look up into the sky and it’s dark orange, with a smog of carbon dioxide and regular flashes from incoming meteors. Inhospitable to life.

This is what scientists think Earth looked like 4 billion years ago. But did it?

Just as you abandon all hope for life, you spot it on the horizon: land. Kicking the time machine into travel mode, you fly across to this expanse of emerged rock and touch down.

You quickly realise you’ve stepped onto a volcanic island, with lava spewing across its flanks. But you also feel raindrops on your nose, and you spot water collecting in little pools at the base of the volcano. Cautiously you cup your hands and have a taste … it’s fresh! The first proof there was fresh water on Earth, at least by 4 billion years ago.

Fresh water and emerged land go hand in hand. If all land is underwater, then you can only have salty, ocean water. This is because salty water wants to encroach under land, a phenomenon known as seawater intrusion.

So, if you find fresh water, you must have dry land – and a reasonably large expanse of it.

How Do We Know There Was Fresh Water And Land On The Early Earth?

Fresh water is very different from sea water. Obviously, you might say, but how do you know if one or both were present on Earth if you can’t actually go back in a time machine?

The answer is in the rock record and chemical signals preserved in that time capsule. Earth is a bit over 4.5 billion years old, and the oldest rocks scientists have found are just a little older than 4 billion years.

To really understand our planet in its first 500 million years, we have to turn to crystals that once came from older rocks and ended up deposited in younger rocks.

Unlike rocks, the oldest preserved crystals go back as far as 4.4 billion years. And the bulk of these super-old crystals comes from one place on Earth: the Jack Hills in Western Australia’s midwest.

This is precisely where we went. We dated over a thousand crystals of a mineral called zircon, famed for its extreme resistance to weathering and alteration.

That’s quite important, as over the span of billions of years, a lot of later processes can erase the primary chemical signal when the crystals first formed. Most other types of minerals are much easier to alter, a process that would erase their original chemistry and not provide us with clues into Earth’s deep past.

Truly Ancient Grains

Our work shows that about 10% of all the crystals we analysed were older than 4 billion years. That might seem small, but it’s an enormous amount of super-old grains compared to other places around the world.

To figure out whether these grains held a record of fresh water, we used tiny beams of ions on these dated zircon grains to measure the ratio of heavier to lighter oxygen. This ratio, known as an oxygen isotopic ratio, is thought to be nearly constant through time for seawater, but much lighter for fresh water.

Conspicuously, a small portion of zircon crystals from 4 billion years ago had a very light signature that could only have formed from the interaction of fresh water and rocks.

Zircon is extremely resistant to alteration. For the Jack Hills’ zircon to obtain this light oxygen signature, the rock altered by fresh water had to melt and then re-solidify to impart the light oxygen isotopic signature into our zircon.

Thus, fresh water had to be present on Earth before 4 billion years ago.

Whether life also began so early in Earth’s history is a question we can’t quite be sure of yet. But we’ve at least found evidence for the cradle of life on Earth some time before 4 billion years ago – extremely early in our planet’s 4.5-billion-year history.

Hugo Olierook, Senior Research Fellow in Geology, Curtin University and Hamed Gamaleldien, Assistant Professor in Geochemistry, Curtin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

When astronomers turn our radio telescopes out towards space, we sometimes detect sporadic bursts of radio waves originating from across the vast expanse of the universe. We call them “radio transients”: some erupt only once, never to be seen again, and others flicker on and off in predictable patterns.

We think most radio transients come from rotating neutron stars known as pulsars, which emit regular flashes of radio waves, like cosmic lighthouses. Typically, these neutron stars spin at incredible speeds, taking mere seconds or even a fraction of a second to complete each rotation.

Recently, we discovered a radio transient that isn’t like anything astronomers have seen before. Not only does it have a cycle almost an hour long (the longest ever seen), but over several observations we saw it sometimes emitting long, bright flashes, sometimes fast, weak pulses – and sometimes nothing at all.

We can’t quite explain what’s going on here. It’s most likely a very unusual neutron star, but we can’t rule out other possibilities. Our research is published in Nature Astronomy.

A Lucky Find

Meet ASKAP J1935+2148 (the numbers in the name point to its location in the sky). This periodic radio transient was discovered using CSIRO’s ASKAP radio telescope on Wajarri Yamaji Country in outback Western Australia.

The telescope has a very wide field of view, which means it can survey large volumes of the universe very quickly. This makes it very well suited for detecting new and exotic phenomena.

Using ASKAP, we were simultaneously monitoring a source of gamma rays and searching for pulses from a fast radio burst, when we spotted ASKAP J1935+2148 slowly flashing in the data. The signal leapt out because it was made up of “circularly polarised” radio waves, which means the direction of the waves corkscrews around as the signal travels through space.

Our eyes cannot differentiate between circularly polarised light and ordinary unpolarised light. However, ASKAP functions like a pair of polaroid sunglasses, filtering out the glare from thousands of ordinary sources.

After the initial detection, we conducted further observations over several months using ASKAP and also the more sensitive MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa.

The Slowest Radio Transient Ever Found

ASKAP J1935+2148 belongs to the relatively new class of long-period radio transients. Only two others have ever been found, and ASKAP J1935+2148’s 53.8 minute period is by far the longest.

However, the exceptionally long period is just the beginning. We have seen ASKAP J1935+2148 in three distinct states or modes.

In the first state, we see bright, linearly (rather than circularly) polarised pulses lasting from 10 to 50 seconds. In the second state, there are much weaker, circularly polarised pulses lasting only about 370 milliseconds. The third state is a quiet or quenched state, with no pulses at all.

These different modes, and the switching between them, could result from an interplay of complex magnetic fields and plasma flows from the source itself with strong magnetic fields in the surrounding space.

Similar patterns have been seen in neutron stars, but our current understanding of neutron stars suggests they should not be able to have such a long period.

Neutron Stars And White Dwarfs

The origin of a signal with such a long period remains a profound mystery, with a slow-spinning neutron star the prime suspect. However, we cannot rule out the possibility the object is a white dwarf – the Earth-sized cinder of a burnt-out star that has exhausted its fuel.

White dwarfs often have slow rotation periods, but we don’t know of any way one could produce the radio signals we are seeing here. What’s more, there are no other highly magnetic white dwarfs nearby, which makes the neutron star explanation more plausible.

One explanation might be that the object is part of a binary system in which a neutron star or white dwarf orbits another unseen star.

This object might prompt us to reconsider our decades-old understanding of neutron stars or white dwarfs, particularly in how they emit radio waves and what their populations are like within our galaxy. Further research is needed to confirm what the object is, but either scenario would provide valuable insights into the physics of these extreme objects.

The Search Continues

We don’t know how long ASKAP J1935+2148 has been emitting radio signals, as radio astronomy surveys don’t usually search for objects with periods this long. Moreover, radio emissions from this source are only detected for a mere 0.01% to 1.5% of its rotation period, depending on its emission state.

So we were quite fortunate we happened to catch sight of ASKAP J1935+2148. It’s quite likely there are many other objects like it elsewhere in our galaxy, waiting to be discovered.

Manisha Caleb, Lecturer, University of Sydney and Emil Lenc, Research Scientist, Space and Astronomy, CSIRO

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Google has rolled out its latest experimental search feature on Chrome, Firefox and the Google app browser to hundreds of millions of users. “AI Overviews” saves you clicking on links by using generative AI — the same technology that powers rival product ChatGPT — to provide summaries of the search results. Ask “how to keep bananas fresh for longer” and it uses AI to generate a useful summary of tips such as storing them in a cool, dark place and away from other fruits like apples.

But ask it a left-field question and the results can be disastrous, or even dangerous. Google is currently scrambling to fix these problems one by one, but it is a PR disaster for the search giant and a challenging game of whack-a-mole.

AI Overviews helpfully tells you that “Whack-A-Mole is a classic arcade game where players use a mallet to hit moles that pop up at random for points. The game was invented in Japan in 1975 by the amusement manufacturer TOGO and was originally called Mogura Taiji or Mogura Tataki.”

But AI Overviews also tells you that “astronauts have met cats on the moon, played with them, and provided care”. More worryingly, it also recommends “you should eat at least one small rock per day” as “rocks are a vital source of minerals and vitamins”, and suggests putting glue in pizza topping.

Why Is This Happening?

One fundamental problem is that generative AI tools don’t know what is true, just what is popular. For example, there aren’t a lot of articles on the web about eating rocks as it is so self-evidently a bad idea.

There is, however, a well-read satirical article from The Onion about eating rocks. And so Google’s AI based its summary on what was popular, not what was true.

Another problem is that generative AI tools don’t have our values. They’re trained on a large chunk of the web.

And while sophisticated techniques (that go by exotic names such as “reinforcement learning from human feedback” or RLHF) are used to eliminate the worst, it is unsurprising they reflect some of the biases, conspiracy theories and worse to be found on the web. Indeed, I am always amazed how polite and well-behaved AI chatbots are, given what they’re trained on.

Is This The Future Of Search?

If this is really the future of search, then we’re in for a bumpy ride. Google is, of course, playing catch-up with OpenAI and Microsoft.

The financial incentives to lead the AI race are immense. Google is therefore being less prudent than in the past in pushing the technology out into users’ hands.

In 2023, Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said:

We’ve been cautious. There are areas where we’ve chosen not to be the first to put a product out. We’ve set up good structures around responsible AI. You will continue to see us take our time.

That no longer appears to be so true, as Google responds to criticisms that it has become a large and lethargic competitor.

A Risky Move

It’s a risky strategy for Google. It risks losing the trust that the public has in Google being the place to find (correct) answers to questions.

But Google also risks undermining its own billion-dollar business model. If we no longer click on links, just read their summary, how does Google continue to make money?

The risks are not restricted to Google. I fear such use of AI might be harmful for society more broadly. Truth is already a somewhat contested and fungible idea. AI untruths are likely to make this worse.

In a decade’s time, we may look back at 2024 as the golden age of the web, when most of it was quality human-generated content, before the bots took over and filled the web with synthetic and increasingly low-quality AI-generated content.

Has AI Started Breathing Its Own Exhaust?

The second generation of large language models are likely and unintentionally being trained on some of the outputs of the first generation. And lots of AI startups are touting the benefits of training on synthetic, AI-generated data.

But training on the exhaust fumes of current AI models risks amplifying even small biases and errors. Just as breathing in exhaust fumes is bad for humans, it is bad for AI.

These concerns fit into a much bigger picture. Globally, more than US$400 million (A$600 million) is being invested in AI every day. And governments are only now just waking up to the idea we might need guardrails and regulation to ensure AI is used responsibly, given this torrent of investment.

Pharmaceutical companies aren’t allowed to release drugs that are harmful. Nor are car companies. But so far, tech companies have largely been allowed to do what they like.

Toby Walsh, Professor of AI, Research Group Leader, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Australia has a long history of bushfires. The 2019-2020 Black Summer was the worst in recorded history. But was that the worst it could get?

Our new research has reconstructed the past 2,000 years of southeast Australia’s bushfire weather, drawing on evidence of past climates laid down in changing patterns in deep ice in East Antarctica. The high and low pressure weather systems south of Australia are so large they connect the two continents, even though they are more than 3,000 km apart.

These historic weather patterns are recorded in the ice. Not with ash which might first come to mind, but in sea-salt spray from the Southern Ocean. When southeast Australia experiences extreme bushfire weather over summer, there is less wind around Antarctica, which means less sea-salt spray is laid down at the ice core site.

Buried in the ice is a warning. At least seven times over the last two millennia, our new research shows bushfire-prone southeast Australia has endured bushfire weather as bad or worse than what was experienced during the devastating Black Summer bushfires. The Black Summer bushfires burned through about 1.5 million hectares, or more than six times the size of the Australian Capital Territory.

This means natural climate variability can toss up more severe bushfire weather than we have yet seen. Given human-caused climate change is also loading the dice for worse and worse bushfire weather, it suggests we are underestimating how bad bushfires can be in Australia.

What Makes Bushfire Weather?

If the weekend is forecast to be hot, dry and windy, we would say this is bushfire weather. Bushfire weather does not mean bushfires are inevitable, only they are more likely to start and more likely to be intense and fast-spreading once they ignite.

Australia’s Black Summer was caused by several climate factors combining. We had a multi-year drought, which coincided with climate variability bringing strong and hot northwesterly winds, and all against a backdrop of increasing heat and falling humidity over land brought by climate change.

Climate change is bringing more frequent and more severe bushfire weather. This trend is projected to continue into the future.

But quantifying the impacts of climate change on bushfire weather over the southeast Australian regions hardest hit by the Black Summer bushfires is difficult. This is because the climate in these mostly coastal or alpine regions varies a lot and we only have a relatively short record of observations.

Our previous research on droughts – a key ingredient for extreme bushfire seasons – showed our roughly 120 years of rainfall observations does not fully cover the range of drought conditions which have occurred in the past 1,000 years. This is supported by recent palaeoclimate work reconstructing 2,000 years of eastern Australian climate variability and research using climate models to show evidence of megadroughts lasting 20 years or more in southeastern Australia.

Australia’s bushfire weather observations only extend back to 1950. In short, this means we have limited insights based on observations alone into how bad bushfire weather can be.

Answers In The Ice

To reach back further in time, we looked to Antarctica. This is because Australia and Antarctica are linked through a “weather bridge”, meaning the enormous, powerful weather systems of the Southern Ocean affect both at the same time.

Year after year, these systems lift and carry different amounts of sea salt from the ocean surface and transport it to Antarctica, where it is laid down in layers of snow and ice.

About 125 km from Casey Station in Australia’s Antarctic territory lies Law Dome. This small, coastal ice cap is very useful for climate scientists, because it is regularly hit by cold cyclones from the Southern Ocean. These intense winds bring sea salt and trigger high snow accumulation – about 1.5 metres a year.

Drilling ice cores from places such as Law Dome has given us rich data sets of past climatic events. We have used these changing levels of sea salt in the ice to reconstruct rainfall and drought over two millennia in eastern Australia. Our new research focuses on Australia’s bushfire weather.

What Did We Find?

Using this evidence, we found an important relationship between the ice core record and the Forest Fire Danger Index, used by authorities to measure bushfire weather.

We then grouped similar weather patterns together over time, so we could get what we were really after: the connection between high and low pressure systems in the Southern Ocean, sea salt, and bushfire weather.

In the observational record, most of Australia’s bushfire disasters have been linked to intense summer cold fronts, including Ash Wednesday (1983), the Canberra bushfires (2003), Black Saturday (2009) and the Black Summer. These cold fronts direct hot, dry and intense winds from the Australian desert to the coast. This increases the chance of bushfires starting and can turn bushfires already burning into enormous conflagrations.

Using our ice core and weather datasets, we found the same weather conditions are behind periods of lower levels of sea salt in the ice and elevated bushfire weather in southeast Australia. These conditions are when the strong westerly winds circling Antarctica move north towards Australia, bringing summer cold fronts. In technical terms, this is when the Southern Annular Mode is negative.

In the last 2,000 years, we found seven years where bushfire weather was the same or even worse than the 2019-2020 Black Summer, in the summers of 485, 683, 709, 760, 862, 885 and 1108 CE.

Ice And Bushfire

Climate change is making extreme bushfire weather steadily more likely.

What our research shows is that natural climate variability can also produce bushfire weather similar or worse than the Black Summer.

Fire authorities should take these possible natural extremes into account, in addition to the increasing intensity of bushfire weather from climate change. 

Danielle Udy, Research associate in Climatology, University of Tasmania; Anthony Kiem, Associate Professor – Hydroclimatology, University of Newcastle; Neil Holbrook, Professor of Ocean and Climate Dynamics, University of Tasmania; Nerilie Abram, Professor in Climate Change and Paleoclimatology, Australian National University, and Tessa Vance, Palaeoclimatologist, Australian Antarctic Program Partnership, University of Tasmania

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Spicy foods taste spicy because they contain a family of compounds called capsaicinoids. Capsaicin is the major culprit. It’s found in chillies, jalapeños, cayenne pepper, and is even the active ingredient in pepper spray.

Capsaicin doesn’t actually physically heat up your mouth. The burning sensation comes from receptors in the mouth reacting to capsaicin and sending a signal to the brain that something is very hot.

That’s why the “hot” chilli sensation feels so real – we even respond by sweating. To alleviate the heat, you need to remove the capsaicin from your mouth.

So why doesn’t drinking water help make that spicy feeling go away? And what would work better instead?

Water-Loving And Water-Hating Molecules

To help us choose what might wash the capsaicin away most effectively, it’s helpful to know that capsaicin is a hydrophobic molecule. That means it hates being in contact with water and will not easily mix with it.

Look what happens when you try to mix hydrophobic sand with water.

On the other hand, hydrophilic molecules love water and are very happy to mix with it.

You’ve likely seen this before. You can easily dissolve hydrophilic sugar in water, but it’s hard to wash away hydrophobic oils from your pan using tap water alone.

If you try to wash hydrophobic capsaicin away with water, it won’t be very effective, because hydrophilic and hydrophobic substances don’t mix.

Going for iced water will be even less effective, as hydrophobic capsaicin is even less soluble in water at lower temperatures. You may get a temporary sense of relief while the cold liquid is in your mouth, but as soon as you swallow it, you’ll be back where you started.

Instead, a good choice would be to consume something that is also hydrophobic. This is because of an old-but-true adage in chemistry that “like dissolves like”.

The idea is that generally, hydrophobic substances will not dissolve in something hydrophilic – like water – but will dissolve in something that is also hydrophobic, as this video shows:

My Mouth Is On Fire. What Should I Drink Instead Of Water?

A swig of oil would likely be effective, but is perhaps not so palatable.

Milk makes for an ideal choice for two reasons.

The first is that milk contains hydrophobic fats, which the capsaicin will more easily dissolve in, allowing it to be washed away.

The second is that dairy products contain a protein called casein. Casein is an emulsifier, a substance that helps oils and water mix, as in this video:

Casein plays a large role in keeping the fat mixed throughout your glass of milk, and it also has a strong affinity for capsaicin. It will readily wrap up and encapsulate capsaicin molecules and assist in carrying them away from the receptor. This relieves the burning sensation.

OK But I Hate Drinking Milk. What Else Can I Try?

What about raita? This dish, commonly served with Indian curries, is made primarily from yoghurt. So aside from being its own culinary experience, raita is rich in fats, and therefore contains plenty of hydrophobic material. It also contains casein, which will again help lock up and remove the capsaicin.

Ice cream would also work, as it contains both casein and large amounts of hydrophobic substances.

Some studies have also shown that consuming drinks with large amounts of sugar can relieve spiciness.

What about reaching for that ice cold beer?

This is commonly suggested as a suitable approach to stop the burning. At first glance, this may seem a good idea because capsaicin is highly soluble in alcohol.

However, most beers only contain between 4–6% alcohol. The bulk of the liquid in beer is water, which is hydrophilic and cannot wash away capsaicin. The small amount of alcohol in your beer would make it slightly more effective, but not to any great degree.

Your curry and beer may taste great together, but that’s likely the only benefit.

In truth, an alcoholic beverage is not going to help much unless you go for something with a much, much higher alcohol content, which comes with its own problems.

Daniel Eldridge, Senior Lecturer in Chemistry, Swinburne University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

We all know fresh produce is good for us, but fruit, vegetables and herbs have a tendency to perish quickly if left uneaten.

This is because even after harvesting, produce from living plants tends to continue its biological processes. This includes respiration: producing energy from stored carbohydrates, proteins and fats while releasing carbon dioxide and water vapour. (Ever found a sprouting potato in your pantry?)

On top of that, fresh produce also spoils easily thanks to various microbes – both harmless and ones that can cause disease, called pathogens.

Simply chucking things in the fridge won’t solve the problem, as different types of plants will react differently to how they’re stored. So, how can you combat food waste and keep produce fresh for longer? Fortunately, there are some helpful tips.

Freshness And Quality Begin At The Farm

Farmers always aim to harvest produce when it’s at an optimal condition, but both pre-harvest and post-harvest factors will affect freshness and quality even before you buy it.

Pre-harvest factors are agricultural, such as climatic conditions, soil type and water availability. Post-harvest factors include washing and cleaning after harvesting, transportation and distribution, processing and packaging, and storage.

As consumers we can’t directly control these factors – sometimes the veggies we buy just won’t be as good. But we can look out for things that will affect the produce once we bring it home.

One major thing to look out for is bruised, wounded or damaged produce. This can happen at any stage of post-harvest handling, and can really speed up the decay of your veggies and fruit.

Moisture loss through damaged skin speeds up deterioration and nutrient loss. The damage also makes it easier for spoilage microbes to get in.

To Wash Or Not To Wash?

You don’t need to wash your produce before storing it. A lot of what we buy has already been washed commercially. In fact, if you wash your produce and can’t get it completely dry, the added moisture could speed up decay in the fridge.

But washing produce just before you use it is important to remove dirt and pathogenic bugs.

Don’t use vinegar in your washing water despite what you see on social media. Studies indicate vinegar has no effect on lowering microbial loads on fresh produce.

Similarly, don’t use baking soda. Even though there’s some evidence baking soda can remove pesticide residues from the surface of some produce, it’s not advisable at home. Just use plain tap water.

Location, Location, Location

The main thing you need is the correct type of packaging and the correct location – you want to manage moisture loss, decay and ripening.

The three main storage options are on the counter, in the fridge, or in a “cool, dry and dark place”, such as the pantry. Here are some common examples of produce and where best to put them.

Bananas, onion, garlic, potatoes, sweet potato and whole pumpkin will do better in a dark pantry or cupboard. Don’t store potatoes and onions together: onions produce a gas called ethylene that makes potatoes spoil quicker, while the high moisture in potatoes spoils onions.

In fact, don’t store fruits such as apples, pears, avocado and bananas together, because these fruits release ethylene gas as they ripen, making nearby fruits ripen (and potentially spoil) much faster. That is, unless you do want to ripen your fruits fast.

All leafy greens, carrots, cucumbers, cauliflower and broccoli will do best in the low-humidity drawer (crisper) in the fridge. You can put them in perforated plastic bags to retain moisture but maintain air flow. But don’t put them in completely sealed bags because this can slow down ripening while trapping carbon dioxide, leading to decay and bad smells.

Some fruits will also do best in the fridge. For example, apples and citrus fruits such as oranges can keep fresh longer in the fridge (crisper drawer), although they can stay at room temperature for short periods. However, don’t store watermelon in the fridge for too long, as it will lose its flavour and deep red colour if kept refrigerated for longer than three days.

Most herbs and some leafy vegetables – like celery, spring onions and asparagus – can be kept with stems in water to keep them crisp. Keep them in a well-ventilated area and away from direct sunlight, so they don’t get too warm and wilt.

Fight Food Waste And Experiment

Don’t buy too much. Whenever possible, buy only small amounts so that you don’t need to worry about keeping them fresh. Never buy bruised, wounded or damaged produce if you plan to keep it around for more than a day.

“Process” your veggies for storage. If you do buy a large quantity – maybe a bulk option was on sale – consider turning the produce into something you can keep for longer. For example, banana puree made from really ripe bananas can be stored for up to 14 days at 4°C. You can use freezing, blanching, fermentation and canning for most vegetables.

Consider vacuum sealing. Vacuum packaging of vegetables and berries can keep them fresh longer, as well. For example, vacuum-sealed beans can keep up to 16 months in the fridge, but will last only about four weeks in the fridge unsealed.

Keep track. Arrange your fridge so you can see the produce easily and use it all before it loses freshness.

Experiment with storage hacks. Social media is full of tips and hacks on how best to store produce. Turn your kitchen into a lab and try out any tips you’re curious about – they might just work. You can even use these experiments as a way to teach your kids about the importance of reducing food waste.

Grow some of your own. This isn’t feasible for all of us, but you can always try having some herbs in pots so you don’t need to worry about keeping them fresh or using up a giant bunch of mint all at once. Growing your own microgreens could be handy, too.

Senaka Ranadheera, Associate Professor, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

My first encounter came as a medical student. Under high magnification, I examined a colleague’s iris, the coloured part of their eye encircling the pupil.

I watched as the muscle fibres moved rhythmically, undulating between dilation and constriction. It looked like an underwater plant, swaying in a current.

Mesmerising. But in a busy university curriculum the experience quickly faded, to be replaced by the next clinical rotation. I forgot ophthalmology; “maybe orthopaedic surgery or emergency medicine are for me”, I thought.

But eyes returned, this time while I was a junior doctor in residency. Assisting in surgery, I observed a patient’s retina through an operating microscope. Here was a cinematic view of the orb, as if viewed from a spacecraft over a Martian landscape.

The internal surface glowed blood orange (the colour once ascribed to its rich blood supply, now attributed to a layer of underlying pigmented cells). Within this landscape ran red rivulets, a network of branching blood vessels.

The Greek anatomist Herophilus thought this pattern resembled a casting net, leading to “retiform” (meaning reticular or netlike), which became “retina” in contemporary language (the light-sensitive film at the back of the eye). I was struck by the intricacy of this secret globe, this gallery of miniature art.

The term “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” took on new connotations, and I turned to pursuing ophthalmology. Aside from the organ’s intrinsic appeal, I was struck by the technicality of eye surgery, and the apparent mystique of ophthalmologists themselves.

These unruffled surgeons appeared to float above the general fray, waltzing around the hospital with fancy eye equipment and clever jargon. No one really knew what they did, but they looked cool.

Acceptance into ophthalmology specialist training was notoriously competitive, with only one or two doctors accepted each year in our state. “Why not,” I thought, and went for it, planning my campaign for eligibility. Among other things, this included me experiencing blindness for 24 hours, by using a blindfold as part of a fundraising event, and conducting research on childhood eye disease in Iran, my country of origin.

Nine years later I was a qualified ophthalmologist, having learned the eye’s workings in both health and when diseased. I had come to view the eye as an engineering and biological miracle.

Mammals With Seeing Brains

A wonderfully elastic ball, the eye can be thought of as housing a camera at the front. This camera focuses incoming light through compound lenses (the cornea and crystalline lens), which are separated by an aperture (the pupil), to form a fine beam.

This beam travels towards a transducer (an electronic device turning one form of energy into another) at the back of the eye (the retina). The transducer converts photons into electrical signals at a rate of around 8.8 megabits (million bits) per second, just shy of a decent ethernet connection.

Carried in an insulated cable (the optic nerve), this electrical current runs backwards through the brain, to the visual cortex. This is the part of the brain that sits just in front of the bony bulge at the back of your skull.

Here is vision’s supercomputer, where incoming, semi-processed data is organised into a final experience of shapes, colours, contrast and movement. Et voila, there you have it: high-definition, stereoscopic human vision.

While the front part of the eye is mainly composed of water, the back is nature’s version of bioelectronics (the convergence of biology and electronics).

Eyesight, then, is an interplay of light, water and electricity, in networks both elemental and complex. This exquisite balance may be further demonstrated through two examples.

First, consider the structure of the cornea. This is the clear “windscreen” at the front of the eye, the only completely transparent tissue in the human body. Its living cells are a plexus of water and collagen, glass-like and liquid enough to permit light, sturdy enough to withstand trauma. Here again lies a balance between the eye’s delicacy and its resilience.

Second, let’s look at the eyes’ development, as direct extensions of our brains. When we are embryos from weeks three to ten, two folds appear on our forebrains (the forward-most portion of our brain). These folds extend forwards, becoming stalks. In turn, they are capped with little cups that turn into globes, later encased in eyelids and lashes.

The brain stretches forward, in other words, to form its own eyes. It’s brain tissue, then, that watches the world – we are the mammals with seeing brains.

Photographs Revert To Negatives

The descriptions above could perhaps be characterised as a meeting of science and lyricism. This is no accident. While ophthalmology concerns itself with optics, a mathematical affair, I was the schoolkid who loved English class.

Whether writing short stories, or nodding to hip-hop’s street poetry, I was drawn to language. These days I’m predominantly a doctor and family man, and only a dilettante as a writer. Still, I seek language out in the micro-gaps of a day, predawn before the kids wake, or on train rides to and from work.

There’s nothing glamorous about this, and nor is it special. Doctor-writers are far from rare – think of history’s Anton Chekhov or William Carlos Williams, the US’s Atul Gawande, or our own Karen Hitchcock or Michelle Johnston. So far, I’m the only writerly eye surgeon I know of (any others out there – shout!).

Author Margaret Lobenstine believes this sort of “renaissance soul” resides in all of us; after all, we have two cerebral hemispheres, one for reason and one for art (in truth though, the hemispheres cooperate on most tasks).

Let’s pivot fully from eyeballs to writing then, and specifically to poetry, my favoured sandpit.

Robert Frost said, “to be a poet is a condition, not a profession”. Most poets write, I believe, because they must, not because it’s fun or easy (although occasionally it’s both). Sometimes we write to understand or at least to name something, to gather up the events and emotions that move us, dangling like threads to be spooled up into something resembling sense.

In a medical day, I am periodically struck by a patient encounter that leaves me reeling. Perhaps it’s an unexpected confession, or a scrap of a life story. Either way, it’s the emotional charge that, like a vein of gold, points towards a buried poem.

Let’s take a real-life example from my practice, an elderly lady whom we shall call Iris (pun intended).

Iris presents to me with failing vision. Examining her eyes, I see “geographic atrophy”, little islands of missing retinal tissue worn away over time. This is a form of incurable, age-related, macular degeneration. It results in permanent loss of central vision, with peripheral vision remaining intact.

It’s not good news; my stomach tightens as I prepare to deliver it.

Iris replies, tearily, that she just lost her husband of 60 years. She’s now alone and becoming blind. I’m taken aback – what can one honestly say to this?

Sure, there are visual magnifiers, home modifications, other practical aids that may guardrail her physical safety. But her anguish goes beyond this; she’s on the edge of a personal precipice, and teetering. There’s electricity in the consult room, a lightning-rod moment for sure.

How might a poet view this scene? Placing Iris in the centre, let’s start with her appearance – her auburn-dyed hair, her knobbly walking stick, her potpourri perfume – enough to make her real. In addition to portraiture, poetry deals in metaphors; what are some for Iris’s grief?

How about:

Colour photographs revert
to their negatives, old-fashioned film
stark and inverting reality,
her life recognisable
yet draining of hue.

Or this:

Turned over, her hourglass
clumps onto the table,
sand trickling away
from having had, towards loss, the two bulbs
painfully, inextricably linked.

Good poetry must go further, seeking the patterns beneath the surface. What precisely is it about Iris that moves me so? She is losing things, important things. Witnessing this touches my deepest fears, knowing that, like an unwelcome house guest, loss visits us all, sometimes staying for good.

As my Persian countryman Rumi wrote, “this human being is a guest house”. Losing our own physical abilities or our loved ones, what would become of us?

Distilling this further, what exactly is loss, its weight and texture?

Inversions,
your cherished glass of shiraz shatters
on the tiles, your laden table
upended. Warmth whistles
out through the cracks, cold rises up.
Midnight:
your reasons for living dwindle,
walking out the door
one by one.

Dark, heavy material no doubt; well, welcome to medicine, and to real life. No wonder Iris’s visit rattles me. The poet must face this discomfort, exploring the interplay between the miniscule and the panoramic, the worldly and the transcendent.

Tasked with creating visions for life, from its mundane to its profoundest moments, poets, then, are our seers.

Anger And Solace

I’m now in my 18th year working exclusively with eyes, the latter half as a qualified consultant ophthalmologist. These days, the toughest conditions I face are diseases without a cure, such as Iris’s geographic atrophy, or vision loss that could have been prevented, such as solar retinopathy.

In other scenarios, there are eye diseases caused by modern living. An example of this is diabetic eye disease, which disproportionately affects Indigenous people. When compared with non-Indigenous people, Indigenous Australians suffer three times the rate of vision loss from diabetes.

The reasons for this are manifold, and include the easy access to sugar-laden beverages in many Indigenous communities. As ophthalmologists, we deal with the downstream effects of high blood sugar levels. This manifests as “diabetic macular oedema”, where a swelling at the back of the eye leads to loss of vision.

Fortunately, we have good treatments for this condition. But prevention is far better than cure. As one measure, why don’t we impose a sugar tax, as more than 100 other countries have done?. By introducing refined sugars into a healthy traditional diet, modern Australia has arguably created this problem. By corollary, we have a duty to solve it.

This is an opportunity for resistance and empowerment.

Hauled over on ships,
white crystals in barrels -
dispossession’s sweetener - now
sat on shelves, bright bottles
singing cheap songs
to thirsty eyes.
We’ll brand you yet:
mark your barrels ‘poison’.

Conditions like this, where modern society harms people – for astronomical corporate profits, mind you – are infuriating.

Thankfully, there is solace in my ongoing fascination with the eye. There are moments of sheer beauty; images of fluorescein angiography, for example, where the retina’s blood vessels are highlighted with a fluorescent dye as a diagnostic tool.

These angiograms remind me of lightning storms in our state’s northwest, where cloud-to-cloud and sheet lightning flash in the night sky in split-second forks and streams. Much as power and charge flow in the sky, so blood is distributed in the back of the eye.

Also spurring me on are patients’ success stories, where sight is restored or blindness prevented.

Twenty years in a Thai refugee camp,
now sat in front of me,
grandma from Myanmar.
Twenty years to lose light –
this cataract surgery won’t
return your nation, grandma, but at least
it’s restored your sight.

These stories abound, such is the privilege of my profession.

A Race Between Science And Time

There may even be hope for Iris. Her condition, geographic atrophy, is caused in part by her immune system, and its complement proteins. This network of proteins marks selected entities (typically pathogens or tumour cells) for destruction by immune cells such as lymphocytes, phagocytes and macrophages.

For reasons including localised inflammation and reduced oxygen delivery, this response can, in ageing, be misdirected towards healthy retinal tissue, leading to its destruction – a process akin to friendly fire in battle.

For Iris, the cavalry may be cresting the hill. In 2023, two new medications were approved for the treatment of geographic atrophy in the US. Both block targets within our complement system and, while not curative, have been shown to slow (although not reverse or stop) the disease. By late 2024, we should know whether one of these drugs, pegcetacoplan, is approved in Australia.

Starter’s pistol fires! A race afoot
between science and time.
Do the molecules work
and – as the clock chimes –
will they cross the line
to save sight?

Hessom Razavi, Associate professor, The University of Western Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Beatles began their first and only tour of Australia 60 years ago this week. It remains a landmark event in our social and cultural history.

The Beatles spent almost three weeks in Australia and New Zealand. Touching down in a wet and cold Sydney on Thursday June 11 1964, they played 32 concerts in eight cities: first Adelaide (where drummer Ringo Starr, suffering from tonsillitis and pharyngitis, was replaced by Jimmie Nicol), then Melbourne (with Starr again), Sydney, Wellington, Auckland, Dunedin, Christchurch and two final shows in Brisbane on June 29 and 30.

Charming and irreverent as they were, The Beatles themselves were only part of the reason the tour was so memorable.

It was the hordes of screaming fans who followed their every move that astonished onlookers.

The Rise Of Beatlemania

By 1964, Australian teenagers had access to a global youth culture. As the feminist author Anne Summers, then an Adelaide teenager, recalled in her memoir Ducks on the Pond:

It was rare for world-famous pop stars to come to Adelaide and unheard of for a group at the height of their celebrity.

That Australian teenagers had the opportunity to see The Beatles in person in 1964 was due to a stroke of luck for tour promoter Kenn Brodziak. In late 1963, Brodziak secured the then up-and-coming Beatles for a three-week tour of Australia at a bargain rate.

By the time the tour took place, the Beatles were the biggest band in the world.

Their popularity had skyrocketed throughout 1964. I Want To Hold Your Hand went to number one on the Australian charts in mid-January and the top six singles that year were all by The Beatles.

So when the band arrived here, Beatlemania was the predictable result: crowds of surging, screaming young people, who turned out in massive numbers wherever the Beatles appeared.

While the earliest rock ‘n’ roll fans (and even performers) in the late 1950s were often labelled juvenile delinquents, there were too many teenagers swept up in Beatlemania for them to be dismissed in the same way. The crowds became a spectacle in themselves.

‘A Chanting Mass Of Humanity’

Beatlemaniacs were loud and unruly. The Daily Telegraph reported:

50,000 screaming, chanting, struggling teenagers crowded outside Melbourne’s Southern Cross Hotel this afternoon to give the Beatles the wildest reception of their careers.

It was a similar story in Adelaide. The Advertiser described:

police, their arms locked together and forming a tight circle around the car carrying the Beatles, had to force a path through the surging, screaming crowd […] Police said they had never seen anything like it.

The crowds overwhelmed observers with their sheer size – a “solid, swaying, chanting mass of humanity”, according to The Age – and noise. The Daily Telegraph consulted an acoustics expert to conclude “Beatles fans scream like [a] jet in flight”.

Beatlemania was visible (and noisy) evidence of a growing teenage consumer market and the assimilation of rock music, dancing and youth culture into the leisure practices of middle-class youth. It was proof (if anyone still needed it) the youth market was highly developed and extremely lucrative.

The speed with which companies found a ready audience for Beatles merchandise (wigs, souvenirs, magazines) demonstrated the relative affluence of the youthful consumer in mid-1960s Australia. This market would continue to grow throughout the decade.

A New Idea Of Youth

Perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of Beatlemania was its femaleness. While not all Beatles fans were girls, it was the crying, screaming girls who attracted the most media comment.

The Daily Telegraph described them this way:

It was the girls, the nymphets of 1964 in their uniform of black slacks and duffle coats and purple sweaters – who showed the orgiastic devotion due to the young men from the damp and foggy dead end of England […] the girls wept, screamed, grimaced, fainted, fell over, threw things, stamped, jumped and shouted […] [The Beatles] were the high priests of pop culture, taking due homage from a captive, hypnotised hysterical congregation.

The references to “nymphets” with their “orgiastic devotion” tells us many Australians thought these young women were transgressing the norms expected for their era. Young women in the early 1960s were still expected to be demure and responsible. Beatles fans were breaking these rules, and helping to rewrite the meanings of youth and gender in 1960s Australia.

Beatlemania was an expression of female desire. The Beatles were powerful objects of fantasy for many fans in a world where sexual mores were slowly changing but where women were still expected to police male desire, stopping young men from “going too far”. A fantasy relationship with a Beatle became a way for young women to dream about their ideal relationship.

Screaming, chasing a Beatle down the street: these were acts of rebellion and joy that prefigured the rise of women’s liberation, with its embrace of rebellious femininity.

Beatlemania reminds us that, even if women were not always behind the microphone or playing the guitar, they have been important to the history of rock ‘n’ roll music as fans and audience members.

Beatlemania marked the ascendancy of a new idea of youth: these young people weren’t mere replicas of their parents, but they were not juvenile delinquents, either. The Beatles tour drew young Australians more closely into a transnational youth culture, fostering the development of a distinctively Australian variant here.

Beatlemania also demonstrated the massed power of youth. By the end of the 1960s, many Australian teenagers were gathering on the streets to protest, rather than celebrate, and to make political demands, rather than to scream.

Michelle Arrow, Professor of History, Macquarie University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

What’s the difference? is a new editorial product that explains the similarities and differences between commonly confused health and medical terms, and why they matter.

Changes in thinking and memory as we age can occur for a variety of reasons. These changes are not always cause for concern. But when they begin to disrupt daily life, it could indicate the first signs of dementia.

Another term that can crop up when we’re talking about dementia is Alzheimer’s disease, or Alzheimer’s for short.

So what’s the difference?

What Is Dementia?

Dementia is an umbrella term used to describe a range of syndromes that result in changes in memory, thinking and/or behaviour due to degeneration in the brain.

To meet the criteria for dementia these changes must be sufficiently pronounced to interfere with usual activities and are present in at least two different aspects of thinking or memory.

For example, someone might have trouble remembering to pay bills and become lost in previously familiar areas.

It’s less-well known that dementia can also occur in children. This is due to progressive brain damage associated with more than 100 rare genetic disorders. This can result in similar cognitive changes as we see in adults.

So What’s Alzheimer’s Then?

Alzheimer’s is the most common type of dementia, accounting for about 60-80% of cases.

So it’s not surprising many people use the terms dementia and Alzheimer’s interchangeably.

Changes in memory are the most common sign of Alzheimer’s and it’s what the public most often associates with it. For instance, someone with Alzheimer’s may have trouble recalling recent events or keeping track of what day or month it is.

We still don’t know exactly what causes Alzheimer’s. However, we do know it is associated with a build-up in the brain of two types of protein called amyloid-β and tau.

While we all have some amyloid-β, when too much builds up in the brain it clumps together, forming plaques in the spaces between cells. These plaques cause damage (inflammation) to surrounding brain cells and leads to disruption in tau. Tau forms part of the structure of brain cells but in Alzheimer’s tau proteins become “tangled”. This is toxic to the cells, causing them to die. A feedback loop is then thought to occur, triggering production of more amyloid-β and more abnormal tau, perpetuating damage to brain cells.

Alzheimer’s can also occur with other forms of dementia, such as vascular dementia. This combination is the most common example of a mixed dementia.

Vascular Dementia

The second most common type of dementia is vascular dementia. This results from disrupted blood flow to the brain.

Because the changes in blood flow can occur throughout the brain, signs of vascular dementia can be more varied than the memory changes typically seen in Alzheimer’s.

For example, vascular dementia may present as general confusion, slowed thinking, or difficulty organising thoughts and actions.

Your risk of vascular dementia is greater if you have heart disease or high blood pressure.

Frontotemporal Dementia

Some people may not realise that dementia can also affect behaviour and/or language. We see this in different forms of frontotemporal dementia.

The behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia is the second most common form (after Alzheimer’s disease) of younger onset dementia (dementia in people under 65).

People living with this may have difficulties in interpreting and appropriately responding to social situations. For example, they may make uncharacteristically rude or offensive comments or invade people’s personal space.

Semantic dementia is also a type of frontotemporal dementia and results in difficulty with understanding the meaning of words and naming everyday objects.

Dementia With Lewy Bodies

Dementia with Lewy bodies results from dysregulation of a different type of protein known as α-synuclein. We often see this in people with Parkinson’s disease.

So people with this type of dementia may have altered movement, such as a stooped posture, shuffling walk, and changes in handwriting. Other symptoms include changes in alertness, visual hallucinations and significant disruption to sleep.

Do I Have Dementia And If So, Which Type?

If you or someone close to you is concerned, the first thing to do is to speak to your GP. They will likely ask you some questions about your medical history and what changes you have noticed.

Sometimes it might not be clear if you have dementia when you first speak to your doctor. They may suggest you watch for changes or they may refer you to a specialist for further tests.

There is no single test to clearly show if you have dementia, or the type of dementia. A diagnosis comes after multiple tests, including brain scans, tests of memory and thinking, and consideration of how these changes impact your daily life.

Not knowing what is happening can be a challenging time so it is important to speak to someone about how you are feeling or to reach out to support services.

Dementia Is Diverse

As well as the different forms of dementia, everyone experiences dementia in different ways. For example, the speed dementia progresses varies a lot from person to person. Some people will continue to live well with dementia for some time while others may decline more quickly.

There is still significant stigma surrounding dementia. So by learning more about the various types of dementia and understanding differences in how dementia progresses we can all do our part to create a more dementia-friendly community.

The National Dementia Helpline (1800 100 500) provides information and support for people living with dementia and their carers. To learn more about dementia, you can take this free online course.

Nikki-Anne Wilson, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA), UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.