The end of the global housing boom – After a years-long surge in global capitals, property prices are starting to head lower

31 July 2018 (Bloomberg News) – From London to Sydney and Beijing to New York, house prices in some of the world’s most sought-after cities are heading south. Tax changes to damp demand, values out of kilter with affordability and tougher lending standards have combined to undermine the market. That could have wider implications because […]

Photo gallery: Aerial views of Australia drought

2 August 2018 (BBC News) – Parts of eastern Australia are suffering their worst drought in living memory as a lack of rainfall in winter hits farms badly. Reuters photographer David Gray captured the view of the dried earth from the air, finding an often surprising collage of colours. […] About 98 percent of New […]

Australia farmers shift on climate change and want a say on energy – “We have turned quite a corner. Overwhelmingly, I think it’s got to the point where the science is very acceptable.”

By Katharine Murphy 29 June 2018 (The Guardian) – Out in the bush, far from the ritualised political jousting in Canberra, attitudes are changing. Regional Australia has turned the corner when it comes to acknowledging the reality of climate change, says the woman now charged with safeguarding the interests of farmers in Canberra. Fiona Simson, […]

Idle coal-fired power plant in Australia will reopen to power bitcoin mining

By Claire Reilly 11 April 2018 (CNET) – Sure, you could mine bitcoin on that old PC in your garage, or you could use a whole power station to do it. That’s the idea behind the Blockchain Application Centre — an Aussie tech initiative that will see one of the country’s now-shuttered coal-fired power plants […]

Unprecedented wave of large-mammal extinctions linked to ancient humans – “What we’re doing is potentially erasing 40 to 45 million years of mammal body-size evolution in a very short period of time”

By Scott Schrage 19 April 2018 (University of Nebraska–Lincoln) – Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and other recent human relatives may have begun hunting large mammal species down to size — by way of extinction — at least 90,000 years earlier than previously thought, says a new study published in the journal Science.Elephant-dwarfing wooly mammoths, elephant-sized ground […]

Shorebirds, the world’s greatest travelers, face extinction – “A worldwide catastrophe is underway”

By John W. Fitzpatrick and Nathan R. Senner 27 April 2018 (The New York Times) – A worldwide catastrophe is underway among an extraordinary group of birds — the marathon migrants we know as shorebirds. Numbers of some species are falling so quickly that many biologists fear an imminent planet-wide wave of extinctions. These declines […]

Global warming is transforming the Great Barrier Reef – “Coral reefs are already shifting radically in response to unprecedented heatwaves”

19 Apr 2018 (James Cook University) – A new study published online today in Nature shows that corals on the northern Great Barrier Reef experienced a catastrophic die-off following the extended marine heatwave of 2016.“When corals bleach from a heatwave, they can either survive and regain their colour slowly as the temperature drops, or they […]

Climate Feedback: The Australian’s coverage of Great Barrier Reef study creates perception that scientists are divided

19 April 2018 (Climate Feedback) – This article in The Australian covers a new study published in Nature that concludes global warming played a key role in the recent large-scale bleaching and mortality of corals in the Great Barrier Reef. Based on the comments of a single oceanographer (Prof. Kaempf), the article was headlined “Not […]

Great Barrier Reef saw huge losses from 2016 heatwave – “The study paints a bleak picture of the sheer extent of coral loss on the Great Barrier Reef”

By Quirin Schiermeier 18 April 2018 (Nature) – Extreme heat in 2016 damaged Australia’s Great Barrier Reef much more substantially than initial surveys indicated, according to ongoing studies that have tracked the health of the coral treasure. The heatwave caused massive bleaching of the corals that captured worldwide attention.In a paper published on 18 April […]

Beef, lamb, lobster or fish? Fisheries study shows impact of food choice on carbon emissions

4 April 2018 (University of Tasmania) – A new study by a team of Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS) and Canadian scientists has found that catching most types of fish produces far less carbon per kilo of protein than land-based alternatives such as beef or lamb. The researchers undertaking the study found that […]

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