By Larissa Schneider, Colin Cooke, Nathan D Stansell, and Simon Haberle 29 January 2020 (The Conversation) – Climate change and bushfire may exacerbate recent mercury pollution and increase exposure to the poisonous neurotoxin, according to our study published in the Journal of Paleolimnology. Mercury stored in plants is released during bushfires, suggesting Australia is particularly at […]
By Sarah Jane Bell 21 January 2020 (ABC Ballarat) – An image of a koala clinging to a tree branch that has been etched in the sands of a Victorian beach has garnered international attention. A photograph of the 120-metre-long artwork near Barwon Heads, south of Geelong, shows a sunset obscured by bushfire smoke and has touched […]
By Will Ziebell 1 February 2020 MELBOURNE (Reuters) – Soaring temperatures and strong winds stoked unpredictable bushfires near Australia’s capital city on Saturday, closing a major highway and prompting warnings for some residents that it was too late to evacuate. Skies along the Monaro Highway in the Australian Capital Territory turned orange-red as an uncontrolled […]
By Matthew Brown and Christina Larson 18 January 2020 (AP) – Australia’s forests are burning at a rate unmatched in modern times and scientists say the landscape is being permanently altered as a warming climate brings profound changes to the island continent. Heat waves and drought have fueled bigger and more frequent fires in parts of […]
By Royce Millar and Chris Vedelago 31 January 2020 (The Sydney Morning Herald) – Rising temperatures and climate change have been blamed for the failure of stocks of some of the most popular eating fish in Australia’s Southern Ocean to recover from declines despite more than a decade of protection. The troubling findings come as […]
By Grahame Madge 24 January 2020 (Met Office) – A forecast of the atmospheric concentration of carbon-dioxide shows that 2020 will witness one of the largest annual rises in concentration since measurements began at Mauna Loa, in Hawaii, 1958. During the year the atmospheric concentration of CO₂ is expected to peak above 417 parts per […]
19 January 2020 (Australian Asssociated Press) – Damaging winds produced by thunderstorms across central New South Wales have whipped up dust storms that turned daytime into night in some towns. The Bureau of Meteorology issued a series of severe thunderstorm warnings on Sunday evening for inland NSW with the associated winds generating massive dust clouds. […]
By Joelle Gergis and Geoff Cary 13 January 2020 (The Conversation) – Every time a weather extreme occurs, some people quickly jump in to say we’ve been through it all before: that worse events have happened in the past, or it’s just part of natural climate variability. The recent bushfire crisis is a case in point. […]
By Naaman Zhou 16 January 2020 (The Guardian) – More than 10.7m hectares of land have burnt so far in Australia’s bushfires – larger than the total area of South Korea, or Portugal, and 1.3 times the size of Scotland. The ongoing and unprecedented bushfire crisis has spread across six states and multiple months. In New South Wales alone, the […]
14 January 2020 (BBC News) – Smoke from the massive bushfires in Australia will soon circle the Earth back to the nation, says NASA. Massive infernos have raged along the nation’s east coast for months, pushing smoke across the Pacific. NASA said plumes from blazes around New Year’s Day had crossed South America, turning skies […]