Intrepid Science Blog

Sydney declares a climate emergency – what does that mean in practice? Chris Turney , UNSW Late on Monday night, the City of Sydney became the second state capital in Australia (after Hobart a week earlier ) to officially declare a climate emergency . With climate change considered a threat to human life, Sydney councillors unanimously supported a motion put forward by Lord Mayor Clover Moore to mobilise city resources to reduce carbon emissions and minimise the impact of future change. The decision sees Sydney join a variety of local and national governments around the world, in a movement that is increasingly gaining momentum . In total, some 658 local governments around the world have made the same declaration, with the UK and Canada committing their national governments to the global movement in just the past two months . An official declaration of climate emergency puts a government on a “wartime mobilisation” that places climate change at the centre of policy and plannin...

UK becomes first country to declare a 'climate emergency' Days of protest by Extinction Rebellion have brought parts of London to a standstill. Shutterstock Chris Turney , UNSW On Wednesday night a bipartisan UK Parliament passed an extraordinary measure: a national declaration of an Environment and Climate Emergency. The UK is the first national government to declare such an emergency. The decision marks a renewed sense of urgency in tackling climate change, following a visit to Parliament by teenage activist Greta Thunberg , the broadcast of David Attenborough’s documentary Climate Change: The Facts and 11 days of protest by environmental group Extinction Rebellion that paralysed parts of London . Read more: Extinction Rebellion: disruption and arrests can bring social change There are now some 49 million people living under national, city and local declarations of a climate emergency aro...

Australia’s epic story: a tale of amazing people, amazing creatures and rising seas We have so much more to learn about Australia. Shutterstock/Lev Savitskiy Michael Bird , James Cook University ; Alan Cooper , University of Adelaide ; Chris Turney , UNSW ; Darren Curnoe , UNSW ; Lynette Russell , Monash University , and Sean Ulm , James Cook University The Australian continent has a remarkable history — a story of isolation, desiccation and resilience on an ark at the edge of the world. It is a story of survival, ingenuity, and awe-inspiring achievements over many years. Shortly after the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, Australia was torn from the supercontinent of Gondwana by immense tectonic forces and began its long, lonely, journey north towards the equator . The lush temperate forests of Gondwana slowly disappeared as the Australian landmass pushed north, preserving a snapshot of faunal life from a much earlier evoluti...

Never has a continent been more misunderstood. Antarctica is on a scale hard to grasp: at over fourteen million square kilometres, it is second only to Russia in coverage of the Earth’s surface and bigger than all the countries of Europe combined. It is the world’s highest continent, with an average altitude of 2300 metres. It contains more than seventy per cent of the world’s freshwater, locked up as thirty million cubic kilometres of snow and ice—which, if it melted, would raise the planet’s seas by an estimated sixty-five metres, easily flooding the likes of Sydney, London and New York. The bitterly cold air on its upper surface contains virtually no moisture, making the Antarctic interior the world’s largest desert, while the rocks that make up the rest of the continent span almost the entire age of the Earth. The wildlife along its fringes is some of the most diverse on the planet. And yet the Antarctic remains one of the last great unexplored regions on our planet. In spit...

In 1773, Captain Cook described the great southern continent Terra Australis Incognita as ‘A country doomed by nature never once to feel the warmth of the sun’s rays but to lie forever buried under everlasting snow and ice’. But is it? We used to think of Antarctica being completely insulated from the rest of the world, effectively stuck in an ice age which most of the planet finished with 12,000 years ago. Disturbingly, there are signs that the image we’ve conjured up in our minds of a frozen continent is fast disappearing. Across this vast region, the last few decades has seen trends above and below the ice that are far from encouraging. Warming has been observed across large parts of the continent and it seems most probable its down to our high-energy lifestyles that has seen us flood the atmosphere with carbon . We even made it to the Pole for the centenary of Scott's arrival! Thanks to ALE. Unfortunately, Antarctica’s connection to the rest of the world means this sp...