Australia and Climate Change

For this post, I wanted to introduce the biodiversity of Australia and look at how this is changing. Biodiversity is the variability of life and genetic health within an ecosystem, biodiversity is highest in areas of high primary productivity, such as tropical rain-forests and coral reef systems. Globally the genetic biodiversity of the world is classed as  beyond the zone of uncertainty , meaning we are in venturing in unknown waters, possibly creeping into a 6th a mass extinction .  Continental isolation has led to very high levels of endemism across the Australia continent and the surrounding ocean. Across the vast country, it's estimated still 75% of the flora and fauna remains to be formally described. There are 150,000 species of flora and fauna identified across Australia,  endemism is 93% through flowering plants, 46% of birds, 69% of mammals, 94% of amphibians, 93% of reptiles. Figure 1 shows an example of an endemic Australian reptile,   Tiliqua rugosa...

Social media is increasingly being used as a platform for communication, advertising and international diplomacy, as well as for smatterings of environmental satire, the latter is by far my favourite. To borrow a line from Peter Ustinov    "Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious”. A video from The Juice Media , in support of a Greenpeace campaign to keep Oil exploration out of the Great Australian Bight , captured some of the best aspects of comedy, whilst being informative, albeit with an array of profane language, as is the Australian way (viewer discretion is advised – profane language throughout). I’d like to touch upon and explore a couple of the talking points from the above video. Firstly, the assertion that the Great Barrier Reef is dead, this is not strictly true. Although the great barrier reef is not yet dead, coral bleaching events have progressively increased in severity across the great barrier reef from 1998, 2002 and 2016. During the mass bl...

This blog, ‘Australia and Climate Change’ is an avenue for me to explore and share how anthropogenic climate change is affecting the many different aspects and environments, of my adopted country of Australia. This first post will serve as a broad introduction to both the topic and myself.  I am a self-confessed environmentalist, but my background is as an exploration and mining geologist, from this, I will attempt to approach an array of topics pragmatically, covering a different issue with each post, whilst remaining the ability to cover up to the minute issues, as they occur. Australia covers 7.69 million km ­­2 of land surface, spanning equatorial, tropical, sub-tropical, desert, Grassland and temperate regions, in a hugely diverse country. These 6 large climate belts are subdivided by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology  (Fig. 1). The main drivers of climate through Australia are El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the Indian Ocean Dipole, the Australian monsoon and...