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In a week where energy politics took centre state over market news, the most interesting development was the signing by retailer Flow Energy of a 10-year 50MW PPA with Ararat wind farm in Victoria. We have long seen that there is a need to develop th

Mosses are sensitive to even minor changes in their living conditions. Sharon Robinson, Author provided

Drones are helping scientists check the health of Antarctic mosses, revealing clues on the pace of climate change.

The scientists say their method could be used for similar research in other harsh environments like desert or alpine regions.

Mosses are sensitive to even minor changes in their living conditions, and scientists traditionally tramped through difficult terrain to collect data on them.

Using the specially-designed drones is faster, kinder to the environment and delivers detailed images that satellite imagery cannot match.

Drones also allow to map much larger areas than previously possible, showing how the moss health responds to meltwater in real time.

These methods could be used for similar research in other harsh environments like desert or alpine regions.

Zbyněk Malenovský has received grants from the ARC and Australian Antarctic Science. He is affiliated with the Surveying and Spatial Sciences Group at the University of Tasmania, the Centre for Sustainable Ecosystem Solutions at the University of Wollongong and the Global Change Research Institute at the Czech Academy of Sciences.

Arko Lucieer has received grants from the Australian Research Council and Australian Antarctic Science Grant Scheme.

A photographer wins a legal fight against an animal rights group over a "monkey selfie" photograph.

There has been no let up since Hurricane Harvey dumped record-breaking rains on the Houston area of Texas. Hurricane Irma lashed parts of the Caribbean and Cuba and is now heading onto the US mainland, having devastated the Florida Keys and the state’s west coast.

We also have Hurricane Jose following Irma through the Caribbean, and Hurricane Katia, now downgraded after tracking through parts of eastern Mexico.

Read more: Are catastrophic disasters striking more often?

This very active season comes after a “hurricane drought” with very few major storms making landfall on the US coast over the previous decade.

So why are we seeing so many hurricanes now? Is climate change to blame?

How to make a hurricane

There are several vital ingredients needed for hurricanes to form. These include an initial disturbance in the atmosphere for the storm to form around, very warm sea surface temperatures to sustain the storm, and a lack of vertical wind shear so the storm is not torn apart during its formation.

In the Atlantic Ocean, hurricanes often form near Cape Verde off the coast of West Africa. They then track westward towards the Caribbean and the US.

Lots of factors can affect how strong these storms ultimately become, including how much time they spend gathering strength over the ocean, and the background weather patterns through which they travel.

Sea surface temperatures are well above normal over the tropical Atlantic. The effects of Hurricane Harvey mixing up cooler waters off the Texan coast can be seen. NOAA Office of Satellite and Product Operations

This storm season we have seen sea temperatures persistently 1-2℃ above normal over the tropical Atlantic Ocean, which has allowed stronger storms to form and develop.

Atlantic sea temperatures have warmed over the past century, thus enhancing one of the key ingredients for hurricane formation. The climate change influence is clear for the sea temperatures, but not so much for the other ingredients required in forming hurricanes.

Harvey and Irma

While we have low confidence in the effect of human-caused climate change on hurricane formation, it is clear that climate change is enhancing some of the impacts of these storms.

Hurricane Harvey hit southern Texas hard by stalling over the Houston area and dumping huge amounts of rain. Climate change might have contributed to the stalling effect, but what’s clearer is that climate change is making intense extreme rainfall events like we saw over Houston more likely. By warming the atmosphere we’re also increasing its capacity to carry moisture.

When we have the trigger for heavy rainfall, climate change makes it rain harder.

Hurricane Irma is a very different beast to Harvey. It devastated several Caribbean islands including Anguilla and the Virgin Islands when it was a Category 5 system. It then struck Cuba before re-intensifying and moving north across the Florida Keys and onto the US mainland.

Irma’s main impacts have been through the storm surge, the strong winds and the heavy rains.

Climate change has likely worsened the effects of Irma. As described above, we know that climate change is intensifying extreme rain events. We also know that climate change is worsening storm surges by raising the background sea level on which these events occur.

Sea levels are projected to rise further over the coming century, by 50-100cm under a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario, and 20-50cm if we greatly reduce our emissions.

So while it’s likely that climate change is contributing to more extreme hurricanes, we have even more confidence that climate change is worsening the impacts of these storms, and will continue to do so over the coming decades.

Paving over the Gulf Coast

Besides the climate change influence, the widespread urban development on the US Gulf Coast is exacerbating the impacts of hurricanes.

Much like the Houston area, Florida also has a growing population. This means that not only are there more people in harm’s way when a major hurricane strikes, but there is also more concrete and other impervious surfaces that allow the water to pool in low-lying areas.

Is there any good news?

While climate change and development in hurricane-prone areas are worsening the impacts of these hurricanes, there are some glimmers of good news.

Scientists’ ability to track and forecast these major systems has improved greatly. Better forecasting of hurricanes allows for earlier planning for their impacts and should improve evacuation processes.

In theory, with the right plans in place, better hurricane forecasting should reduce death tolls from events like Irma. But it doesn’t necessarily reduce the economic costs of these storms, and for both Harvey and Irma the clean-up and recovery bills will be more than A$100 billion each.

It’s clear that climate has worsened the impacts of Atlantic hurricanes and will continue to do so. Improved forecasting provides a glimmer of hope that the death tolls from future events can be reduced, even as the economic impacts increase.

Andrew King receives funding from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science.

Energy capacity auction shows offshore wind dramatically outstrips nuclear - and ministers must take note

Hinkley Point C nuclear power station was conceived in the days when offshore wind cost £150 per megawatt hour and a few misguided souls, some of them government ministers, thought a barrel of oil was heading towards $200.

Successive governments swallowed the line that Hinkley represented a plausible answer to the UK’s threefold energy conundrum – keeping the lights on, reducing carbon emissions and producing the juice at affordable prices for consumers and business.

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Joe Boyd is appealing to public for donations to challenge petrochemicals giant over ‘anti-democratic’ injunction

A second campaigner is challenging a sweeping injunction obtained by a petrochemicals giant against anti-fracking activists that has been criticised for profoundly limiting protests.

Joe Boyd, an anti-fracking campaigner, is going to the high court in London on Tuesday in an attempt to stop the injunction which has been secured by the multinational firm, Ineos. He is appealing to the public for donations as he could face a large bill if he loses.

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Ministers say culls are vital for cutting TB infections in cattle but scientists say there is little evidence to support the policy

Up to 33,500 badgers will be shot this autumn in an attempt to control tuberculosis in cattle, a huge rise from the 10,000 killed in 2016.

The government has announced that 11 new badger cull areas have been licensed, adding to the 10 already in place. Devon now has six badger culls under way, with Somerset and Wiltshire having three each, with others in Cheshire, Cornwall, Dorset, Gloucestershire and Herefordshire.

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A small great white shark was rescued after it was found floundering on a beach in Sydney, Australia, on Monday. The shark was found by beachgoers in shallow waters at Manly beach and was moved to a beach rockpool to be monitored by authorities

• Pool shark: beached great white given temporary refuge in Sydney rock pool
  

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Researchers and LGBT groups clash over facial recognition tech that supposedly spots gay people.

A vaccination programme to stop the spread of bovine tuberculosis is also restarting.

The Cassini spacecraft is about to send itself towards destruction in the ringed planet's atmosphere.

AGL debunks Coalition myths on Liddell, saying it is unreliable and costly, and money is best invested in wind, solar, battery storage and other dispatchable generation.

Public pool closed to swimmers after injured marine predator transferred for observation by wildlife experts

A juvenile great white shark was rescued after washing up on a Sydney beach – and given a new temporary home in a nearby public swimming pool.

The shark, which washed ashore on Manly beach in Sydney’s north about midday, appeared to be injured and onlookers alerted marine rescue and lifeguards.

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The Government is negotiating with the owner of Australia's oldest coal-fired power plant to keep it in operation.

A door-opening method that involves using the "wrong" hand should be taught to drivers, groups say.

The aging Liddell power station has become a crucial part of the Government's energy plan, but the Liddell's owner is standing in the way.

Figures from the government are seen as a milestone in the advance of renewable energy.

Green groups say record low price should sound death knell for Hinkley Point C after subsidy auction sets price for windpower below even lowest forecast

Offshore windfarms are to be built for a record low price in the UK early next decade, after developers bid far more aggressively than expected for a multimillion-pound pot of government subsidies.

Industry watchers had expected the guaranteed price for power from windfarms around Britain’s coast to come in somewhere between £70 and £80 per megawatt hour, below the £92.50 for the nuclear power station at Hinkley Point.

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Hurricanes, like Irma which has just hit Florida, command more attention because they have a strong visual identity and are often given human names and attributes. Reuters/Carlos Barria

The devastating scenes of destruction and flooding in the Bahamas and the southern states of the US have captivated the world for many weeks now. Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, and Hurricane Jose soon to follow, have stolen headlines around the world, as they break records and provide a deluge of spectacle and image … the main ingredients for tabloid reporting.

Of course, as far as the fatalities they have caused, which are now into the hundreds, they have not been as dangerous as the under-reported monsoons that devastated India, Nepal and Bangladesh a few weeks ago, with death tolls into the thousands. But, in the oligopolised world of the news wires of AFP, Reuters and AP, threats to developed nations push well ahead of tragedy in the third world, an imperialist bias that reflects the global hierarchy of nation states as defined by news services.

But is also true that hurricanes (typhoons and cyclones) command more attention because they have a strong visual identity. Unlike monsoonal rains, they are also endowed with a personality.

For a start, each hurricane is given a name, and often they are referred to as “monsters” that have some kind of personality. “Irma is unpredictable, ferocious, powerful”, and so on. Unlike monsoons, hurricanes are to be feared, almost like they are preying on humans.

But in the US, these same hurricanes have been the subject of ridicule and religious divinity.

In between all of the suffering in Texas and now in Florida, conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who broadcasts out of Palm Beach, Florida, had labelled Hurricane Irma a kind of fake news. Limbaugh, a strident Trump supporter, has sought to persuade his listeners that these Hurricanes are wildly exaggerated, potentially endangering those who may not take seriously the official emergency weather warning. He said:

There is a desire to advance this climate change agenda, and hurricanes are one of the fastest and best ways to do it … All you need is to create the fear and panic accompanied by talk that climate change is causing hurricanes to become more frequent and bigger and more dangerous, and you create the panic, and it’s mission accomplished, agenda advanced.

Limbaugh claims that hurricanes bring together three unlikely beneficiaries: climate change activists, television broadcasters and retailers, the latter two having a “symbiotic relationship”.

For Limbaugh, TV stations, which receive much advertising revenue from retailers, become fixated with the hurricane, causing panic and mass raids on retail supplies of food, water, batteries and fuel. For the radio shock jock, this creates a vicious circle of interests more important than the hurricane itself.

Of course, Limbaugh is at least partly right. Tabloid television is most at home in covering violent events, whether this is extreme weather, terrorism, or violent crime. The more images it has about these events, the more it will cover them.

However, that these same broadcasters will make any significant link to climate change has not been a trend in either the US or Australia. It may increase audience concern about climate change, but not really their understanding that the more energy you have in the oceans, the more potential there is for powerful storms. Extreme weather is indeed the best time to communicate climate change, but it has to be done in a way that increases audience understanding of the causes, impacts and projections for the future.

It also has to be done in a way that demonstrates what is so different about today’s extreme weather. With Hurricane Irma, for example, what has amazed climatologists, is that it was one of a trio of hurricanes that were threatening land at the same time. Irma itself matched the force of Katrina in terrajoules of energy. Then there are the scenes of Irma literally sucking up the ocean around beaches and changing the shape of coastlines during that period. The forces involved are unprecedented in the modern record.

Yet, it seems that the more extreme the nature of the hurricanes, the more extreme are the reactions of climate denialists. And here we can point to the growing number of television evangelists who are also getting some attention out of the hurricane. Both Harvey and Irma have been hailed as biblical events that have wrought retribution on those who have not followed the path of god. Televangelist Jim Bakker and Pastor Rick Joyner observed last week that “storms don’t happen by accident”. The Houston flood was from God and if, according to Pastor Kevin Swanson, the supreme court would rule abortion and gay marriage to be illegal, Houston would have averted a disaster.

Conservative social commentator Anne Coulter, tweeted to her 1.7 million followers that Houston’s recent baptism was more likely to be payback for having elected a lesbian mayor in its recent past than it was related to climate change.

Doubtless, the fact that Hurricane Irma has spared the southern White House, Mar-a-Lago from a direct hit, will also be comfort to President Trump’s evangelist supporters. The luxurious resort is again in the news, but this time for not answering calls for Trump to open it as a shelter for displaced Hurricane victims.

Oh, and Rush Limbaugh fled from his home in Palm Beach, two days before Irma hit.

Locals blame coca interests for the state’s broken promise on protecting Tipnis national park, biodiversity hotspot and home to thousands of indigenous people

When Ovidio Teco’s Amazon homeland was declared “untouchable” by the Bolivian government in 2011, his war had been won.

The concerns of people like him had been listened to: their beautiful and ancient land would not be carved in two by a 190-mile highway.

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