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(Bloomberg) -- Australia's carbon credit market will continue without a major overhaul after a government-backed study largely dismissed claims the system fails to deliver promised emissions reduction. The Chubb-led review won't help persuade polluters to reduce emissions rather than rely on credits, according to the Climate Council, a climate science advocacy group. [Extracted from the article]

The article focuses on the Explaining Extreme Events of 2014 from a Climate Perspective report of the periodical "Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS)" which includes five Australian papers focusing on the events that took place in Australia's climate in 2014. Topics include severe frosts found to have harmful effects for native vegetation and food crops, and global average surface temperatures in the last five years found to have been the warmest on record.

Climate change poses a significant threat to Australia's World Heritage sites, including Kakadu National Park, the Great Barrier Reef, and the Sydney Opera House. Rising sea levels, extreme temperatures, changing fire regimes, and erosion are already impacting these sites. To address these threats, a climate change "toolkit" has been developed in collaboration with site managers and Indigenous experts, combining climate science with Indigenous knowledge systems. The toolkit provides practical guidance for adapting to climate change and protecting the cultural and natural heritage of these sites. It emphasizes the importance of engaging with Indigenous communities and respecting their traditional knowledge and intellectual property rights. [Extracted from the article]

Direct normal irradiance (DNI) is the main input for concentrating solar power (CSP) technologies--an important component in future energy scenarios. DNI forecast accuracy is sensitive to radiative transfer schemes (RTSs) and microphysics in numerical weather prediction (NWP) models. Additionally, NWP models have large regional aerosol uncertainties. Dust aerosols can significantly attenuate DNI in extreme cases, with marked consequences for applications such as cSP. To date, studies have not compared the skill of different physical parameterization schemes for predicting hourly DNI under varying aerosol conditions over Australia. The authors address this gap by aiming to provide the first Weather and Forecasting (WRF) Model DNI benchmarks for Australia as baselines for assessing future aerosol-assimilated models. Annual and day-ahead simulations against ground measurements at selected sites focusing on an extreme dust event are run. Model biases are assessed for five shortwave RTSs at 30- and 10-km grid resolutions, along with the Thompson aerosol-aware scheme in three different microphysics configurations: no aerosols, fixed optical properties, and monthly climatologies. From the annual simulation, the best schemes were the Rapid Radiative Transfer Model for global climate models (RRTMG), followed by the new Goddard and Dudhia schemes, despite the relative simplicity of the latter. These top three RTSs all had 1.4-70.8 W m-2 lower mean absolute error than persistence. RRTMG with monthly aerosol climatologies was the best combination. The extreme dust event had large DNI mean bias overpredictions (up to 4.6 times), compared to background aerosol results. Dust storm-aware DNI forecasts could benefit from RRTMG with high-resolution aerosol inputs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Of all the ideas developed to combat the climate crisis, George Wilson of Australian Wildlife Services may have the least intuitive: eating more kangaroos. In a paper published in June by the U.S.-based Society for Conservation Biology, however, he explains that 11 percent of Australia's total greenhouse-gas emissions come from the methane produced by the rumen of cattle and sheep. ''It's been long known that kangaroos don't produce methane,'' Wilson says, noting that kangaroos' stomachs have different microorganisms to ferment their food. ''I began to speculate, What if we managed the kangaroo population up and the cattle population down?'' Kangaroo is a specialty meat, gamy in taste, that is already available in some restaurants and many grocery stores in Australia. Wilson calculated that if by 2020 the kangaroo population was managed upward from its current 35 million to 175 million -- and if Australia could remove 36 million sheep and 7 million cattle from production -- the country would see a reduction of 16 megatons of greenhouse-gas emissions, 3 percent of its national total. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]