04/02/2022

(AU SMH) Australia’s Top Cricketers Make The Baggy Green Even Greener

Sydney Morning Herald - Laura Chung

Australian men’s cricket captain Pat Cummins has launched a campaign to have cricket clubs around the nation install solar panels to drive down their costs and reduce carbon emissions, declaring that it is time for the sport to do its bit to tackle climate change.

 Cummins, who on Thursday announced the creation of Cricket for Climate and its solar panel project Solar Clubs, is just the latest sporting star to throw his weight behind climate action.

Australian men’s cricket captain Pat Cummins has launched a campaign to have cricket clubs install solar panels to drive down their costs and reduce carbon emissions. Credit: Getty
In December, former Wallabies captain David Pocock announced he would run for Senate in the ACT with a focus on climate action, while last month the Australian Open parted ways with fossil fuel sponsor Santos after an activist campaign.

350 Australia chief executive officer Lucy Manne, who spearheaded the move on Santos in which 7500 people signed a petition asking for the partnership to end, said it was important that fossil fuel companies were not allowed to “sportswash” their image.

“A sporting group promoting fossil fuels today is as irresponsible as a medical group promoting cigarettes in 1930,” she said, echoing similar sentiments aired by Mr Pocock last month.

Cummins feels a personal responsibility as well as a public duty to act.

Aerialist performs on three-tonne iceberg over Sydney Harbour to raise climate change awareness. 1min 30sec

“In recent times, I’ve been thinking about what the future looks like, and that involves looking at my own footprint and how I live my life,” he told the Herald.

“We are playing international cricket, travelling around the world on planes and that has a big footprint. I started looking at what actions I could take to offset some of that and came up with the idea of solar panels on top of my junior club.

“I have memories of 45 degrees days in Penrith, and I thought what could happen if we could capture some of that solar energy.

“The longer we take to take action, the more it’s going to be irreversible,” Cummins said. “We’re not the ones who will be hard hit – it’s the next generation. Being a dad drives that home.

“We have to be conscious because kids look up to sports stars, whether we like it or not; we help shape their ideas of the world and we need to take that seriously.”

Despite green shoots in the sports sector, the resource sector remains influential. Gina Rinehart, the minerals magnate and Australia’s richest person, has been an active player in the Australian sporting scene, providing direct funding for athletes in swimming, rowing, artistic swimming and beach volleyball.

Her company, Hancock Prospecting, is now an official partner of the Australian Olympic Committee, which trumpeted the deal last week as a game changer for the movement in Australia ahead of Paris in 2024 and an inbound home Games in Brisbane in 2032.

Extreme weather
ANU Emeritus Professor at the Fenner School of Environment and Society Will Steffen said sport was just one of many sectors fighting the climate crisis, with many businesses, state and local governments and community members adding their voices.

However, the federal government was a “laggard”.

“Sport has an enormously powerful role to play,” he said. “It puts the Commonwealth government to shame. They are leaving it up to individual leaders, like sportspeople, like local governments, to get emissions down.”

Climate change is worsening extreme weather in Australia, with the country already having warmed by 1.4 degrees, faster than the global average.

By 2040, summer temperatures on hot days in Sydney and Melbourne will be approaching 50 degrees, making summer sport as it is played at present untenable, according to a report by the Climate Council pubFlished last year.

At the elite level, heat has become a risk to crowds as well as players, it shows, with almost 1000 spectators at the 2014 Australian Open being treated for heat exhaustion.

The Climate Council head of research Simon Bradshaw said Solar Clubs was a good example of how sporting clubs could be part of helping the climate crisis.

“Rising temperatures put much more than our ability to play sport at risk, affecting our health, livelihoods, and the ability to enjoy the things we love,” he said. “Australia has been falling behind the rest of the world in the race to move beyond fossil fuels and cut greenhouse emissions.”

“However, Australia has an incredible opportunity to shift to a cleaner economy and play its part in tackling the global climate crisis. By changing the way they power events and build venues, Solar Clubs are taking a big and important step. Australians love our sport and the outdoors, and we need our sporting clubs to help lead the way to a cleaner future.

“[This] shows just how fast businesses and communities are acting on climate, and how the federal government is failing to match what’s happening on the ground here.”

Great Barrier Reef
For Solar Club recipient Penrith Cricket Club president Paul Goldsmith, the solar panels will make a huge difference to the club’s electricity bills which are about $17,000 a year.

“As well as reducing carbon emissions, this new solar system will save us more than $3000 every year, which can be redirected into much-needed resources and future focused projects, like junior development,” he said.

There are plans to expand the project to cover all 4000 junior clubs around the country and some of Australia’s best cricketers, including Steve Smith, David Warner, Shane Watson and Rachel Haynes, are throwing their support behind the project.

“If players, sporting administrators and clubs work towards a common goal to put sustainability at the front of their plans, then Australian cricket has the opportunity to play its role in slowing global warming and mitigating the existential threat that cricket faces,” Australian Cricketers’ Association chief executive officer Todd Greenberg said.

“We can’t sit around for other people to do [something], we all have a responsibility,” Cummins said. “I am in a privileged and lucky position to be able to try and make some changes.”

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(Tbe Conversation) How Climate Change Is Washing Away Precious Evidence Of Our Distant Past

Tbe Conversation -  | 

 Heavy rainfall and degrading peatland are putting archaeological artefacts at increased risk of decay. 139904/Pixabay
Authors
  •  is Associate Professor in Archaeology, Teesside University
  •  is Lecturer in Forensic Science, Northumbria University, Newcastle     
As well as threatening biodiversity, food systems and human health, climate change has another victim: ancient artefacts.

At some UK sites of archaeological interest, unusually heavy rainfall is eroding layers of protective peat to damage the preserved relics that lie beneath.

Some of the UK’s finest archaeological remains have been found buried in peat, a type of soil that’s naturally high in acidity and low in oxygen.

That means it preserves wood, leather and textiles extremely well, as the microorganisms that would usually cause these materials to break down can’t thrive.

Peat has helped to keep Britain’s ancient environments alive for modern analysis: from neolithic trackways marking where our ancestors travelled between settlements in Somerset, to preserved bodies like the Lindow Man found in a bog in Cheshire.

The peat environment in which Lindow Man was buried dramatically reduced decay, meaning that his hair and beard have remained visible even after almost 2,000 years.

But climate change is bringing increasingly hotter summers and wetter winters to the UK, including unprecedentedly heavy local rainfall. This changes the landscape by washing away layers of soil and peat to reveal archaeological buildings, items and human remains.

Vindolanda, a Roman fort, holds a huge range of archaeological evidence. Francis/Wikimedia

To better understand how fast these changes are taking place – and what their consequences might be for future archaeologists – our colleagues are studying what’s happening at Magna, the site of an ancient Roman fort in Northumberland.

Magna

Magna is one of the most fascinating, well-preserved sites in the UK. As a strategic army base, it would have held a commanding position at the junction between three key Roman roads: the Stanegate, Military Way and Maiden Way. Surveys suggest that it was occupied from AD80-85 to the end of Roman Britain, in around AD410.

To study it, archaeologists dug boreholes and inserted devices called piezometers to collect data on groundwater levels and temperature. They’re also sending peat samples to a laboratory for chemical and microbiological analysis. This information will help us to understand how the local environment is changing and what effect this might have on archaeological degradation.

Another Roman fort just a few miles east of Magna, Vindolanda, has provided some of the most significant finds from Roman Britain.

Here, archaeologists have discovered the first evidence of handwriting by a woman (Claudia Severa writing to invite her friend Sulpicia Lepidina to her upcoming birthday party), the world’s oldest boxing gloves from around AD120, and the largest Roman leather shoe collection ever found – consisting of an astonishing 7,000 items.

Items like these Roman black leather shoes are often found preserved in peat. Dan Diffendale/Flickr

These remarkable finds are due to the fort’s unique, peat-rich environment, which means that they’re also threatened by climate-driven deterioration. We fear that finds which haven’t yet been discovered may soon be irreversibly damaged due to the effects of climate change.

The point of peat

Peatlands cover about 3% of the world’s land area but are one of its best natural carbon stores, holding twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests.

In England and Northern Ireland, peatland makes up 10%-12% of all land, while Scotland has 20% peatland cover. Historically, these landscapes have been drained for use in farming, with peat dried to burn for fuel: releasing massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

Across Europe, an estimated 100,000km² of peatland has been lost over the last 50 years. Much of what remains is poor quality. In the UK, only a fifth of UK peatlands can be described as “near pristine”.

Peatland stores huge amounts of carbon. Cifor/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA

The drainage, cutting and agriculture that have damaged these ecosystems have caused equal damage to the archaeological finds buried within them. Peat growth is slowed or stopped when peatlands are drained, leading to oxidised soil that encourages destructive microorganisms to proliferate.

Archaeologists and policymakers are now working side by side to keep peatlands protected environments, to help capture and preserve both carbon and the evidence of the UK’s history.

And this commitment to protecting peatlands and the heritage they shelter has gone global. Last year, a session at the UN climate conference COP26 was dedicated to highlighting the importance of protecting peatland. But this is only the beginning of a long journey to ensure that peatlands, and the treasures they hold, will remain safe for generations to come.

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(UK The Guardian) Global Count Estimates Earth Has 73,000 Tree Species – 14% More Than Reported

The Guardian - 

Second world war codebreaking calculations used at Bletchley Park find 9,000 of those species are yet to be discovered

A view of a forest in mist
Researchers collected information on 38m trees in 90 countries as part of the global count. Photograph: Global Forest Biodiversity Initiative)
There are an estimated 73,300 species of tree on Earth, 9,000 of which have yet to be discovered, according to a global count of tree species by thousands of researchers who used second world war codebreaking techniques created at Bletchley Park to evaluate the number of unknown species.

Researchers working on the ground in 90 countries collected information on 38m trees, sometimes walking for days and camping in remote places to reach them.

The study found there are about 14% more tree species than previously reported and that a third of undiscovered tree species are rare, meaning they could be vulnerable to extinction by human-driven changes in land use and the climate crisis.

“It is a massive effort for the whole world to document our forests,” said Jingjing Liang, a lead author of the paper and professor of quantitative forest ecology at Purdue University in Indiana, US.

“Counting the number of tree species worldwide is like a puzzle with pieces spreading all over the world. We solved it together as a team, each sharing our own piece.”

Jingjing Liang.
Jingjing Liang. Photograph: Tom Campbell/Purdue University
Despite being among the largest and most widespread organisms, there are still thousands of trees to be discovered, with 40% of unknown species believed to be in South America, according to the paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Some of these undocumented species would probably have been known to indigenous communities but some, in the most inaccessible regions, may have never been found before.

The Amazon basin appears to have the highest diversity of tree species at local level, with 200 tree species a hectare.

Researchers believe this could be because it is a warm, wet environment suited to supporting a wider range of species.

To estimate the number of unknown species, scientists used the Good-Turing frequency estimation, which was created by the codebreaker Alan Turing and his assistant Irving Good when trying to crack German codes for the Enigma machine during the second world war.

The theory, which was developed by the Taiwanese statistician Anne Chao to be applied to the study of undetected species, helped researchers work out the occurrence of rare events – in this case unknown species of trees – using data on observed rare species. Essentially, the code uses information on species that are only detected once or twice in data to estimate the number of undetected species.

The idea to do an inventory of the planet’s trees came 10 years ago when Liang found data on Alaska’s trees sitting in a drawer. He was impressed by the findings and made it his personal mission to get the data online. He then wrote a proposal to do an inventory of the whole world. “People initially laughed at me,” he said.

Scientists are worried many tree species will disappear before they have been documented.
Scientists are worried many tree species will disappear before they have been documented. Photograph: Picasa/Global Forest Biodiversity Initiative
There is no data on how the number of tree species may have changed over time, although many species are thought to be threatened with extinction due to deforestation and the climate crisis. Scientists are worried many will disappear before they have been documented.

Liang said: “We hope this paper will provide us with benchmark data so that we can know if the total number of tree species in the world has been declining, especially during our mass extinction event.

“We need to look at the forest as not just a carbon reservoir, or a resource for extraction; we should look at our forests as a habitat that contains tens of thousands of species of trees, and even a much higher number of flora and fauna – we need to pay attention to this biodiversity.”

A fallen oak tree in Humberside after the region was battered by Storm Arwen in November.
Dr Ruth Mitchell, a plant-soil ecologist at the James Hutton Institute in Scotland, who was not involved in the research, said it showed that even for organisms as large as trees, new species were still being discovered.

“It is very exciting, yet at the same time concerning that we are losing so much biodiversity so rapidly that we don’t even know about,” she said.

“This study highlights the incredible diversity within our forests, much of which is still out there waiting for us to discover.”

Martin Lukac, professor of ecosystem science at Reading University, who was also not involved in the paper, said: “The paper shows that almost half of the world’s tree species are in South America – this is a diamond-hard proof that we must not destroy the tropical forests there.

“The tree-species diversity took billions of years to accumulate in the Amazon,” he said. “It would be beyond reckless to destroy it inside a century.”

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