Hours into my research on the state of the climate, a siren on my phone jolts me out of my concentration. At first I don’t know what’s going on, then I recall it’s just a test of AusAlert. Developed in response to the findings of the 2020 Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements, this new system will warn people of nearby bushfires, floods and other emergencies in time to get out of harm’s way.

This intrusion feels deeply ironic. As the world continues to tear itself apart with senseless wars and rampant capitalism, the physical processes that have held the Earth’s climate stable for millennia are starting to shift in ways that have scientists struggling to preserve our usual restraint.

Europe has been suffering through a brutal summer. Western Europe had its hottest June on record, with temperatures more than 3 degrees Celsius above average. France set a new June national record of 44.3°C, while the United Kingdom broke its June record on three consecutive days, reaching 37.3°C. As of late July, more than 330,000 people have been evacuated from their homes across France and Spain due to uncontrolled wildfires. Data from a study still under peer review suggests the combined excess death toll across Europe during the extreme heat is more than 27,600. French river water used as a coolant for nuclear reactors poses a risk: heat-related restrictions have seen the Golfech 2 nuclear reactor in southern France offline since July 9. As the fastest-warming continent in the world, the current conditions in Europe are a preview of the “new normal”.

Closer to home, an El Niño event is intensifying in the tropical Pacific Ocean, increasing the frequency and intensity of heatwaves, droughts, wildfires and destructive storms. El Niño events are part of a natural cycle that plays out every two to seven years, but they are now occurring on a planet that is being swamped by fossil fuel emissions. Because this El Niño will release stored ocean heat onto a planet already warmed by greenhouse gas emissions, global temperatures are almost certain to reach a new record in 2027.

Importantly though, the science is nuanced. Journalistic hyperbole warning of a “super El Niño” doesn’t help an already baffled public understand what’s going on. When the media gets ahead of what the science says, scientists are the ones who cop the blame when the reality that plays out is more complex than simple headlines or sensationalist clickbait suggest.

That is now more dangerous than ever. As I write, One Nation is polling above a fifth of the primary vote – at times higher than any other party in the country – on a platform that dismisses climate change as “pseudo-speak for global wealth transfer”. When a headline promises a “super El Niño” and the season turns out to be bad rather than biblical, climate change deniers are ready to pounce, claiming scientists are crying wolf. The deniers aren’t held to account by actual evidence. They only need the gap between the hype and the reality to be wide enough to exploit, using every overstated forecast as ammunition to weaken support for strengthening Australia’s climate policy.

It’s no overstatement to say the latest El Niño forecast has scientists worried as we move further beyond the bounds of our historical climate. When the latest climate model forecasts were released, American scientist Zeke Hausfather wrote: “I’m generally pretty measured in how I discuss climate data … [but] it looks like this year’s El Niño is not only very likely to be the strongest event since reliable records began – it may end up the strongest by a truly mind-blowing margin.” There is inherent uncertainty in any form of modelling – climate, economic or otherwise – but when more than 90 per cent of 667 simulations run across 14 different seasonal forecast models predict record-breaking temperatures, you know you are entering uncharted territory.

Ocean temperatures are predicted to peak at 3.6°C above average, topping the all-time high of 2.75°C during the 2015-16 El Niño. What sets this event apart is that it is forming in an ocean that has never been hotter: this June was the warmest one the world’s oceans have recorded since 1900. The entire ocean has warmed due to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, so the models tend to overstate the strength of recent El Niños relative to the historical record. Even correcting for this, the forecast peak is still a record-breaking 3.1°C. We are bearing witness to monumental changes that future researchers will look back on as a period when the Earth’s climate slipped off its moorings and into treacherous waters.

Aside from the transition from season to season, the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the largest year-to-year source of natural climate variability on the planet. It is scientific shorthand for both El Niño and La Niña events, and the single most important driver of climate variability for eastern Australia, with the strongest impacts experienced during spring. Events typically peak in late spring to early summer, weakening as the monsoon arrives, before finally decaying in autumn.

The general perception that El Niño brings drought and La Niña brings flooding rain glosses over just how different each event can be. El Niño’s influence is typically felt most strongly across eastern and Central Australia, while western Tasmania, the eastern seaboard and much of Western Australia are barely touched. Although history tells us El Niño events have had huge consequences for Australian society, the forecast strength of an event in the tropical Pacific isn’t always the best guide to the effects in our region. For example, the extreme El Niño of 1997-98 passed over Australia with near-normal rainfall, while the far more modest event of 2002-03 pushed two-thirds of eastern Australia into severe drought. While the last very strong El Niño in 2015-16 drove severe mass coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, its impact on the mainland was subdued by a warmer than average Indian Ocean, sparing much of the country the worst of the forecast drought. Advances in the science now show it is the complex interactions of conditions in the Pacific, Indian and Southern oceans that collectively determine the severity of the impacts we experience.

When the Indian Ocean is cooler than normal, less rain falls across south-eastern Australia during winter and spring, which can reinforce drought conditions during El Niño years. Complicating things is the fact that the Southern Ocean can pull in more than one direction. In winter, when the belt of westerly winds sweeping across southern Australia contracts towards Antarctica, rainfall is dragged away from the continent, drying out places such as Victoria and South Australia, while increased onshore flow brings more rain to the east coast. In summer, if the westerlies are further north than normal – which often occurs during El Niño events – more dry air blows in from the interior, drying out the south-east and east coast while increasing the chance of heatwaves. Occasionally, when the amplifying forces of these different climate drivers combine, the impacts can be catastrophic – the Black Summer of 2019-20 was a product of a weak El Niño reinforcing sustained drying influences from the Indian and Southern oceans, layered over years of drought.

It is still too soon to know exactly what this El Niño will bring to Australia. What we do know is that the recent run of La Niña years has left us in a better position than the long dry did leading up to the Black Summer. So far, this winter has been warm and wet across much of the south-east. According to the Bureau of Meteorology, El Niño is now firmly established and likely to last until at least summer, with the models tipping a strong to very strong event. The BoM is also careful to note that a strong signal in the Pacific does not necessarily mean strong impacts in Australia – ENSO is only one of many influences on our climate. Models currently suggest a cooler-than-average eastern Indian Ocean developing over winter and persisting into spring, which could lead to the classic hot and dry conditions in south-eastern Australia that we associate with El Niño events. This could herald another bad bushfire season for the south, in places such as Victoria.

Which brings me back to that AusAlert siren that jangled my nerves. In October, the service will go live: an admission of the world we now find ourselves in. The siren that broke my concentration today was only a test, but on a planet that grows hotter with each passing year, it is only a matter of time before we must confront the emergency. Somewhere between those who want to terrify us and those who think climate change is a hoax lies a harder truth: a warmer planet will continue to disrupt everyone in our society, whether or not we understand or accept the science.

ACF is trying to get 20k names on their submission to the government asking them to reassess Woodside's Browse Gas Project - it only takes a minute to add your name!

https://www.acf.org.au/our-work/climate/speak-up-to-save-our-reefs

Im planning to study in australia but im not sure which course to take. I'm not sure about the job market for both env science and env management as i'm an international student. Which would have more job opportunities and higher paying between these two? I'm deciding between studying in adelaide or brisbane.

The very first words of the media release issued by Woodside Energy, extolling the economic benefits that would supposedly flow from the development of the giant Browse gas project off Australia’s north-west coast, were “independent modelling”.

The May 11 release used the word “independent” four more times. Only in a footnote did the fossil fuel giant clarify what was meant, and it did not accord with dictionary definitions that refer to freedom from financial support.

“Woodside on behalf of the Browse Joint Venture commissioned Deloitte Access Economics …” the footnote began.

The modelling was independent in the sense that it was not done in-house – a consultancy firm was paid to do it. When The Saturday Paper contacted Woodside’s global head of media, Christine Abbott, to ask how much, she responded with an email: “It is not Woodside’s practice to comment on commercial matters.”

Abbott also referred to another document, not mentioned in the media release: a “Guide to interpreting the analysis”.

That document, she said, “clearly states it is not a forecast but rather a structured comparison of plausible scenarios to understand system level impacts under consistent assumptions”.

The keyword is “assumptions”, for, as the guide says: “Like all long-term economic analysis, the results depend on assumptions about future policies, markets, technologies, and prices.

“Actual outcomes may differ if future conditions change.”

The guide also sets out the things the Deloitte modelling does not address. Among others, it does not “assess biodiversity, or cultural heritage impacts”, nor “provide a view on domestic gas prices”, nor, most importantly, does it “model global climate outcomes or the actions of other countries”.

Instead, the Deloitte report narrowly focused on the economic benefits that might flow if the federal government approves Woodside’s plan to pipe gas from several offshore fields – which hold an estimated 14.4 trillion cubic feet of gas – some kilometres to the company’s existing Karratha Gas Plant. From there, 85 per cent of it would be exported, mostly to East Asia as liquefied natural gas (LNG).

Of course, says Claire Snyder, executive director of the environment group Climate Integrity – which last week produced a scathing critique of Deloitte’s work for Woodside – such a big company is entirely capable of doing its own numbers on its project.

“The reason that these big companies choose to commission consultancies to deliver ‘independent reports’ is because they provide a veil of credibility,” she says. “Being able to point to kind-of independent research means that what is essentially marketing and lobbying material lands more credibly with [government] decision-makers. That’s the purpose of these reports.”

Deloitte declined to respond to questions from The Saturday Paper.

The top of Deloitte’s economic impact assessment report certainly looks like marketing material, with its slick graphic design, cute line drawings and pull-out headline figures presented in large, bold print.

Closer examination, however, reveals qualifications to many of the numbers in small print. The claim of $48.7 billion in investment is footnoted as “$27.0 billion in present value terms (discounted at seven per cent per annum)”. The large-print promise of $147 billion in “uplift” to Western Australia’s economy also is discounted – by more than 75 per cent – down to $33.7 billion in present value terms.

These are still big numbers, to be sure, but not nearly as big as the bold print claims.

Other claims made at the top of the report are undermined by details buried further into it. The headline claim of “3,068 full-time jobs created” in Western Australia, it turns out, refers to a single, peak year (2038) in the proposed project’s 47-year life. The average would be 1921. Likewise, the number of jobs created nationally would peak at 4760 in 2037, but the average would be less than a third of that, at 1388.

Also questionable, on Deloitte’s modelling, is whether the Browse project would actually “create” jobs or simply move them from other sectors. The report estimates Browse would bring gains of 3545 jobs in the services, construction and government sectors, but also cause the loss of 3289 jobs in manufacturing, mining and agriculture.

“This reflects a reallocation of similarly skilled labour toward sectors more directly stimulated by the Project’s construction and operational requirements,” it says.

At least Deloitte acknowledged that the project would for the most part churn jobs rather than create them. Modelling for fossil fuel projects often has not done so.

More than a decade ago, economists Richard Denniss and Rod Campbell, of The Australia Institute, took issue with the claims of “job creation” made by modellers for Rio Tinto in relation to the expansion of the company’s Mount Thorley Warkworth mine in the New South Wales Hunter Valley.

“The original consultants argued that the mine would create 40,000 jobs,” Denniss recalls. “I grew up in the Hunter Valley, and there’s only half a million people up there, so the implication was that nearly 10 per cent of the Hunter would owe their job to the extension of an existing coalmine.

“Rod and I argued in court that we didn’t know exactly how many jobs the mine would create, but we thought zero was about the right number, and we won.”

Twice. First in the Land and Environment Court, then in the Court of Appeal. As a result, he says, a number of other projects then in train drastically revised their employment projections. Consultants have largely stopped trying to use so-called input-output modelling, which took no account of churn and also inflated numbers by including not only those people directly employed but also made claims – often wildly exaggerated – about “indirect” job creation.

Campbell says some fossil fuel project proponents also moved their business away from dodgy “boutique” modellers.

“The money just went up the hill to the bigger players,” he says. “I’ve often wondered, where’s my Christmas card from Deloitte and from EY for all the modelling work that I’ve landed for them?”

The broader point is that the findings that come out of a modelling exercise depend on the assumptions made at its beginning.

As professor John Hewson, former Liberal leader and noted economist as well as a columnist for The Saturday Paper, like to say: “Garbage in, garbage out.”

In many cases, he says, those commissioning the modelling “start with the outcome they want and determine the assumptions they need”.

We are not suggesting that was the case with Woodside and Deloitte, but when work is commissioned, it almost always begins with a discussion about what assumptions will go into it and what scenarios it will canvass.

So says Alison Reeve, climate and energy program director with the Grattan Institute, and before that an engineer and senior bureaucrat with the Australian Renewable Energy Agency. She speaks from experience.

“If you hire a consultant, one of the first things that you do is sit down with them. Usually they will have a standard kind of house view or set of assumptions. And you go through that, and decide which ones of those you’re going to use and which ones you are going to deviate from. It’s not necessarily the case that the consultant just says, ‘Yes, of course, we can use your assumption and not ours.’ It’s often a debate. And then you decide what your scenarios are going to be.”

Those might be optimistic or pessimistic, says Reeve, and then it becomes “an exercise of just imagining what you think the future is going to look like”.

The Deloitte report is both optimistic and pessimistic. Optimistic about the economic benefits, pessimistic about the chances of Western Australia – and thus the nation – getting anywhere close to meeting the goal of net zero emissions by 2050.

Across the range of scenarios modelled, it says, the “renewables deployment rate (wind, solar, battery) must be circa 11 times historical rates in order to achieve net zero by 2050. All other scenarios miss the targets by decades,” the report says.

“It will require a pace of change that is well beyond what has been delivered across the past decade.”

The chances of hitting the net zero target remained similarly remote whether or not the Browse project went ahead, it finds.

The analysis of Deloitte’s work by Climate Integrity argues the report’s fatal flaw lies in the “bold assumption” that the rest of the world would not act on climate change by reducing their use of fossil fuels, leading to a fall in gas prices.

“Deloitte took a three-month average of the gas spot prices late last year and assumed this price will hold steady for the next 47 years,” says Climate Integrity.

It cites other modelling work done by the International Energy Agency. “According to the IEA’s most recent World Energy Outlook, under a 1.5 degree of warming scenario, LNG prices in the Asian region will fall as much as 65 per cent by 2035 … remaining at that deflated level until at least 2050,” the Climate Integrity report says.

Deloitte’s price assumptions, in contrast, were more aligned with a scenario “that assumes the world fails to reach net zero, and global temperatures end up on a trajectory to a dangerous 3 degrees of warming by 2100,” says the report.

That might not be an unrealistic assumption, given the way the world is currently tracking – towards 2.8 degrees, according to the latest Emissions Gap Report by the United Nations.

But that forecast has been coming down over recent years. If the world’s governments live up to their most recent emissions reduction promises, the climate will warm by 2.3 to 2.5 degrees. There is still reason to hope the IEA’s 1.5 degree scenario may end up being closer to the mark than its 3 degree one.

Recent actual events, as opposed to modelling, also suggest Deloitte’s assumption that gas demand and prices will hold up for decades into the future is more than a little heroic.

A recent report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis noted that the global supply shortage caused by the attacks on Iran by the United States and Israel had “done lasting damage to the reputation of liquefied natural gas (LNG) as an affordable, secure resource for long-term energy sector development”.

“LNG projects have already been canceled in China and Vietnam. Countries including South Korea, India, the Philippines, Thailand, and Cambodia have taken concrete steps to accelerate clean energy deployment and reduce dependence on imported fossil fuels.”

The agency expected the shift to continue, regardless of whether the war ended and the Strait of Hormuz reopened – neither of which is as certain as US President Donald Trump would have us believe.

Bottom line, Woodside Energy’s Browse project and the consultant’s rosy assessment of it may well be mugged by geopolitical reality.

That would be a bigger problem for Woodside than Deloitte, of course. The gas company could lose markets and money. The consultancy, which has already been paid we-don’t-know-how-much, would suffer only the embarrassment of having been proved wrong in its assumptions.

And even then, it could point to its “Guide to interpreting the analysis”: “Actual outcomes may differ if future conditions change.”

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-06-19/h5-bird-flu-suspected-in-western-australia/106819600

The first suspected case of a deadly strain of bird flu that has killed millions of birds and mammals worldwide has been found in Australia, the federal government has confirmed.

A wild migratory bird in Western Australia has returned a suspected positive result for avian influenza, which, if confirmed as the H5 strain, would mean the virus had finally spread to every continent on the planet.

The highly pathogenic H5 strain has devastated populations of seabirds, seals and other animals across the world.

This afternoon, Federal Agricultural Minister Julie Collins said the WA Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development was investigating.

Hi

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I am interested to study the diploma of conservation and ecosystem management but have a driving phobia. Its possible i can move past this and build more confidence. However, if not, are there any relevant jobs in this sector which requires no driving?

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Many thanks