With growing fire concerns – following last year’s Black Saturday bushfires – it is expected more and more species could be struck again.

While the death toll of humans in those bushfires were well documented, the toll of species weren’t known but only predicted in the hundreds of millions.

Authorities began evacuating endangered species from bushfire-ravaged parts of the state, as the extent of devastation to wildlife habitat becomes clear in March this year.

Early estimates of wildlife loss in the fires, which burnt through more than 400,000 hectares, including around 300,000 hectares of forest, put the number of animals killed in the hundreds of millions.

Many endangered species — including Victoria’s faunal and bird emblems — lived in some of the state’s worst-hit parts.

AUSTRALIA was also certain to lose a bat to extinction for the first time in 53 years, Environment Minister Peter Garrett said earlier this year.

Mr Garrett said the rare Christmas Island pipistrelle bat’s tiny population was a reason not to embark on a captive breeding program.

On a slightly positive note, there has been evidence that the more endangered animals a state or country has, the more tourists they get every year.

It’s called the Tourism of Doom.

CLIMATE change continues to be in full swing with most Australian capital cities posting their hottest November on record.

Melbourne has had a strange month of weather that has produced above-average rainfall but still record temperatures.

The city’s average maximum temperature was 27.6 degrees to Saturday, besting the 1862 record of 25.5 degrees for the whole of November.

While the weather cooled on the weekend, 10 consecutive days over 30 degrees at the start of the month set the pattern for the monthly record to fall.

Melbourne’s November rainfall to date was 90.2 millimetres.

Senior weather bureau forecaster Terry Ryan told The Age that it was unusual to have the combination of the hottest November and above-average rainfall.

”This is another statistic that says the Earth appears to be getting warmer,” he said.

And water restrictions continued to be in force.

Water Minister Tim Holding announced Melburnians had used an average of 153 litres of water per person per day over the past 12 months, coming in under the Government’s target of 155 litres.

Thai Oil company PTTEP were responsible for the spill and said it would take up to a week to stop the spill into Timor Sea.

Mike Allcorn from the Alert Well Control, said the efforts to stop the leak were “fantastic”.

But WWF’s ocean’s campaigner told Fairfax:  ”Each day the leaks continue it’s adding to the risk and threat this toxic spill poses to precious marine life in this area.”

At the peak of the spill in September, satellite images showed oil had spread over 7000 square nautical miles, crossed into Indonesian waters and come close to the marine reserves of Ashmore and Cartier reefs.

Energy minister Martin Ferguson said the next attempt at fixing the leak would be this weekend.

Clotheslines were once considered a community eyesore but with clothes dryers using at least 6% of all household electricity consumption, many consumers are opting for good ‘old fashion air drying.

But instead of lowering their electric bills, some residents are receiving notices or even fines as clotheslines are commonly against the law in many communities, calling it a marker of poverty that lowers property values, according to The New York Times.

However legislation to protect the clothesline is catching on, most recently in Colorado, Hawaii, Maine and Vermont. While advocates for drying laundry outdoors feel that it is the right of the homeowner, others argue that it brings down the aesthetic appeal of a community! Surely we should be putting the earth first rather than aesthetics?!

For Opal Davis, 71, clotheslines are not a symbol of a low-income status, but of energy savings and cleanliness. As a resident of Maryville, Tenn., drying laundry outdoors is legal and common. “There’s nothing better than getting clothes fresh off the line,” Davis says. “Furthermore, it really cuts down on my electric bill every month. If that option was taken away, I would feel a little cheated.”

Similar bills to protect clotheslines are being considered in Maryland, North Carolina, Oregon and Virginia. If clothesline drying is not an option in your community, the U.S. Department of Energy recommends regularly inspecting dryer vents and using indoor drying racks as an alternative.

Although there are numerous weather reports from the 18th and 19th century covering entire continents the oceans have largely been uncharted territory. Now a new project has transcribed and digitised nearly 300 ships’ logbooks dating back to the 1760s to help scientists fill in the gaps in the world’s recent climate history. Until now they have been an untapped resource of scientific data.

Some ship logs have already revealed evidence that climate change may not be as rapid as believed, with many charting little or no change in Arctic sea temperatures compared with today.

However the data of others may prove the opposite. Recordings taken by the HMS Isabella, which sought the Northwest Passage in 1818, compared with today show a significant decline in sea ice in Baffin Bay, Canada. This area of sea connects the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans.

Each log contains accurate weather information with daily and sometimes even hourly measurements of temperature, wind speed, air pressure and ice formation. Modern researchers can use them to find out what the weather was like all around the globe on any particular day back to 1760.
 
The UK Colonial Registers and Royal Navy Logbooks (CORRAL) project is led by Dr Dennis Wheeler from the University of Sunderland. He said: ‘What happens in the oceans controls what happens in the atmosphere – so we absolutely need to comprehend the oceans to understand future weather patterns.’

The project is being run in partnership between the University of Sunderland, the Met Office Hadley Centre and the British Atmospheric Data Centre.

Researchers are embarking on a three-year study into how food supplies affect honey bees and their resistance to disease. The research at the Rothamsted Institute in Hertfordshire is being co-funded by the government and the bio-tech company Syngenta. It is hoped the research will devise new ways of keeping colonies healthy. Experts say honey bee colonies are dying off in unprecedented numbers.

There have been a variety of explanations put forward, such as the increased use of pesticides, the spread of parasites that feed on the bees themselves, or the loss of farmland flowers as agriculture has intensified.

For the first time researchers at Rothamsted will be looking at how nutrition is related to a hive’s ability to resist disease. The bees will be allowed limited foraging expeditions, and at the same time diseases in the hive will be monitored.

New theories however say that the honey bee is being wiped out by a new generation of pesticides. Chemicals routinely used on maize, oil seed rape and garden plants could be responsible for the mysterious decline, according to new documentary film Vanishing Of The Bees.

The new film suggests long-term exposure to a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids is partly to blame. Introduced in the 1990s because, unlike previous pesticides, they appear to be harmless to mammals, neonicotinoids are applied to seeds. Now American beekeeper Dave Hackenberg, who appears in the film, says pesticides are the prime suspect.

In an article by The Daily Mail it states that British scientists have calculated the changes in the height of the vulnerable but massive ice sheets and found them especially worse at their edges. In some parts of Antarctica, ice sheets have been losing 30 feet a year in thickness since 2003, according to the paper published in the journal Nature today.

Some of those areas are about a mile thick so still have plenty of ice to burn through. But the drop in thickness is speeding up. In parts of Antarctica, the yearly rate of thinning from 2003 to 2007 was 50% higher than it was from 1995 to 2003. The new measurements are based on 50 million laser readings from a NASA satellite.

The research found that 81 of the 111 Greenland glaciers surveyed are thinning at an accelerating self-feeding pace. The more the ice melts, the more water surrounds and eats away at the remaining ice.
‘To some extent it’s a runaway effect. The question is how far will it run?’ asked the study’s lead author Hamish Pritchard of the British Antarctic Survey. ‘It’s more widespread than we previously thought.’

The study does not answer the crucial question of how much this worsening melt will add to projections of sea level rise from man-made global warming. Some scientists have previously estimated that steady melting of the two ice sheets will add about 3 feet, maybe more, to sea levels by the end of the century. The ice sheets are so big, however, that it should take hundreds of years for them to disappear.

Worsening data keeps proving ‘that we’re underestimating’ how sensitive the ice sheets are to changes, Mr Pritchard warned.

Blood diamonds or conflict diamonds, as they’re also known, are diamonds that have been implicated in horrific human rights violations including diamond fuelled violence, child labour and environmental destruction.

An estimated 3.7 million people have died in Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Liberia and Sierra Leone in conflicts fuelled by diamonds.

Amnesty International and Global Witness claim consumers have the power to effect industry-wide change by demanding that their diamonds are clean. They recommend that you ask the retailer the following questions before buying:

• Do you know where your diamonds come from?
• Can I see a copy of your company’s policy on conflict diamonds?
• How can I be sure that all of your jewellery if conflict-free?

Even if your diamonds are guaranteed as conflict-free, many in the industry says that because the industry is so dangerous anyway and working conditions often criminal, that all diamonds are blood diamonds. Diamond mining is very destructive to the environment, mining for precious stones and metal destroys thousands of acres and creates huge amounts of waste.

• Buy refills when you can – it’ll cut down on the amount of packaging you’re using.
• Buy second hand – recycle, recycle, recycle!
• Say no to plastic bags, try and carry round a bag for life with you, so you don’t forget when you go shopping. If you do have to use plastic bags make sure you re-use them.
• Slap a no junk mail sticker to your post box. No one wants it, so if more people refuse it maybe they’ll stop annoying us and doing it! Otherwise call the Distribution Standards Board on 1800 676 136 and complain!
• When you put cans and bottles in the rubbish remember to squash them to make more room, and thus you won’t fill up the bag as quickly. It’s also a great stress reducer!
• When you go shopping keep in mind everything you are going to be throwing away and things that you could reuse and recycle.
• Make a shopping list for the week and stick to it. It’ll reduce the amount you waste – food and packaging wise.
• Buy in bulk – it cuts down on packaging and will usually save you money.
• Avoid disposable options and buy long lasting products such as nappies, razors, napkins, cameras etc.

In its effort to reduce the number of single use plastic bags and encourage greater use of reusable bags when shopping, Coles Supermarkets has launched a range of new bag options available for customers to purchase in store.
 
From 1 September, Coles will be providing customers with new reusable bag choices for customers, including the Re-Use Me: Don’t Forget Me bag available for 15c and the Re-Use Me: I’m Biodegradable (cornstarch) bag available for 25c. Coles will also be launching its Natural Bag this month for $2.99, made of natural plant fibres. Available from 17 September, Coles will donate 10c from the sale of each Natural Bag to support Junior Landcare and the development of community bush tucker gardens, maintaining the tradition of indigenous Australians. And stores will also continue to offer customers the ever-popular Landcare reusable bags for 99c, with 5c from the sale of each bag donated supporting Coles’ School Garden Grants Program.

For customers who forget their reusable bags, free single use checkout bags will continue to be available at all Coles stores (except in South Australia), however, to encourage the use of more environmentally-friendly reusable bags, Coles will reward any FlyBuys member who purchases a Re-Use Me: I’m Biodegradable bag from 1 September until the end of the year with 5 bonus FlyBuys points.

During September, Coles and Landcare will launch a Plastic Bag Challenge to encourage shoppers to recycle plastic bags. Schools, businesses and individuals will be invited to register online and prizes will be presented to those who collect the most plastic shopping bags. Further details will be released later in the month.