Penguin researchers gather at Phillip Island under shadow of bird flu.

Extract from ABC News

By Lily Kristanto

• ABC Gippsland

• Topic:Birds

28 minutes ago

Global experts have gathered at Phillip Island for the 12th International Penguin Conference. (Supplied: Phillip Island Nature Parks)

In short: 

Global penguin experts have issued a warning about the threat climate change poses to the species.

The experts also discussed H5 bird flu at a conference on Victoria's Phillip Island.   

What's next?

Scientists are calling for sustained long-term research, stronger international collaboration and conservation action to protect the birds.

The world's leading penguin researchers have issued a stark warning about the effects climate change will have on penguin habitats.

The scientists met this week at the 12th International Penguin Conference on Phillip Island, in Victoria's south-east, to discuss the latest research about the seabirds and bird flu management strategies.

At the end of the week-long conference, the researchers released a statement calling for "decisive conservation action" to protect penguins and their habitats.

"When penguins struggle we should pay attention. Their warning is about the health of our oceans and ultimately the health of our planet," the statement said.

"Penguins cannot tell us in words that their world is changing. They are showing us."

Scientists at the conference discussed the latest penguin research and conservation strategies. (Supplied: Phillip Island Nature Parks)

The call to action comes as the United Nations warns the world will breach the 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming benchmark within the next five years.

Penguins under pressure

Phillip Island Nature Parks senior scientist and chair of the conference Andre Chiaradia said penguins were facing a growing combination of pressures.

He said penguins depend on healthy oceans to survive, and changing oceans could affect where penguins feed, when they breed, how they raise their chicks and whether their populations grow or decline.

He said a major concern for penguins was ice shelves melting at a "scary, fast pace".

Andre Chiaradia says there are many challenges facing penguins globally, including climate change. (Supplied: Phillip Island Nature Parks)

"Those places are disappearing, then there's no place for them to breed,"

he said.

"Penguins are suffering from a thousand cuts so [bird flu] is just an extra cut on penguins' lives.

"If we do what we can … then we can probably provide a brighter future for penguins."

He said sustainable fisheries, protecting critical feeding and breeding habitats, effective predator management and long-term monitoring could help strengthen the resilience of penguin populations.

Timely event

Phillip Island is home to about 40,000 little penguins, making it the world's largest colony.

This year's conference followed the death in August of a little penguin on the island from H5 bird flu.

So far more than 1,500 penguins have been vaccinated against the disease as part of the government's plan to vaccinate 5,000 of the birds at Phillip Island and St Kilda.

Federation University biological sciences lecturer and speaker at the conference Meagan Dewar said this year's conference was timely.

"It's very important to have so many penguin experts here in the one place as Australia is facing H5N1 outbreaks," she said.

"We have many experts from places that have already experienced this, such as South America and South Africa, and also the Antarctic.

"It's a great time to share knowledge."

Meagan Dewar says it is very important for penguin experts to gather and discuss research methods. (Supplied: Federation University)

Ms Dewar said Australian experts could learn from other countries' experience of monitoring the disease and how they managed outbreaks.

New research ideas

The researchers also discussed the latest technology used to understand and protect penguins, including artificial intelligence and drones.

US geospatial scientist and conference speaker Brett Buzzanga said one of the biggest benefits was the multiplicity of perspectives and the different knowledge each group had.

"There's a shared language, the shared language of science, the shared language of penguin conservation that everyone wants to collaborate with each other regardless of national borders,"

Mr Buzzanga said.

Brett Buzzanga speaking at the International Penguin Conference on Phillip Island. (Supplied: Phillip Island Nature Parks)

Mr Buzzanga works with drones equipped with thermal cameras to detect penguins living underground, providing a better picture of penguin populations and how they change over time.

"As with the rest of the world, AI is a big player in being able to classify different images, being able to recognise different patterns in the data," Mr Buzzanga said.

The colony on Phillip Island has about 40,000 birds. (Supplied: Phillip Island Nature Parks)

He said advances in technology allowed researchers to cover much larger areas than they could by hand.

"A lot of the tech unlocks the potential to expand those regions, expand science, expand conservation," Mr Buzzanga said.

"So sharing that with each other, that's the goal."

Russian drone attack hits Ukraine's SBU headquarters in Kyiv, injuring seven.

Extract from ABC News

• Topic:War

about 5 hours ago

Smoke rises from the SBU headquarters in Kyiv. (Reuters: Gleb Garanich)

In short: 

A Russian drone targeted the headquarters of Ukraine's SBU security service, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said. 

The attack marks a new escalation, as throughout Russia's lengthy war on Ukraine, government buildings have rarely been damaged in drone and missile strikes.

At least seven people were injured and Kyiv has vowed a "tangible" response. 

A Russian drone hit the headquarters of Ukraine's SBU security service in Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said, vowing to retaliate as Moscow kept up its constant air attacks on the capital for the tenth day.

Heavy black smoke rose in Kyiv city centre following the attack, on Friday, local time, which signalled a new escalation in the conflict. At least seven people were injured, Kyiv's mayor said.

Twelve killed as Russia steps up aerial assault on Ukraine

Russia carries out a sixth straight day of heavy attacks on Kyiv, with civilian infrastructure and residential buildings among the targets.

During more than four-and-a-half years of war with Russia, Ukrainian government buildings have rarely been damaged in drone and missile strikes.

The SBU is vital to Ukraine's war efforts as it executes high-impact, deep strikes to damage Russia's war machine and its energy infrastructure.

"The drone was aimed directly at the office of the Head of the Security Service in that building," Mr Zelenskyy said on the Telegram app. 

It was not immediately clear if SBU members were among the injured.

Ukraine vows 'tangible' response 

Mr Zelenskyy said that he ordered "an appropriate, tangible response and, where possible, one that mirrors this strike, to the Russians once everything was ready". 

Numerous ambulances and emergency services were heading to the scene in the historic part of the city close to the Saint Sophia Cathedral, a UNESCO World Heritage site.

The owner of a popular bakery, Zavertailo, said on the Telegram app that their building located opposite the SBU building was also destroyed in the attack.

Russian drones targeted downtown Kyiv and Ukraine's SBU headquarters, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.  (AP: Francisco Seco)

One woman shouted into her phone that she had popped out to buy cigarettes and been startled by the explosion.

Ukraine's capital has been under continuous Russian drone attack for 10 days. On Wednesday, a university in the city centre was also hit.

"I think (people) can get used to this. In the centre of Kyiv, and in the centre of Moscow. It will get worse, I believe this," said Oleh, 33, who declined to give his last name.

'Rejection of diplomacy'

Ukraine's Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha urged allies to step up pressure on Moscow after a Russian drone hit Ukraine's security service headquarters in central Kyiv.

"The Russian attack on Ukraine’s Security Service Headquarters is a major escalation that demands resolute responses," he said on X.

"Moscow launched this strike during a renewed push for peace - laying bare its true rejection of diplomacy,"

he said.

The SBU is a vast and secretive agency responsible for ambitious operations against Russia, such as the 2022 bombing of a Russian bridge to occupied Crimea and a 2025 drone attack, codenamed Spiderweb, that struck Russian strategic bombers.

It is also widely seen as a leading player in a campaign of covert assassinations of senior Russian military and other figures blamed by Ukraine for carrying out war crimes. Russia has denounced those killings as terrorist attacks.

Reuters 

 Extract from Eureka Street

• Home
• Vol 36 No 17
• What AI is doing to the way we think

AUSTRALIA

What AI is doing to the way we think.

• Tom Keating
• 02 September 2026

 

Debate about artificial intelligence has, by now, settled into two established grooves. The first is economic, concerning which jobs will go, which will change, and what the productivity dividend might be. The second is environmental, concerning the electricity that data centres draw, the water that cools them, and the minerals dug up to build them. Both of these matter, and both deserve the scrutiny they receive. But they share an assumption: each approach treats artificial intelligence as a new input into a world whose purposes are already fixed, and considers only what it will cost us to run.

There is a third question, which is harder to see and, I believe, more consequential than either. It is not what these systems will do to the labour market or the power grid, but what they will do to us as knowers: to how we come to believe things, what we accept as understanding, whom we trust, and whether we keep the habits of mind on which a thinking society depends. Call it the epistemological question. A society can restructure employment and can, with effort, find the energy. A society that loses its grip on the difference between information and understanding has lost something far harder to recover, not least because it may lose the very means of noticing the loss.

In Plato’s Phaedrus, the god Theuth offers the Egyptian king the gift of writing, praising it as a remedy for memory and wisdom. The king is unpersuaded. Writing, he says, will breed forgetfulness because people will trust in marks on a page instead of exercising memory; and it will give the appearance of wisdom in place of its reality because readers will take in a great deal while understanding little. Every technology of the word since has drawn the same complaint, and in each case the alarm was partly overdone because each of those tools passed on, stored or pointed to words that some human being had written and could, in principle, answer for.

Generative AI is different in kind. It does not fetch an existing text. It composes one, fresh and fluent, in response to a prompt, and no one has written it. This is the first and least noticed of its effects. When a person tells you something, they are staking a claim: they represent themselves as knowing it, you can ask them how they know, and they can be believed or doubted according to their honesty and their record. Almost everything we know about the wider world reaches us this way, through the testimony of others, held together by that thread of accountability. A machine’s output wears the grammar of testimony while lacking its substance. The sentence has the shape of a claim, but no one is making it. There is no knower behind it, no one to ask for grounds, no reputation on the line. We receive assertion without an asserter, and we are tempted to extend to it the trust we reserve for a candid and competent informant. That is a mistake, and a natural one.

It is made worse by a second effect, in which fluency has been cut loose from truth. The philosopher John Searle once imagined a person locked in a room, shuffling Chinese symbols according to a rulebook and producing flawless Chinese without understanding a word. A large language model is something like that room on an enormous scale, arranging language by statistical pattern, with no purchase on what the words are about. Some philosophers have recently argued, borrowing Harry Frankfurt’s precise use of the term, that its output is best understood as ‘bullshit’, not lies. Lying requires caring about the truth in order to conceal it, but speech produced with no concern for the truth at all is properly described as ‘bullshit’. The hazard is subtle. In ordinary life, we treat fluency, confidence and coherence as signs that someone knows what they are talking about. These systems produce all three in abundance, whether or not the underlying claims are sound, because they are built to imitate the form of a good answer rather than to reach a true one. The polish is mistaken for knowledge, and there is no knowledge beneath it. Researchers have begun to call this the illusion of understanding.

Here, the older tradition earns its keep because knowing was never one thing. Aristotle distinguished several kinds, and the most human of them he called phronesis, practical wisdom: the judgement that reads a particular situation for what matters in it, formed slowly through experience by someone who must live with the consequences. Thomas Aquinas drew a further line between reasoning, the step-by-step movement from premise to conclusion, and understanding, the mind’s actual grasp of what is true, which reasoning merely serves. On this old and durable picture, to know something is to stand in a relation to reality through meaning. A language model stands in no such relation. It works on the outward signs of words, never on the things they name. It can imitate the motions of reasoning with uncanny skill while grasping nothing. The danger is not that the imitation is poor. It is that the imitation is superb, that we mistake it for the real thing, and that we hand over to it the very work that understanding is.

That handing over is the third effect, and the one that should trouble anyone concerned with public life. Offloading mental labour is neither new nor bad in itself; we have always used notebooks, maps and calculators to extend what our minds can do. But there is a line between delegating a defined task while keeping hold of the thinking and surrendering the thinking itself, accepting the machine’s answer as one’s own with barely a glance. Early studies, which should be read with care, point in the wrong direction, indicating that heavier reliance on these tools tracks with weaker critical thinking and that people who lean on them to complete work often do worse once the crutch is removed. Intellectual capacities are habits. They are kept alive only by use, and they waste away without it. The philosopher of technology Shannon Vallor calls AI a mirror that reflects our own intelligence back at us, and warns that a mirror can flatter and distort as readily as it can inform.

This has real-world implications for policy and the professions. Medicine, law, social work and public administration all turn on practical wisdom, on the seasoned reading of the particular case. Consider the experienced clinician who senses that a patient’s account does not quite fit the obvious diagnosis, or the caseworker who judges that a struggling family needs support rather than surveillance. That perception is not a rule that can be written down and handed to a machine; it is wisdom, built case by case, and it is answerable to the person in front of you. Automated decision support can offer a recommendation, but not the deliberative judgement that ought to sit beneath it. A practitioner who defers to the system by habit may find, in time, that the judgement the institution exists to provide has quietly thinned. The deskilling of the hands is visible. The deskilling of judgement is not, until the moment it is needed and found missing.

 

“The measure of these machines is not only what they can produce, but what they do to our capacity to understand. That measure belongs at the centre of the debate about artificial intelligence, not at its edge.”

 

There is, finally, the shared environment in which all of this happens. As generated text floods in, it grows harder to tell human testimony from machine composition, and the models themselves degrade as they feed on their own output. When no one can be sure whether a photograph, a document or a quotation is genuine, the default trust on which public conversation runs begins to fray. The common ground of public knowledge, like any commons, can be fouled and depleted. Meanwhile, the tools that appear to democratise knowledge concentrate real power in a handful of firms, on whose private choices the terms of public reasoning increasingly depend.

None of this is an argument for refusal. These systems are genuinely useful for retrieval, drafting and exploration, and pretending otherwise would persuade no one. But it is an argument for using them in a way that guards the thing they can quietly erode: treating their output as a prompt for inquiry, provisional and to be checked, rather than as a verdict to be accepted; keeping human judgement where practical wisdom is required; and designing institutions that resist lazy deference. Teach the young, above all, to notice the gap between plausibility and truth. And recover, in ourselves, the plain distinction between having information and understanding something, on which the whole matter turns.

The measure of these machines is not only what they can produce, but what they do to our capacity to understand. That measure belongs at the centre of the debate about artificial intelligence, not at its edge.

 

---

 

Dr Tom Keating is a policy consultant and academic author. He writes on public policy, social administration and the history of ideas.

Rockhampton Zoo to send baby chimpanzee elsewhere after failed reunion with mother.

Extract from ABC News

By Katrina Beavan

• ABC Capricornia

• Topic:Animals

about 19 hours ago

Baby Cassie to find new family. (Supplied: Facebook/Rockhampton Zoo)

In short:

Zookeepers had to hand-rear baby Cassie after the chimpanzee was dropped by its mother hours after birth, breaking its leg.

Once healed, attempts to reunite the primate with its mother and aunt resulted in aggression.

What's next?

The zoo said it's in Cassie's best interest to send the primate elsewhere as it needs to grow up around fellow chimps.

A central Queensland zoo will send a baby chimpanzee elsewhere after a failed reunion with its mother.

Female chimp Sile gave birth to Cassie at the Rockhampton Zoo in June, but dropped the baby when it was hours old, breaking its leg.

Zookeepers then had to care for Cassie round the clock as they tried to mimic all interactions as closely as they could to typical chimpanzee behaviour.

Keepers have had to work around the clock caring for Cassie, trying to mimic interactions with chimp behaviour. (ABC Capricornia: Katrina Beavan)

After healing, staff attempted to re-introduce Cassie to mother Sile as well as another female adult in the troop, Mary.

But it was unsuccessful, with both females showing aggression towards Cassie, who was left with bruising and bite marks.

At the time the zoo said it would discuss possible next steps with experts in the field.

Cassie had positive reactions to the troop through mesh screens before the unsuccessful reunion. (Supplied: Rockhampton Regional Council)

In a social media video posted on Thursday morning, primate team leader Jo Thrower said Cassie had healed well from the interactions.

"From this we've had a lot of discussions within our team and with specialists from around Australasia and Europe," Ms Thrower said.

"We've concluded that Cassie needs to find a new troop to go to and become a part of."

Ms Thrower said it was very important for the young chimp's development to be around others of its kind as soon as possible.

"Staying in human care she's going to grow up believing she's a human, which will only cause bigger issues down the line when she does eventually go in with chimps," she said.

"The sooner we can get this done the better."

She conceded that the Rockhampton community already "loved" Cassie and would like to see the chimp grow up locally.

"But we need to do what's best for her welfare, and to put her back in with our troop she's only going to get hurt."

Rockhampton Zoo curator Blair Chapman nursing baby Cassie, who is receiving 24/7 care from keepers. (Supplied: Rockhampton Regional Council)

Where to next?

Ms Thrower said Cassie's development was going well and the chimp was hitting all the appropriate milestones.

The zoo did not confirm which facility Cassie would be sent to as it was "still working through options" and would update the community as soon as the final decision was made.

Cassie is the offspring of 19-year-old alpha female Sile and the troop’s alpha male, Alon. (Supplied: Rockhampton Regional Council)

The zoo is owned and funded by the Rockhampton Regional Council which has not yet responded to the ABC about the costs incurred with hand-rearing Cassie.

The young chimp was named after chimpanzee Cassius, a resident at the Rockhampton Zoo for almost 40 years, and a local woman named Cassie who donated colostrum during the initial weeks after the primate's birth.

Cassie will leave behind a seven-chimp troop with four males aged from six to 30 years old and three females aged between eight and 23.

UN climate agency warns El Niño may be strongest ever recorded.

Extract from ABC News

• Topic:Weather Phenomena

about 8 hours ago

Officials in Indonesia say El Niño conditions have raised the risk of more fires during the peak dry season. (AP: East Java Regional Disaster Mitigation Agency)

In short:

The El Niño weather phenomenon is set to intensify further into 2027 and could be the strongest ever, says the World Meteorological Organization.

The UN climate agency says this raises risks of extreme weather into next year.

What's next?

The WMO says it is highly likely that El Niño will continue through to February.

El Niño could be the strongest since records began four decades ago, the United Nations' climate agency has warned, with the UN chief warning the world is in the "danger zone of extreme weather".

The naturally occurring weather phenomenon is set to become "very strong" in the months ahead and is near certain to persist through to February, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said Thursday.

El Niño warms surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, bringing worldwide changes in winds, pressure and rainfall patterns.

A view of cracked ground at a dam in Zimbabwe during an El Niño-induced drought, 2024. (Reuters: Philimon Bulawayo)

"If this trajectory continues, it may be stronger than anything since our monitoring began — so literally off the charts we have used for the past four decades," WMO chief Celeste Saulo told reporters in Geneva.

El Niño will peak towards the end of this year — though its knock-on impacts for the climate will continue well into 2027, said the WMO.

Heat in the oceans releases more slowly into the atmosphere, pushing up global temperatures the following year.

The powerful 2023-24 El Niño contributed to 2024 being the warmest year on record, and "we should not be surprised if this record is broken", Ms Saulo added.

"El Niño is firmly established and will intensify into a very strong event in the coming months, with big impacts on rainfall and temperature patterns and associated risks of floods, drought and extreme heat," the WMO said.

 El Niño is a natural climate phenomenon and is not caused by climate change.

Record rainfall linked to El Niño caused flooding in Rio Grande do Sul state, Brazil, 2024. (Reuters: Amanda Perobelli)

But scientists expect it will exacerbate the heat of a planet already warming from burning fossil fuels, while amping up weather extremes.

"El Niño is being supersized before our eyes," said UN chief Antonio Guterres.

"The science leaves no room for doubt: the planet is in uncharted waters, and those waters are heating up. Sea surface temperatures are rising, temperatures keep climbing, and the world is in the danger zone of extreme weather," he said.

'Massive blow' to economies

"This exceptional El Niño … has the potential to deliver a massive blow to communities and economies across the world", said Ms Saulo.

"We are already seeing disruption and devastation from droughts and floods, and we expect these impacts to increase as El Niño intensifies."

She put disaster management authorities and climate-sensitive sectors like agriculture, health, energy and water on notice, saying there was "no time to lose" in getting ready.

 El Niño typically takes place every two to seven years and lasts about nine to 12 months.

Ocean temperatures hit record high

The world's oceans have reached their hottest temperatures on record and are likely to warm even more in the next few months, data shows. 

Conditions oscillate between El Niño and its opposite La Niña, with neutral conditions in between.

"Fuelled by exceptionally warm ocean conditions across the tropical Pacific, El Niño is expected to strengthen further during the coming months to a very strong intensity," the WMO said.

The UN agency classifies El Niño events as weak, moderate, strong or very strong, meaning it is set to reach the highest level out of four.

The WMO said there was an "exceptionally high likelihood of nearly 100 per cent" that El Niño will continue through to February.

Pacific Ocean heating up

El Niño can reshape weather and climate patterns thousands of kilometres away from the tropical Pacific.

Every El Niño is different, but major events often follow familiar patterns.

This includes drought across parts of the Amazon, Indonesia and Australia, disrupted monsoons in India, and shifting rainfall throughout the tropics.

El Niño is often associated with drought across Australia due to its influence on winter and spring rainfall. (ABC News: Jess Davis)

For September-November, WMO forecasts indicate an increased likelihood of above-normal temperatures "across almost all land areas", alongside rainfall patterns showing a "pronounced and classic atmospheric response to the strong Pacific El Niño", the UN's weather and climate agency said.

The index, which measures sea surface temperature anomalies in the central eastern equatorial Pacific, has strengthened from an average 1.5C above normal between May and July.

Weekly values between late July and mid-August ranged from around 2.2C to 2.6C above average, indicating continued El Niño intensification.

In some areas, subsurface ocean temperatures were more than 8C above average during July and early August.

AFP

Winter delivers record low snow and unprecedented warmth to Australian Alps.

Extract from ABC News 

By ABC meteorologist Tom Saunders

• Topic:Snow

about 1 hours ago

Skiing in early September is restricted to small areas of artificial snow like the Front Valley section of Perisher. (Supplied: Telemark Phat)

Australian ski resorts are winding up operations early in 2026 after the warmest winter on record.

Along with mild temperatures, winter also brought frequent rain to the high country, preventing a seasonal snowpack from establishing across lower alpine elevations.

This year also marks three very lean years in the past four, continuing the long-term decline in snowfall across the Australian Alps, which is proving to be one of the most tangible signs of our warming climate.

Ski fields above freezing most of winter

This year's snow season was a challenge from the start.

June was unseasonably warm and wet, and when it was not raining, it was mostly too warm for snowmaking at ski resorts.

Heavy rain in late August caused a major melting event and a swelling of the Perisher Creek. (Supplied: SMSkier)

A remarkable statistic for early winter was the Perisher Valley weather station measured 301 millimetres of precipitation from June 1 to July 2, of which only 25mm fell at a temperature below 0 degrees Celsius.

A modest dump of snow finally arrived in July, but the month was generally mild and occasionally rainy; although a snow base developed on higher slopes, a full cover across lower alpine regions never formed.

Last month brought no relief, with further rain and above-average temperatures — during the final days of the month, alpine maximums even climbed above 10C, including a new all-time winter record of 14.4C at Perisher on Saturday, August 29.

Three warmer-than-normal months meant the average winter temperatures across the high country were easily the highest on record, and by a fair margin.

The longest-running BOM station in the Australian alpine region is Cabramurra, where this winter's mean of 4.0C was well above the long-term average of 1.8C and nearly half a degree above the previous record in 2023.

Across the border, the Mount Buller station has been operational since 1985 and also exceeded the previous record by nearly half a degree, coming in at 1.9C versus a long-term average of 0.1C.

Snow depth in 2026 is historically low

In a typical year, snow accumulates through winter and peaks in August or early September.

However, this year, discounting the improbable arrival of a major polar storm this spring, snow peaked two weeks earlier than average and was at historically low levels, which heavily restricted the amount of open terrain for skiing.

The table below shows peak snow depth in 2026 compared to average; however, there are a few caveats when analysing snow data in Australia*.

What is evident this season is that, for higher elevations, it was the worst season for natural snow since 2006, while for lower regions it was the worst on record.

Despite the setbacks, CEO of Snow Resorts Australia Josh Elliott was confident the industry had the infrastructure to mitigate poor seasons.

"While conditions and available terrain have differed between resorts, continued investment in snowmaking and snow management has meant that skiing, snowboarding and snowplay have been available in NSW, Victoria and the ACT since the June long weekend," he said.

Winter finished with almost no snow cover on many alpine slopes and an early end to the season for most of the terrain. (Supplied: Perisher)

But even extensive snow curation eventually lost out to the elements, and two of the lower resorts, Mount Selwyn and Mount Baw Baw, already shut down operations for the season a fortnight ago.

Mount Hotham is also due for a premature finish this Sunday, and with more heavy rain ahead this weekend, it is hard to see the other major resorts lasting until the traditional closing weekend in early October.

The downhill slide continues

In isolation, a winter without much snow is nothing new in Australia — 1973 and 1982 were both very lean years — but it is the sharp downward trend over recent decades that is concerning.

And unsurprisingly, the marginal lower alpine areas are most vulnerable to a warming climate, since more winter precipitation is now falling as rain, and above-freezing temperatures are melting the snow cover between storms.

Between 1955 and 2000, the peak annual snow depth at Three-Mile Dam, at an elevation of 1,460 metres, averaged 55 centimetres, but during the past 25 years that figure has fallen to 34cm, a reduction of 38 per cent.

A few hundred metres higher, Mount Buller's drop during the corresponding period is 21 per cent, from 117cm to 93cm, while for Spencers Creek at 1,830m, the decline is 13 per cent from 205cm to 178cm.

In other words, the winter snowline is clearly rising, and projections from several studies this century show that by 2050, maximum snow depth at major resorts, relative to the late 20th century, may decline by more than 50 per cent even under a low emissions scenario.

However, Mr Elliott said Australian resorts were leveraging against future climates.

"While those projections may be relevant to understanding changes in the natural alpine environment, they are not forecasts of future skiable terrain, resort operating periods or the visitor experience," he said.

"Snowmaking has been a core component of the Australian snow experience for more than 35 years. New technology, including All-Weather Snowmaking Systems, now allows resorts with these systems to produce snow in ambient temperatures of up to +20C."

*Victorian statistics are sufficiently robust with daily natural snow depth readings taken by resorts; however, Mount Hotham did not report during the COVID-19 winters of 2020 and 2021. In NSW, Perisher and Thredbo quote snow depth data from Snowy Hydro at Spencers Creek, normally measured weekly or fortnightly. Snowy Hydro also takes readings at Deep Creek and Three-Mile Dam, however these datasets suffer from inconsistent measurement intervals, with intervals between readings of up to three weeks.

Israeli strikes kill four in Gaza as military says it arrests Hamas militant.

 Extract from ABC News

• Topic:Unrest, Conflict and War

8 hours ago

Two vehicles were hit and reduced to twisted wreckage in Gaza City. (Reuters: Dawoud Abu Alkas)

In short:

Officials in Gaza say Israeli airstrikes in Gaza City have killed at least three Palestinians, including two children.

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz says a senior Hamas militant was arrested.

A third child was killed in a separate incident in central Gaza.

Link copied

At least three Palestinians have been killed by gunfire and airstrikes in Gaza City during an Israeli-backed raid, according to Gaza officials.

An Israeli special force had tried to carry out an operation in Gaza City before being detected by Hamas and launched heavy airstrikes to cover their withdrawal, director of the Hamas-run Gaza government media office, Ismail Al-Thawabta said.

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said a senior Hamas militant had been arrested with an Israeli security official saying the man was the head of Hamas' internal security service.

Some Israeli media reports said the raid may have been carried out by members of an Israeli-backed militia that operates from Israeli-controlled areas inside Gaza.

Witnesses said Israeli warplanes fired at least 12 missiles near the Katiba area in the west of Gaza City, an area crowded with displaced families.

Palestinians gather at the site of Israeli strikes and gunfire in Gaza City. (Reuters: Ebrahim Hajjaj)

At least three people — two children and a woman — were killed and several others wounded in the bombardment, medics said. 

Two vehicles were hit and reduced to twisted wreckage. Another child was killed in Israeli fire in central Gaza, medics said.

In a statement on Tuesday, local time, the Israeli military said it struck several targets in the Gaza Strip in order to remove threats to Israeli security forces.

Mr Katz did not provide details about the arrest operation or identify the Hamas militant.

"This is our policy: we do not wait for threats, but rather pursue Hamas terrorists, thwart them, and destroy their terror infrastructure," he said, speaking from the Netiv HaAsara community near the northern Gaza border.

In a separate incident, medics said a girl was killed and two other people were wounded when Israeli forces operating east of Deir Al-Balah in central Gaza opened fire on the area.

Ceasefire has not stopped strikes

A US-backed ceasefire that took effect in October 2025 halted the large-scale fighting that had devastated the enclave, but it has not ended Israeli strikes. 

The military says such operations are intended to prevent attacks by Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups.

Hamas accuses Israel of repeatedly violating the ceasefire and undermining efforts to advance a broader plan by US President Donald Trump to end the war. 

The plan includes further Israeli troop withdrawals from Gaza and the disarmament of Hamas.

More than 1,300 Palestinians have been killed ‌in Gaza ⁠since the ceasefire came into force last October, according to Gaza health officials. 

The Israeli military says four Israeli soldiers have been killed in militant attacks during the same period.

Reuters