One of the largest wildfires in California's history continues to burn as authorities accuse one man of arson.

Extract from ABC News

ABC News Homepage

By Brianna Morris-Grant

Posted 15 hours ago

A state of emergency has been declared in multiple parts of California. (Image: Cal Fire)

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In short: 

A man has been accused of using a burning car to spark one of the biggest wildfires in California. 

The fire continues to burn across four counties in the state as thousands of fire fighters struggle to contain it. 

What's next? 

More resources are being called in to try and contain the fire, which has already blazed across more than 149,000 hectares. 

As families enjoyed a peaceful summer afternoon at a California swimming hole, a man nearby stepped out of his car and set it on fire.

Witnesses watched on as he pushed the burning vehicle down into an 18-metre embankment, walked away, and calmly joined the crowds of people fleeing the fast-growing flames.

The same fire has become the largest wildfire in Californian history, this week burning across more than 149,000 hectares.

The man allegedly responsible has now been arrested and formally charged with felony arson.

Thousands of firefighters are still struggling to contain the fire he is accused of starting.

Alleged arsonist 'held without bail' as fire rages

Authorities say Ronnie Dean Stout II was spotted just before 3pm last Wednesday pushing the car into the embankment near Bidwell Park's Alligator Hole.

Less than 12 hours later, the 42-year-old was arrested at his home in Chico Mobile Home Park, a less than 20 minute drive away.

Thousands of firefighters have so far been dispatched. (Image: Cal Fire)

Neighbours told the Washington Post Mr Stout seemed "like a decent guy" who had lived in the park since being released from jail "quite some time" ago.

Ronnie Dean Stout II.  (Image:  Butte County District Attorney's Office.)

One resident told the outlet she had heard him excited about buying a car for $US7,500 ($11,460), allegedly the same car which started the fire.

Mr Stout has been booked into Butte County Jail, and, according to a statement released by District Attorney Mike Ramsey, "he is being held without bail until his arraignment".

He has denied the charges, according to Mr Ramsey, who said during a news conference Mr Stout called the incident "an accident" and claimed the car rolled down the hill. 

Mr Ramsey added there were "indications" Mr Stout was intoxicated and he was allegedly seen drinking near the watering hole and driving "extraordinarily" recklessly. 

Authorities have said they are trying to find a motive.

"If you try to figure out what happens in a crazy mind, it will drive you crazy," Mr Ramsey said. 

Mr Stout's next court appearance is scheduled for 1:35pm on August 1, local time.

Court records show almost a dozen different media outlets have already requested permission to record and photograph inside the courtroom.

'Sixth largest fire in California history'

The fire has now spread across four California counties and as of Monday afternoon local time was only 12 per cent contained.

Firefighters are working to establish control lines around the perimeter of the fire. (Image: Cal Fire)

So far there have been 4,876 individual personnel and 98 fire crews, 33 helicopters, 434 fire engines, 166 dozers and 116 water tankers assigned to fight it.

More than 100 homes and businesses have been destroyed and thousands of people have been evacuated.

A state of emergency has been declared in Plumas, Butte and Tehama counties in California's northern central region.

Interstate crews have also been called in to try and get the fire under control.(Image: Cal Fire)

In "only six days", Cal Fire incident commander Billy See said, the fire has become the "sixth largest fire in California history".

"This region, both Butte and Tehama … has had four of the largest 10 fires known in history," he said.

"The firefighters are working extremely hard, gaining perimeter control daily, and will continue to serve and protect the citizens of California."

"Fire devils", towers of swirling smoke, dirt, and fire, have been captured on video multiple times over the last week.

Cal Fire operations section chief Mark Brunton said on Monday afternoon local time there had been "significant changes" in fire activity in 24 hours.

"We had a break for 48 hours prior to that, we were able to do a lot of good work, establish some good control lines and go direct on the fire," he said during a press briefing.

"However with the changing of the weather we've seen increased fire activity."

California governor Gavin Newsom said: "We're continuing to see dangerous conditions, our firefighters and emergency responders are working day and night to protect our communities.

"Californians must heed warning from local authorities and take steps to stay safe."

The fire is so far only 12 per cent contained.(Image: Cal Fire)

Texas governor Greg Abbott has also announced the state would deploy firefighters, fire engines and more to California to assist.

Aurora australis returns as BOM forecasts significant geomagnetic activity.

Extract from ABC News

ABC News Homepage

By Nelli Saarinen

Posted 6 hours ago

The aurora was visible over Tasmania early in the evening.(Facebook: Kim Cox)

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In short:

The Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) forecasts significant geomagnetic activity over the next couple of days, which could result in displays of aurora australis in the night-time.

The geomagnetic storm was expected to be at its strongest on Tuesday evening.

What's next?

Aurora activity could continue for several days as the Sun emits a series of coronal mass expulsions.

It was only a few months ago that a dazzling show of technicolour auroras lit up the night sky and amazed viewers in Australia and around the world as a result of the largest geomagnetic storm in decades.

How the Aurora borealis and australis dazzled viewers across the world for three consecutive nights

From Australia to the US — here's how the dazzling lights of the aurora australis and borealis were captured in each hemisphere in a rare spectacle in May.

Read more

The stunning weather event, known as aurora australis in the southern hemisphere, has now returned to Australian skies.

The Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) released an aurora watch notice early on Monday morning, forecasting significant geomagnetic activity that could possibly result in visible auroras during night-time.

The geomagnetic storm was expected to be at its strongest on Tuesday evening.

BOM forecast a sequence of large expulsions of plasma and magnetic field from the Sun's corona, known as coronal mass expulsions, over the next couple of days.

When these forces hit the Earth's magnetic field, some of the particles can travel down the magnetic field lines near the north and south poles.

The captivating displays of pink, red, green and sometimes even violet, known as auroras, are created when the particles collide with gases in Earth's atmosphere.

Dr Karl explains the physics behind aurora australis.

BOM said an aurora alert would follow "if significant geomagnetic activity actually occurs", so a light show was not guaranteed, but enthusiastic aurora spotters have already been rewarded for keeping their eyes on the sky.

May's huge solar storm tested thousands of satellites

The solar storm in May did more than just produce exceptional auroras. An analysis of US Space Force data has found more than 5,000 satellites had to alter their position to avoid deorbiting or crashing into each other.

Read more

In May, stargazers around the world were treated to stunning displays of aurora australis in the south and aurora borealis in the northern hemisphere.

The southern display was not expected to be as strong as the one in May, which was the result of one of the strongest geomagnetic storms in two decades.

Geomagnetic storms are rated on what's known as the G-scale, ranging from G1 (minor) to G5 (extreme), according to BOM. The storm in May was rated as a G5.

The current forecast for Australia is G2 (moderate) from July 30 to August 1.

ABC

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Vale Ray Lawler: the playwright who changed the sound of Australian theatre.

Extract from The Guardian

The Conversation

Theatre

Julian Meyrick for the Conversation

Lawler’s most famous play, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, and the story of the Melbourne Theatre Company are forever intertwined

Sun 28 Jul 2024 13.07 AEST

Last modified on Sun 28 Jul 2024 13.23 AEST

Ray Lawler, who died this week at 103, was one of the artists responsible for establishing the first non-commercial repertory theatre in Australia – the Union Repertory Theatre Company, now Melbourne Theatre Company – and the writer of its best-known play, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.

It is impossible to think of the two achievements separately. So pronounced was the Doll’s success, it cemented the position of the company. The story of the production of the play is the story of the rise of the Union Theatre.

Both are inception events for the structure, outlook and values of Australian theatre today.

The ‘non-existent’ Australian plays

Lawler was born in Footscray in 1921, leaving school when he was 13 to work in a factory. Taking acting classes whenever he could, he started writing plays during the war after being rostered on night shift.

His first job in theatre was on the vaudeville circuit, playing “straight man” to American comedian Will Mahoney. In 1953 came an all-important meeting with John Sumner, founder of the Union Theatre, and the man who would lead it for 35 years.

A performance of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll by the Melbourne Theatre Company in 1977. Photograph: National Archives of Australia

Sumner persuaded Lawler to try directing, and Sumner prevailed upon Lawler to let the Union Repertory Theatre Company produce the Doll.

The Doll was not an obvious choice. In 1954, it shared first prize with Oriel Gray’s The Torrents in a playwrights competition. But this meant little. Australian plays often achieved literary recognition. It was getting them staged that was the problem.

Challenges continued into rehearsals. In 1965, Niall Brennan, the Union Theatre’s front of house manager, recalled: “The theatre in those days was an imported thing; Australian plays, in commercial terms, were virtually non-existent …

“The play was set in Carlton, literally almost over the road from the theatre. It was very hard for everyone to realise that we were so close to home. Was it a play about shearers and wombats, muttered one critic?”

On November 28 1955, the Doll opened. There had been successful Australian plays before this time, notably Steele Rudd’s On Our Selection (1912) and Sumner Locke-Elliot’s Rusty Bugles (1948). It is the extent and penetration of the Doll’s impact that makes it such a signal work, as well as the quality of its dialogue, characters and comedio-tragic narrative.

An Australian classic

Lawler’s tale of the deterioration and collapse of the unconventional relationship between two Queensland cane-cutters and their off-season, Melbourne-based lovers was both an assault on the wowserism of the times, and a clear-eyed dissection of values we would now call masculinist.

Unlike other plays of the 1950s, it retains its force and appeal. It is one of the few we can justly call an Australian classic.

Producer John Sumner (left) and author Ray Lawler, who played the part of Barny, making a last-minute check before the final rehearsal of Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll in 1956. Photograph: Fairfax Media Archives/Fairfax Media/Getty Images

Supported by the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust (predecessor to Creative Australia), the Doll toured nationally, Lawler playing the role of Barney. With the help of Lawrence Olivier, the production then transferred to London’s New Theatre, where it had a similar seismic impact on British audiences running for over eight months, and winning the Evening Standard award for best new play.

Ken Tynan, the rising star of theatre criticism, wrote of Lawler’s “respect for ordinary people”, amazed at his ability to portray working class characters who were neither incidental nor the butt of class humour. Not until John Osborne, Arnold Wesker and Shelagh Delaney did English drama manage a similar feat.

In 1959, the Doll was turned into a film by Hecht Hill Lancaster. In 1996, it was adapted as a chamber opera by Richard Mills.

A singular event

Lawler had a long career in theatre, but never repeated the triumph of the Doll. In 1957, he left Australia to live in Denmark, Britain and Ireland. Returning in 1975, he rejoined Sumner at the Melbourne Theatre Company until both retired in 1987.

In 1975 and 1976, Lawler wrote two prequel plays, Kid’s Stakes and Other Times. Together, they make up The Doll Trilogy, complementing other trilogies in the Australian repertoire such as Peter Kenna’s Cassidy Album (1978), Janis Balodis’ The Ghosts Trilogy (1997) and Jack Davis’ The First Born Trilogy (1988).

In retrospect, two things can be said about the Doll’s success. First, it is easy to take for granted and fall into rote deprecation of its influence, like the theatre critic Harry Kippax when complaining about a rush of subsequent plays he dubbed “the Doll clones”. Playwrights are not responsible for the drama they inspire, only the work they create. The Doll remains a singular event for Australian theatre, and for Australian culture more broadly, as it has tacked away from its British colonial origins.

Second, while many Australians have heard about Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, and a good proportion have seen it, the play remains largely unproduced overseas. Here, the drama’s strengths may count against it. The authenticity of language and character that grabbed audiences in the 1950s, and remains impressive now, is hard to reproduce for non-Australian actors.

The power and the challenge of the Doll is that it resists globalised interpretation: it remains supremely and stubbornly an Australian play.

The last word can perhaps be given to Brennan about that opening night audience: “None of us could understand it. The jinx [on Australian drama] had just gone! They clapped the house curtain when it went up, and they clapped the set. They clapped every actor who came on and the roars which greeted Ray’s own entrance were tremendous. When the curtain came down at the end, the theatre almost shook.”

• Julian Meyrick is a professor of creative arts at Griffin University and a former associate director and literary adviser at the Melbourne Theatre Company. This article was originally published on the Conversation

As record heat risks bleaching 73% of the world’s coral reefs, scientists ask ‘what do we do now?’

Extract from The Guardian

 

Bleached and dead staghorn coral off Heron Island, Australia in April 2024.

Coral

A vast array of solutions are being worked on but experts urge a ‘fundamental rethink’ as temperatures are forecast to climb even higher in coming decades.

Graham Readfearn Climate and environment reporter

Tue 30 Jul 2024 01.00 AEST

Last modified on Tue 30 Jul 2024 04.39 AEST

After 18 months of record-breaking ocean temperatures, the planet’s reefs are in the middle of the most widespread heat-stress event on record.

Across the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans, latest figures from the US government’s Coral Reef Watch, shared with the Guardian, show 73% of the world’s corals have been hit with enough heat for them to begin bleaching.

Beginning in February 2023, this is the fourth global mass bleaching event – the second in 10 years, and the most widespread on record.

After seeing their beloved reefs struggling to survive, some coral scientists are now calling for a major rethink on how to protect reefs as temperatures climb even higher in the coming decades.

“We’re coming out of a couple of decades where we made predictions,” said Prof Tracy Ainsworth, the vice-president of the International Coral Reef Society.

“Now we are at a point where we hoped we would not be. Now we’re asking, what do we do now?”

In the scientific journal Nature Climate Change, three articles were published on Monday calling on the coral conservation and science community to have a collective rethink.

‘Most of it was dead’: scientists discover one of Great Barrier Reef’s worst coral bleaching events

Read more

“I would call it soul searching,” said Prof Tiffany Morrison, a co-author of one of the articles which is sharply critical of widespread programs, many with corporate backers, to grow corals in nurseries and then plant them out on reefs.

“When everyone realised the scale of the climate impacts on coral reefs, the first instinct was to just do something and intervene because people were so distressed.”

In Florida and the Caribbean last year, many replanted corals died as record-breaking heat stress swept across the region.

“We need a fundamental rethink,” said Prof David Bellwood, a colleague of Morrison’s at James Cook University in Australia.

“Too much is at stake. At the moment, coral restoration is at best psychological relief and cosmetic conservation, and at worst a dangerous distraction from climate action.”

Critical coral

Coral reefs provide food for millions of people around the world. They also provide the raw material that eventually becomes much of the sand on beaches and protect coastlines from wave damage.

When corals sit in water that is too hot, they expel algae in their tissues that provide colour and much of their nutrients.

Dr Derek Manzello, director of Coral Reef Watch, said the number of reefs affected by heat stress from the current global event was still rising and had “definitely led to most everyone involved with reef science and restoration having a hard think about future activities and best practices”.

The current global event has affected reefs in 70 countries and the full impact may never be fully understood.

The world’s biggest coral reef system – the Great Barrier Reef – has also likely been through its worst coral bleaching event, but government scientists may not know until next year how many corals died.

Whether an individual coral survives bleaching depends on each species and the extremes and duration of heat.

In another scientific article, Prof Michael Webster of New York University suggested a radical idea which, he said, would have been far too controversial for a scientific paper only 10 years ago.

Coral reefs exist across tropical waters around the world but are adapted to local conditions. Conservationists should consider introducing corals that have evolved in very hot regions to reefs where the current mix of corals are struggling to survive, Webster said.

“It’s incredibly controversial and we might not ever go there, but we’re in a situation where we’re questioning if we will have reefs in many places. Is it now worth asking that question?”

Webster said coral reefs will have a better chance of surviving through the coming decades if they have a diversity of coral species.

“Getting CO2 down has to be our end game, but we have centuries where coral systems like reefs will be in trouble.”

Cautious interventions

It’s interventions like that mooted by Webster that Morrison is cautious about.

There’s a vast array of scientific solutions for coral reefs currently being worked on around the world, from whitening clouds to shade reefs to selective breeding of corals for increased heat tolerance.

“We are vesting too much money and hope into these speculative coral bioengineering and genetic engineering solutions,” Morrison said. “We don’t know if they’re scalable and, if they are, whether we can afford to scale them.”

Many interventions come up against a philosophical question. Who decides which species to save or modify, or which steps to take? Those decisions could dictate what reefs look like in the future – decisions made by humans, not by nature.

Dead coral at North Point reef off Lizard Island in June. Photograph: Sea Cucumber Monitoring Project

“There are very few people looking at unintended consequences and there’s no governance systems in place to manage that,” Morrison said.

“But number one – we have to be mitigating fossil fuels.”

Freaking out

Members of the International Coral Reef Society wrote in May that scientists needed to “reconsider this challenge” of protecting reefs.

Global heating pushes coral reefs towards worst planet-wide mass bleaching on record

Read more

Because efforts to cut global greenhouse gas emissions were too slow, governments and communities needed to redouble efforts to reduce other stressors on corals, such as overfishing and local water pollution, the society said.

Tim McClanahan, a reef ecologist and director of marine science at the US-based Wildlife Conservation Society, admitted “people are freaking out” from the current bleaching.

He said there was little evidence coral restoration projects had restored reefs at scale and in places like Florida coral nurseries had been destroyed by heat.

“I think they are ignoring past experiences and not recognising the science,” he said.

“I’m concerned that a problem we have with NGOs is we’re not very good at admitting to our failures. I find there’s a tendency to act without consulting the literature.”

McClanahan, in a third article in Nature Climate Change, said predicting the future for coral reefs needs to be more sophisticated.

Rather than just including heat, modelling should account for how reefs react differently to heat stress depending on local conditions like the mix of coral species or how well protected they are. The prognosis for some reefs may not be quite so dire, he argued.

McClanahan has been working on reefs for 40 years and said he has seen them go from undisturbed wonders to shadows of their former selves.

“Yes, the reefs are screwed – in deep trouble. We’re experiencing very austere conditions for corals already,” he said.

“In the 90s I was in grief, but now I want to know how we deal with the situation that we’re in. We are not dealing with it very well and we have this fatalistic view.

“We should be freaking out. That’s not an unreasonable response, but we need to sit back and be a bit more intelligent”