More than 300 wild reindeer have been killed by lightning in southern Norway, Norwegian officials say, in the largest such incident known to date.

The 323 reindeer, including 70 young, were found on Friday by a gamekeeper on the Hardangervidda plateau, a national park where Europe's largest herd of some 10,000 wild reindeer roam freely.

Television footage showed the animals' dead bodies lying close together on the ground.

"There were very strong storms in the area on Friday. The animals stay close together in bad weather and these ones were hit by lightning," an official from the Norwegian Environment Agency, Kjartan Knutsen, told AFP.

Reindeer are social creatures and usually move in packs.

"It's unusual. We've never seen anything like this on this scale," Mr Knutsen said.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-08-29/more-than-300-reindeer-killed-by-lightning-in-norway/7796418

The planet is warming at a pace not experienced within the past 1,000 years, at least, making it “very unlikely” that the world will stay within a crucial temperature limit agreed by nations just last year, according to Nasa’s top climate scientist.

This year has already seen scorching heat around the world, with the average global temperature peaking at 1.38C above levels experienced in the 19th century, perilously close to the 1.5C limit agreed in the landmark Paris climate accord. July was the warmest month since modern record keeping began in 1880, with each month since October 2015 setting a new high mark for heat.

But Nasa said that records of temperature that go back far further, taken via analysis of ice cores and sediments, suggest that the warming of recent decades is out of step with any period over the past millennium.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/30/nasa-climate-change-warning-earth-temperature-warming

Idiots of course, like those described in the toon at top, with a thermometer in their arse and a finger in the air can challenge NASA with confidence. WE DESERVE BETTER THAN THESE IDIOTS IN CHARGE OF THE BACKBENCH ENVIRONMENT AND ENERGY COMMITTEE...

Australia's largest listed, carbon intensive companies say management lost focus on carbon matters, abandoned energy projects and didn't have the commercial imperative to produce long-term strategic action on reducing emissions after the carbon tax was repealed, new research finds.

Our research looked at the comparative views of emitters before and after the repeal of the carbon tax legislation, in interviews with 18 senior managers from nine carbon-intensive listed companies.

Two years have passed since Australia's carbon tax was repealed. It was introduced by the Labor government and came into effect in 2012.

The carbon pricing scheme asked big emitters to pay for each tonne of emissions above a threshold of 25,000 tonnes, in carbon units, and these were at a fixed charge of: $23 a tonne in 2012, $24.15 a tonne in 2013 and $25.40 a tonne in 2014.

The Swinburne research found the financial pressure exerted by the carbon tax forced companies to take action to manage emissions. As one senior executive observed at the time:

"…the threat is our operating costs will increase, and we won't be able to pass that cost on through to our customers, and, therefore, our earnings suffer as a result".

In July 2014, the coalition government repealed the carbon tax by replacing it with the "Direct Action" plan which works primarily by providing funding to companies to incentivise emission reduction activities. The government has spent $1.7 billion on 143 million tonnes of emissions, at an average cost of $12 a tonne.

Many of the companies interviewed for our research said Direct Action was not as effective as a carbon tax in driving companies to act urgently and manage emissions. The carbon tax gave companies incentives to act because it increased utilities prices, adding financial burden for some companies, in addition to these companies being liable under the tax.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-09-02/direct-action-not-as-motivating-as-carbon-tax/7808098

You're allowed to blame Turdy Abbott and Clivey Palmer for this caper. Turdy obsessed with removing the carbon pricing as if his religion forbade the taxing of CO2 production. 

Actually I can see it in Genesis 45 item #7:

"Thy shall not stop the production of CO2 that floweth from burning fossil fuels under any circumstances — as this would retard Armageddon and the glorious trumpets of god of the second helping, sorry coming..."

Labor’s Penny Wong asks about Eric Hutchinson, who lost his Tasmanian seat in July, but Senate president Stephen Parry denies the appointment is political...

read more: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/oct/17/coalition-appoints-liberal-mp-who-lost-his-seat-as-senate-president-adviser

The chairman of the Turnbull government’s backbench environment and energy committee has backed Tony Abbott’s call to wind back the renewable energy target, and cut the immigration rate to boost housing affordability.

The Liberal MP Craig Kelly told Guardian Australia on Friday the RET needed to be frozen where it is at the moment, and the government needed to explicitly link the issues of immigration and housing affordability.

“We have to link the two,” Kelly said. “One of the big factors in housing demand at the moment is how many people migrate to Australia.”

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/feb/24/craig-kelly-backs...

One of the things that Craig Kelly should also know is that the "housing industry" is what keeps the economy of this country above water... As well, this process is likely to increase demand in energy, possibly leading to more global warming. So Craig Kelly is shooting himself in the foot while being idiotically smart. Tony Abbott is a dangerous nasty man who has decided not to understand anything about sciences because he is a hypocritial religious nut. Abbott is lucky the pope did not mention him by name...

See toon at top.

Tony Abbott has stepped up his campaign to save his factional ally Craig Kelly from losing his preselection, calling on the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, to directly step in and “make some calls”.

Kelly faces a strong challenge from Liberal party state vice-president Kent Johns, a liberal moderate, for the seat of Hughes.

Kelly, who was reportedly part of the “Monkey Pod” diners who gathered in support of Abbott after his ousting in 2015, has held the seat since 2010.

Last week, Abbott used his regular slot on Sydney radio 2GB to warn the party against allowing Kelly to lose preselection, saying it would be an “absolute disaster”.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/jun/06/abbott-says-turnb...

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Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has launched a spectacular intervention in the preselection process of Liberal backbencher Craig Kelly, urging his colleagues not to "capitulate" to threats from the conservative MP.

• Mr Turnbull said his comments regarding Mr Kelly's preselection were not part of a personal vendetta
• The former PM suggested he thought Mr Kelly would not seek to topple the Government by sitting as an independent
• Mr Kelly has been described as the "Member for Sky News rather than the Member for Hughes" by another Liberal MP

Mr Turnbull has also encouraged his successor Scott Morrison to go to the polls shortly after the long summer break, arguing he and the then treasurer had been planning to call an election for March 2 before Mr Turnbull was ousted from the nation's top job.

He denied his comments were part of a personal vendetta against Mr Kelly.

"It's not a question of knocking him off, it's a question that the democratic processes of the Liberal Party be allowed to operate," Mr Turnbull told ABC RN Breakfast.

"What is being proposed to the State Executive is that the State Executive should reindorse Mr Kelly, so that the Liberal Party members of Hughes do not have the opportunity to have their say.

"We've just had a very long debate in New South Wales, in the Liberal Party, about the importance of democracy and grassroot members' participation.

"In my view, the party should allow the preselection process to take its course, and then Mr Kelly will succeed or not."

Mr Turnbull suggested he did not believe Mr Kelly would seek to topple the Government by quitting the party and sitting as an independent.

"But assuming that he has made that threat, then that is the worst and the weakest reason not to have a preselection process," he said.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-03/malcolm-turnbull-launches-spectacular-preselection-intervention/

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The publisher of a NSW year-10 history book has rejected complaints from the federal Liberal backbencher Craig Kelly that it misrepresents facts about climate change.

Kelly took issue with the characterisation of climate change in the textbook Pearson History New South Wales.

Kelly has written to the NSW education minister, Rob Stokes, saying the book’s description of Tony Abbott as a climate change denier was “an offensive slur equating it with Holocaust deniers”, the Daily Telegraph reported.

The book says: “Climate change is noticeable in Australia, with more extreme frequent weather events such as the 2002-06 drought or the 2010-11 Queensland floods.”

“That is simply an inaccurate statement that is in a school history book,” Kelly told parliament’s federation chamber last week.

“What chance do we have of forming the best policies in this nation to deal with fire, floods and drought if we have children being misled by incorrect information in our history books?”

He quoted Dorothea Mackellar’s poem My Country to argue contemporary natural disasters are nothing out of the ordinary: “I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains, of ragged mountain ranges, of droughts and flooding rains,” the poem says.

“We need to understand that we live in that same country that Dorothea Mackellar wrote about over a hundred years ago,” Kelly said.

“That is why we need to prepare and help people recover from their resources instead of wasting money pretending that we can change the weather.”

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/feb/26/publisher-rejects...

Meanwhile, in regard to "historical records"...:

January [2019] was Australia’s hottest month on record, with the country’s mean temperature exceeding 30C for the first time since records began in 1910.

The Bureau of Meteorology released its climate summary for January on Friday and said the widespread heatwave conditions and daily extremes were “unprecedented”.

“There’s been so many records it’s really hard to count,” said Andrew Watkins, a senior climatologist at the Bom.

...

Port Augusta recorded the country’s highest temperature in January, reaching 49.5C.

“We’ve also seen records in many states set including places like Victoria where Swan Hill and Kerang got up over 47.5C,” Watkins said.

...

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/feb/01/january-named-as-...

The book should ghave stated that Craig kelly is an idiot, Tony Abbott is an idiot and Scummo is an idiot...

In regard to the word "denier", the book should use the word "denialist" or "idiot" which Gus uses for the denialists of global warming... See also: a giant of climate science...

What chance do we have of forming the best policies in this nation to deal with fire, floods and drought if we have idiots and denialists like Craig Kelly and Tony Abbott (and Scummo) mucking up the scientific analysis?

ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL.

Read from top.

I am very nice to the idiots, now: this is why I call Craig Kelly a nice man...

Liberal MP Craig Kelly has become embroiled in an unseemly online war of words with a television meteorologist after being called a climate denier during a trainwreck UK interview.

Mr Kelly was grilled by Good Morning Britain hosts Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid over the coalition government’s stance on the Australian bushfire crisis and was branded “not a climate sceptic” but a “climate denier” by the show’s weather presenter Laura Tobin.

The member for the New South Wales electorate of Hughes later took to Facebook to call Tobin an “ignorant Pommy weather girl” who “doesn’t know what she’s talking about” in a since-deleted post.

Govt @LiberalAus MP denies climate change on UK TV. Challenged by presenter. On Facebook, MP calls her ‘Ignorant Pommy Weather Girl’. Uncensored by MP, followers pile in: ‘brain washed trollop’ ‘3/4 retarded’ ‘airhead’ ‘back in our day, weather girls were good looking sorts’.

Tobin quickly responded on Twitter with the hashtag #notaweathergirl, outlining her impressive credentials. She holds degrees in physics and Meteorology, and was a former aviation forecaster for the Royal Air Force.

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2020/01/07/craig-kelly-laura-to...

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Kelly wrote: “Yet again, the truth is the exact opposite of the Alarmist narrative peddled in the media and swallowed, hook line & sinker by the naive and gullible.”

But Harrison, of the University of Exeter, told Guardian Australia the study was about historical changes, and “not about the modern situation”.

She said: “The paper explicitly shows that climate warming intervals in the geologic record are characterised by more fire, all other things being equal, and thus demonstrates exactly the opposite to Mr Kelly’s claim.”

She said while it was correct that there had been a reduction in area burned, the scientists “provide an explanation for this in the very next sentence after the one [Kelly] quotes”.

“Specifically, in many regions of the world, including Australia, human transformation of the landscape through the introduction of agriculture and infrastructure results in reduced fire spread and a reduced burnt area.”

She said a reduction in burnt area over the last 50 years “does not negate the fact that climate warming is going to lead to increases”.

She said that “landscape fragmentation” had been countering the impact of global warming on the spread of fires, but added “the number of large and intense fires has gone up”.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/22/uk-climate-scientist...

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